Rick Bragg Quotes

#1. 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

#2. Stripes on their backs. The twentieth century

Rick Bragg

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. The unwritten rule of engagement had been If it looks hostile, shoot it.

Rick Bragg

#6. 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

#7. 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

#8. The best writers who have put pen to paper have often had a journalism background.

Rick Bragg

#9. 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

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

Rick Bragg

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

Rick Bragg

#12. 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

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

Rick Bragg

#14. 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

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

Rick Bragg

#16. 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

#17. 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

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

Rick Bragg

#19. 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

#20. Only low men, the lowest, tormented the weaker things in their control.

Rick Bragg

#21. 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

#22. 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

#23. Most national correspondents will tell you they rely on stringers and researchers and interns and clerks and news assistants.

Rick Bragg

#24. 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

#25. 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

#26. People who think there is something pedestrian about journalism are just ignorant.

Rick Bragg

#27. 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

#28. 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

#29. It wasn't that I had gotten it right ... but that I had gotten true.

Rick Bragg

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

Rick Bragg

#31. 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

#32. Mama just stepped back on the treadmill of worry and hopeless, and kept walking.

Rick Bragg

#33. A man should not be cruel to things weaker than himself,

Rick Bragg

#34. 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

#35. That is where a big part of the Old South is, on coffee tables in Greenwich Village.

Rick Bragg

#36. Mature material. Where once he had hollered through

Rick Bragg

#37. 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

#38. 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

#39. West Virginia is among the nation's leaders in military service, in killed in action, in medals for valor.

Rick Bragg

#40. 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

#41. 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

#42. 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

#43. 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

#44. 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

#45. 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