Rick Bragg Quotes & Sayings

I write late into the night at the Tutweiler in downtown Birmingham, and try hard to turn down that second cheeseburger at Milo's over by UAB, which has the best one in the whole wide world. — Rick Bragg

These were people ... who built redwood decks on their mobile homes and have no idea that smart-aleck Yankees think that is somehow funny. People of the pines. My people. — Rick Bragg

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

When you're a sportswriter, you learn how to use your imagination and to flex your literary muscle, because it's the same game played over and over again. There's nothing unique or marvelous. It's not an earthquake, or a weird mass murder. It's just the same old game played over and over, and you have to bring out the personalities. You have to drag them kicking and screaming out into the light of day, or you're not a good sportswriter. — Rick Bragg

The unwritten rule of engagement had been If it looks hostile, shoot it. — Rick Bragg

It is not unusual to send someone to conduct an interview you don't have time to conduct. It's what we do. — Rick Bragg

In water so fine, a few minutes of bad memory all but disappear downstream, washed away by ten thousand belly busters, a million cannonballs. Paradise was never heaven-high when I was a boy but waist-deep, an oasis of cutoff blue jeans and raggedy Converse sneakers, sweating bottles of Nehi Grape and Orange Crush, and this stream. I remember the antidote of icy water against my blistered skin, and the taste of mushy tomato and mayonnaise sandwiches, unwrapped from twice-used aluminum foil. I saw my first water moccasin here, and my first real girl, and being a child of the foot washers I have sometimes wondered if this was my Eden, and my serpent. If it was, I didn't hold out any longer than that first poor fool did. — Rick Bragg

I have dictated stories from an airport after writing the story out in longhand on the plane that I got from phone interviews and then was applauded by editors for 'working magic.' — Rick Bragg

The Haitians, who knew something about suffering and survival, had a beautiful phrase ... The Translation is not perfect, but the nut of it was: 'The season of pain is never over until the sky begins to cry. — Rick Bragg

I made some friends for life, the way I usually make them. Any jackass can be pleasant company, but if people help you when you're at your worst, that's a friend. — Rick Bragg

For maybe the first time in my life, I had tried to do the safe thing, and it had blown up in my face. Never, ever again. — Rick Bragg

Everyone went and had some turkey and cornbread dressing, and hot biscuits, and mashed potatoes running with butter, and when they prayed, they thanked God for the good fortune that had found their boy, who had sense enough to know that if you're going to be hit by a train, you have to go stand on the tracks in Memphis, Tennessee. Amen. — Rick Bragg

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. — Rick Bragg

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

Most national correspondents will tell you they rely on stringers and researchers and interns and clerks and news assistants. — Rick Bragg

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

West Virginia is among the nation's leaders in military service, in killed in action, in medals for valor. — Rick Bragg

A man should not be cruel to things weaker than himself, — Rick Bragg

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

That is where a big part of the Old South is, on coffee tables in Greenwich Village. — Rick Bragg

How do you not love a place where the faded beads from a parade six years before still hang in the branches of the live oak trees. — Rick Bragg

I don't think there's a difference between writing for a newspaper or magazine and doing a chapter in a book. — Rick Bragg

It is true that almost everyone in the foothills farmed and hunted, so there were no breadlines, no men holding signs that begged for work and food, no children going door to door, as they did in Atlanta, asking for table scraps. Here, deep in the woods, was a different agony. Babies, the most tenuous, died from poor diet and simple things, like fevers and dehydration. In Georgia, one in seven babies died before their first birthday, and in Alabama it was worse.
You could feed your family catfish and jack salmon, poke salad and possum, but medicine took cash money, and the poorest of the poor, blacks and whites, did not have it. Women, black and white, really did smother their babies to save them from slow death, to give a stronger, sounder child a little more, and stories of it swirled round and round until it became myth, because who can live with that much truth. — Rick Bragg

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. — Rick Bragg

The only thing poverty does is grind down your nerve endings to a point that you can work harder and stoop lower than most people are willing to. It chips away a person's dreams to the point that the hopelessness shows through, and the dreamer accepts that hard work and borrowed houses are all this life will ever be. — Rick Bragg

In the Mountains, they cooked, too.
Joe Godwin made liquor in Muscadine. Moe Shealey made it in Mineral Springs. Junior McMahan had a still in ragland. Fred and Alton Dryden made liquor in Tallapoosa, and Eulis Parker made it on Terrapin Creek. Wayne Glass knew their faces because he drove it, and made more money hauling liquor than he ever made at the cotton mill. He loaded the gallon cans into his car in the deep woods and dodged sheriffs and federal men to get it to men like Robert Kilgore, the bootlegger who sold whiskey from a house in Weaver, about ten minutes south of Jacksonville. "I could haul a hundred and fifty gallons in a Flathead Ford, at thirty-five dollars a load," he said. Wayne lost the end of one finger in the mill, but he was bulletproof when he was running liquor, and only did time once, for conspiracy. "They couldn't catch me haulin' liquor," he said, "so they got me for thinkin' about it. — Rick Bragg

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. — Rick Bragg

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. — Rick Bragg

I know I grew up in the time when a young man in a baggy suit and slicked-down hair stood spraddle-legged in the crossroads of history and talked hot and mean about the colored, giving my poor and desperate people a reason to feel superior to somebody, to anybody. I know that even as the words of George Wallace rang through my Alabama, the black family who lived down the dirt road from our house sent fresh-picked corn and other food to the poor white lady and her three sons, because they knew their daddy had run off, because hungry does not have a color. — Rick Bragg

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. — Rick Bragg

Mama just stepped back on the treadmill of worry and hopeless, and kept walking. — Rick Bragg

They, especially, taught me that you can't go through life not liking people because they didn't have to work as hard or come as far as you did. — Rick Bragg

I once banged out a story in Peshawar, Pakistan, while eating a chicken salad sandwich, as demonstrators shouted their displeasure of all things American in the glow of burning flags and some steel-edged radials. I was told, by well-meaning people, that I should tell the angry crowds that I was, in fact, Canadian.
I just looked at them.
How in the world do you pretend to be from Calgary, when you talk like me?
I thought briefly, I would say I was from Alabama, and hope they didn't know exactly where that was, but I am pretty sure that, if I had, someone would answer back:
"Roll Tide. — Rick Bragg

There are these boutique writers out there who think if they are not writing their novels sitting at a bistro with their laptops, then they're not real writers. That's ridiculous. — Rick Bragg

I began reading Harper Lee's novel in the skimpy shade of a pine outside my grandmother's house, fat beagles pressing against me, begging for attention, ignored. At dark, I kept reading, first on the couch, a bologna sandwich in one hand, then in my bed, by the light of a 60-watt bulb hanging from the ceiling on an orange drop cord. When my mother came in from her job as a maid and unplugged my chandelier, I replayed the story in my head until it was crowded out by dreams. I woke the next morning, smelling biscuits, and reached for the book again. — Rick Bragg

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

And Sandy Martindale ... dated Elvis before the rhinestone jumpsuits and the drugs, when he was sharp and cool and jagged, like porcelain that has been hurled against a wall ... — Rick Bragg

Only low men, the lowest, tormented the weaker things in their control. — Rick Bragg

He crashed a dozen Cadillacs in one year and played the Apollo. With racial hatred burning in the headlines, the audience danced in the seats to a white boy from the bottomland, backed by pickers who talked like Ernest Tubb. "James Brown kissed me on my cheek," he says. "Top that. — Rick Bragg

He spent two decades wandering the wilderness, overmedicated, set upon by the tax man, divorce lawyers, everything but a rain of toads. There were more fights and pills and liquor and car crashes and women and discharge of firearms - accidental and on purpose - than a mortal man could be expected to survive, but he played. — Rick Bragg

People who think there is something pedestrian about journalism are just ignorant. — Rick Bragg

It wasn't that I had gotten it right ... but that I had gotten true. — Rick Bragg

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. — Rick Bragg

Mature material. Where once he had hollered through — Rick Bragg

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. — Rick Bragg

Like most men, Jimmy Jim was neither all good nor all bad. It is just that when he was bad, gentler people saw in him a disturbing fury. People, a lot them, don't understand fury. They understand anger and even hatred, but fury is one of those old words that have gone out of style. Jimmy Jim Bundrum understood it. It rode his shoulder like a parrot. — Rick Bragg

If one piddles correctly, time just goes away, without regret on the part of the piddler, or even any particular notice. — Rick Bragg

I don't know anything about wars. I don't think even the most erudite scholars do. I think you have to fight one, to know it. — Rick Bragg

It is one thing to be sure of yourself. It is another to have someone tell you to quit dancing, look them in the eye, and tell them the truth even if it hurts your pride. — Rick Bragg

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. — Rick Bragg

The best writers who have put pen to paper have often had a journalism background. — Rick Bragg

Stripes on their backs. The twentieth century — Rick Bragg

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. — Rick Bragg

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. — Rick Bragg

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. — Rick Bragg

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. — Rick Bragg

I felt lonely then. This is the time when you need somebody. This is the time when it is good to have a wife, and children, to absorb your grief, to hold on to you. This is when you pay, and pay and pay, for pretending that you don't need anybody. — Rick Bragg

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. — Rick Bragg

But I hope I will never have a life that is not surrounded by books, by books that are bound in paper and cloth and glue, such perishable things for ideas have lasted thousands of years ... I hope I am always walled in by the very weight and breadth and clumsy, inefficient, antiquated bulk of them, hope that I spend my last days on this Earth arranging and rearranging them on thrones of good, honest pine, oak, and mahogany, because I just like to look at their covers, and dream of the promise of the great stories inside. — Rick Bragg