Quotes from Rick Bragg

They were all buried quickly, quietly, without the attention, the traditions, they deserved, the way people always are in a time of plague

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

You're the guy they depend on when things go bad, when they need somebody to pull them out of the ditch, or clear the road with your chainsaw, or jump them off in the middle of the night. "People will line up to say this stuff over you, like they did Grandpa," I said. My kin could recall how they could see the headlights coming for miles down those twisting mountain roads, the night he left this earth.

The Pontiac dented and rust-flecked meant it was 1974, since cars are the way working-class people of the deep south truly mark their time. Listen to them sometime, when they're roping for a memory – they will find it next to a yellow Oldsmobile.

Jack frantically tried to herd my white-hot father into the car before he weighed into the congregation and gave the minister the left foot of fellowship right in his Sunday pants

She can tell if her cornbread is done, and all the rest, by their aromas alone—that, or the angels mumble it straight into her ear. It's not the clock that tells you when it's done; the food does.

Every life deserves a certain amount of dignity, no matter how poor or damaged the shell that carries it.

This is a place where grandmothers hold babies on their laps under the stars and whisper in their ears that the lights in the sky are holes in the floor of heaven.

It is a common condition of being poor... you are always afraid that the good things in your life are temporary, that someone can take them away, because you have no power beyond your own brute strength to stop them.

Don't worry about what people think, because once it's all over the people who love you will make you what they want you to be, and the people who don't love you will, too.

Passion is something you really don't miss, after it has cooled. It is like looking at an empty bottle on the side of the road and thinking, "Boy, I wish I had a Coke." The loves you miss are the ones that go away when they are still warm, even hot, to the touch.

You do not hate the time you waste; it evokes a much more passive emotion than that. You only wish you had it back, like a quarter in an unlucky slot machine.

The children start school now in August. They say it has to do with air-conditioning, but I know sadism when I see it.

It was a good moment, the kind you would like to press between the pages of a book, or hide in your sock drawer, so you could touch it again.

Momma kept a garden, which sounds romantic to people who have never held a hoe

It is easy to be liked when the world has no jagged edges, when life is electric blankets and peach ice cream. But to be beloved, a man needs a dragon.

This is home and home is not something you remember, it is something you see every day and every moment.

I wonder if, north of here, they might even run out of stories someday. It may seem silly, but it is cold up there, too cold to mosey, to piddle, to loafer, and summer only lasts a week and a half. The people spit the words out so fast when they talk, like they are trying to discard them somehow, banish them, rather than relish the sound and the story. We will not run out of them here. We talk like we are tasting something.

One: Don't kill yourself. Two: Don't kill each other. Three: Try hard not to kill nobody else, but if you have to, better if it ain't fam'ly.

But if she was going to live in a damn jungle, she preferred it be a damn jungle in Georgia, she always said, and never saw any reason to elaborate on that.

We are good at stories. We hoard them, like an old woman in a room full of boxes, but now and then we pull out our best, and spread them out. We talk of the bad years when the cotton didn't open, and the day my cousin Wanda was washed in the Blood. We buff our beloved ancestors until they are smooth of sin, and give our scoundrels a hard shake, although sometimes we can't remember exactly which is who.

I know how silly and paranoid that sounds, especially coming from a man who gets a perverse thrill from taking chances. But it is a common condition of being poor white trash: you are always afraid that the good things in your life are temporary, that someone can take them away, because you have no power beyond your own brute strength to stop them.

I believe that if we are going to write about life and death, we should not do it from the cheap seats.

To be a Southerner, or to live Southern, is to feel, well, something special even in the quiet, something fine in itself after all those rebel yells and fight songs have finally faded into silence.