Wright Thompson Quotes

I knelt down. The dirt felt cool as it ran through my fingers. Nothing hits the nose quite like freshly tilled topsoil, carrying the scent of life and death. The ground around here smells rotten after a rain, gray buckshot petrichor, grabbing tires and axles and feet. I’ve lost shoes in this mud. Delta folks call it gumbo and it feels hungry, aggressive even, as if it actively wants to pull more living things down into its stinking maw.

All writing is trying to say something new that is true, that is both specific and universal, and that helps the reader understand something they didn't understand before, preferably about themselves.

Being Southern means carrying a responsibility to shake off the comforting blanket of myth and see ourselves clearly.

The story sums him up best to me. He thought of the grand gesture and then did it.

There’s the story of the Kentucky Derby party when a group of famous people, including baseball star Cal Ripken, had cornered Julian to talk whiskey and Wayne Gretzky kept coming up and interrupting, until Julian finally wheeled around and said, “Why don’t you shut the fuck up, Wayne?

our long history of trying to do the right thing while benefitting mightily from the wrong thing

I find the brainstorm meeting absurd. Everybody is looking for ideas all the time, like breathing, or they are not doing it at all. If you have to come in at a set time to come up with ideas, I don’t want to be anywhere near you. I want to be around people who are curious citizens of the world who want to know everything about everything.

My time with them made me examine my own life and think about my family's past and about what I want to bury and what I want to live on in my daughter. We must be intentional with our myths and stories, and we must live the lives we want our children to live.

I know that success means reaching your goals and enjoying them and that one without the other is empty and meaningless.

I understood in that moment why a memorial for Emmett Till in the Delta wasn't just about justice or truth. Memorials in my homeland had always been about forgetting. Nathan Bedford Forrest in Memphis, the Confederate dead on countless Mississippi courthouse lawns. But this memorial would be about remembering.

The newspaper reporter summed up the rhetoric “on segregation all candidates agree, they support it….all five candidates tried to prove they were more racist than their opponents, a sprint to the bottom. All promising to take any measure to stop the most dangerous and immediate threat to the Mississippi way of life-which apparently was a black child who wanted to learn math. All of Hannibal’s elephants and Genghis Khan’s hordes lacked the world-destroying power of a bunch of first graders learning the alphabet and how to stay in line during the walk from recess to lunch”.

I've learned in the past three years that I did many things solely to tell Daddy about them later.

When tomorrow comes this day will be gone forever, leaving something it its place I have traded for it.

Both loved me unconditionally and showed that love every day, as well as an unshakable belief in me and my dreams, no matter how unlikely they seemed. That's what I wanted to provide, more than anything else: a safe harbor of encouragement.

Violence and discord over Hamilton versus Jefferson remain the greatest threats to the health of our experiment in democracy.