Hampton Sides Quotes

#1. The thing about Memphis is that it's pleasingly off-kilter. It's a great big whack job of a city. The anti-Atlanta. You go there, and you can't believe the things people will say, the way they think, the wobbling orbits of their lives. There's an essential otherness.

Hampton Sides

#2. I've sort of been an anthropologist of modern America, in a non-academic way. Whether it's Marines or Tupperware salesladies, high end audiophiles or bike couriers, I'm fascinated by the hallmarks of the American tribe.

Hampton Sides

#3. I'm not a Man U fan at all, but I can't get enough of Rooney. What a joy to watch!

Hampton Sides

#4. When the Americans were trying to conquer the Navajos, they felt this need to capture Canyon de Chelly like it was the Navajo capital. It was a meeting place and a sanctuary of last refuge. To control Canyon de Chelly was to control the Navajo people.

Hampton Sides

#5. The Navajos were another matter. Theirs was a sprawling nation, wealthy in stock, obdurate in its ways, open to change but only on its terms.

Hampton Sides

#6. I'm not a huge soccer fan, but I follow the sport. I played in high school, a little bit in college, played on various club teams most of my life, and all three of my sons are competitive soccer players and far better than I ever was.

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#7. I find there's a thin, permeable membrane between journalism and history, and though some academic historians take a dim view of it, I gather a lot of strength and professional inspiration from passing back and forth across it.

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#8. The surly orphan of American politics ... the grim joker in the deck, whose nightrider candidacy [is] a rough approximation of the potential for an American fascism. People

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#9. The Tea Party has very close affinities with independent third-party movements like the George Wallace movement. The Tea Party is still inchoate, still trying to figure out what it's going to become.

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#10. to plan for a return to the Arctic. One

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#11. When De Long arrived in California with Emma that May, he went straight down to the yard and feasted his eyes upon his new ship. He was smitten by the transformation that had taken place during his absence. "I am perfectly satisfied with her," he wrote. "She is everything I want.

Hampton Sides

#12. I love Memphis, I guess you could say, in the way that you love a brother even if he does sometimes puzzle and sadden and frustrate you. Say what you want about it, it's an authentic place. I was born and raised in Memphis, and no matter where I go, Memphis belongs to me, and I to it.

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#13. By the age of nine or ten, I knew that I loved history and writing. It got hold of me and never turned loose.

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#14. The privilege isn't given to everyone. ... You must have suffered first, have suffered greatly, have gained some miserable knowledge. In that way your eyes are opened to it. - Henry James, 1881

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#15. Petermann's staunchest enemy in Great Britain was Clements R. Markham of the Royal Geographical Society. Markham had come to regard Petermann as a charlatan and a windbag.

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#16. From his legs like an untethered weight. In their thousands the parasites

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#17. I think of America not so much as a single country but as a constellation of groups out there competing for air time, energetically expressing themselves and luxuriating in their right to govern themselves. Freedom is that great vaunted word that's always applied to our country - and rightly so.

Hampton Sides

#18. Yet Wallace and other segregationists created an inflamed environment in which a confused but also ambitious man like Ray could think it was permissible, perhaps even noble, to murder King. The signals Ray was picking up enabled him to believe that society would smile on his crime. What

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#19. If this book is a thriller, it's also a requiem, the story of the last days of a great figure and the end of his movement.

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#20. I majored in Southern history in college, and much of my early work at my first job - as a staff writer at 'Memphis' magazine - focused on race relations.

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#21. The FBI's search for MLK's killer began, a manhunt that would become the largest in American history,

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#22. America is an archipelago of tribes, a land where people form national families of kindred spirits.

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#23. Sometimes it takes a brush with eternity - a crash, an illness, some shock to the system - to get you really thinking about what you want to do with your limited time here, and why you're living on this wobbling dirt clod in the first place.

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#24. These men suffered enough for a hundred lifetimes, and no one in this country should be allowed to forget it.

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#25. I am not one of those people who believe that MLK achieved more in martyrdom than he could have if he'd lived: imagine what a guiding influence he could have on the world were he still among us.

Hampton Sides