Quotes from Richard Grant

They eat every part of them, including the testicles. I don't eat the testicles. I don't want anybody eating on mine, so I won't eat on anybody's. I eat the hams, ribs, and shoulders. I enjoy them. Once you start eating testicles, it's like you've gone cannibalistic.

It's not just Mississippi. The North is segregated too. This is work the whole country needs to do. White people need to understand the bitterness we feel about slavery. There's pride that we survived the whole experience and came through it with dignity, and then successfully fought for our civil rights, but a lot of white people act like it's no big deal, or we should be grateful for what we have now. They haven't even begun to understand.

People seemed uniquely printed to believe in plots and conspiracies, miracles and demons.

Legal segregation was long gone, but a strong tradition prevailed in both communities that it was best to live separately.

Mariah and I had never thought so much about race and racism in our lives. It was the great underlying obsession of the Mississippi delta. The elephant in every room. Almost every charming, gracious, hospitable, generous white landowner we met came from a family that had profited from an American version of apartheid. Or more accurately a blueprint for the South African version.

Here, race was so difficult and complicated, it was a kaleidoscope you could keep on turning.

If you were from a state that didn't fight for the Confederacy, you were a Yankee.

This is a common form of exchange when Mississippians meet for the first time. They want to know about each other's ancestors, and which families they married into. If kinship ties can be established, so much the better. If there was a feud in the past, it could get awkward.

A kind of affectionate racism prevailed among the delta gentry, they had kind, paternalistic feelings toward black people and a genuine appreciation for black culture, but they didn't want a black man dating their daughters or sitting down to eat dinner at their table, because that wasn't the way things were done or meant to be.

Mariah put something useful in a nutshell when she said: If white person is lazy around here, it is because they have a poor work ethic. If a black person is lazy, it's because they are black.

Maybe the fact that nobody believes in magic and wood sprites and happiness is the problem of the day. [Ludi]

proceeds and walking

Sometimes when you are feeling buried, you're just planted

Each of us is a cosmic improbability, brought into this life and sentenced to experience it

They have to square their well-earned reputation for kindness and hospitality with their equally well-earned reputation for violence and bigotry.

We resurrected our history in order to sell tickets and make money from it, but it's more powerful than we are. It's like we resurrected a monster and now we can't control it. Sometimes it feels like progress is impossible, because the dead are running the show.

James Jackson, the barber, led the meeting, which was filmed by a documentary filmmaker named Ed Pincus, who was in Natchez documenting the civil rights struggle. The resulting film, Black Natchez, is still widely available.

Theophilus Freeman was right over here. He's the one that sold Solomon Northup out of Twelve Years a Slave.

Family separations were probably the most brutal, heartless aspect of American slavery, although many slaveholders claimed that blacks, being less than fully human, weren't particularly bothered by it.

For inspiration, he read Martin Luther King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail" and listened to the Drive-By Truckers singing about the duality of pride and shame they felt as white Southerners.

If you're doing well, you're a target, nobody's interested in you except how you can be of use to them.

You finish a movie and you think, there, you've done it, really well, or best you can. But if you watch it, you see it was just bollocks.

I loved being asked 2,000 questions a day, storyboarding every move, knowing as though by instinct exactly where the camera had to be, because it was my story.

You have to look at the discrepancy between what you hoped and imagined and the reality of yourself and all your shortcomings.