Quotes from Rick Bragg

Operation Iraqi Freedom began on March 20, 2003.

The woman also tried to save me at lunchtime. We ate salads and fruit and whole-wheat everything, and I was not happy, but I did it for love. I lost a pound.

Her driveway is about a quarter-mile long. She walks to the mailbox, for her health. "Now they all follow her in a straight line, all of them, there and back," my brother told me.

There ain't enough pats in the world.

If it had not been for clam chowder, I would have jumped from a bridge into the frozen River Charles.

The past is where we go when we are helpless; the past, no matter what the psychiatrists say, can't really hurt you much more than it already has, not like the future, which comes at you like a train around a blind curve.

boudin, the sausage made from pork, liver, onions, rice

the late writer Lewis Grizzard once wrote, it is hard to get drunk and fall off a backyard.

They called it, oddly, a "toddy." Their homemade remedies for the cold, flu, and croup varied a little, depending on which grandparents were mixing the concoctions, but the active

Around the cabin, you can smell woodsmoke on the breeze. The people burn their brush piles a day or two after the first chilly rain, build their first fires in the fireplace. As much as the red and gold leaves on the mountainside, it is how you know the holidays are coming near.

Moonshine. I get it now.

I knew then that sweet tea embodies all that is good about the South and its hospitality. Life's too short not to enjoy, and it's too short not to have sweet tea.

You get to thinking of a place as yours, after a while, and you grit your teeth over the Red Bull cans and Mountain Dew bottles and takeout chicken bones scattered through one of the prettiest places on earth. But while any half-wit can toss their trash out into a country road, it takes a rarefied, soulless son of a bitch to slink out here to throw away a good dog. He

She passed November 25, 2002,' he said, pointing to a sepia-toned photo of them taken when they were still young. 'She was a wife to me, boy,' he said, and then he looked around the room, his eyes fierce, as if daring someone to disagree. He is asked if he has anything else to say about baseball, but he is lost now, in a place even the cheers cannot reach, cannot brighten.

Some men were just born beside a river of melancholy. Some men lived a lifetime there.

On every pack leaned an M16, except Lori's. Her son was playing soldier with it in the bleachers. There was no clip in it, which was a good thing.

The scale spun to the truth of it. The two women, together, had picked more than six hundred pounds of cotton--at two dollars per one hundred pounds, they made six dollars each, and a little change. They had picked three times their weight.

But I knew, as I staggered down that hill with that awful dog, what the unreliable men in my family have always known: that this ol' life can be a bleak, sorry, boring slog, if you take the time, at every turn, to think it through. { Three } Tough Guys The dog lay in the garage as I cleaned off the mud and old blood with a rag.

can't write well enough to tell you how good it was.

The children ate their spice cake with Kool-Aid.

You just been travelin'.

just cook better than anybody else. A Cajun knows he's got it right when, after it's done, you can throw away the meat and just eat the gravy.

A lot of the people dancing were the same ones I had seen the night before. One of them, Ted Couvillion, said hello. "My wife died of cancer two years ago," he said. He vanished into his grief, until his friends dragged him out dancing. Now, every week, he dances and dances his way out of heartache. I can't dance a lick. But I have two bags of cracklin's in the trunk of my car.

Even though his pocket's were empty as a banker's soul, even though his family was poor as poor got outside the shanty towns of the depression, he wore his pride like a suit of mail (...) I think it's much more civilized to knock someone on their ass, than the cuss yourself into an embolism, like they do in New York.