Wright Thompson Quotes

The citizens in New Orleans, generation after generation, have chosen joy in the face of disaster and oppression. Everything unique about the city is a reflection of that.

Bourbon became popular again, and then it became expensive and rare, which made it more popular and yet so hard to get that its original purpose as a way to facilitate and lubricate fellowship was being replaced by the hunting for and finding of it.

He doesn’t inspire selfies as much as handshakes.

Being Southern means carrying a responsibility to shake off the comforting blanket of myth and see ourselves clearly. I was bringing a child into this world, and into our long history of trying to do the right think while benefiting mightily from the wrong thing, and I wanted her to see it clearly without the nostalgia that so often softens my anger and desire to tear it down and build a new world in its place.

A cult is built on believing the absurd if the absurd justifies the cult.

He has said his foal with his own family was to avoid the pain inflicted on him by his father, to be, as he put it, an ancestor in their lives and not a ghost. He wanted to walk by their side and guide and protect, not grasp their ankles and pull them back down.

The covering up of Till’s murder was not something that was perpetrated by a few bad apples. It couldn’t have been. The erasure was a collective effort, one that continues to this day. This isn’t comfortable history to face. The more I looked at the story of the barn and came to understand the forces that moved everyone involved into the Mississippi Delta in 1955, the more I understood that the tragedy of humankind isn’t that sometimes a few depraved individuals do what the rest of us could never do. It’s that the rest of us hide those hateful things from view, never learning the lesson that hate grows stronger and more resistant when it’s pushed underground. There lies the true horror of Emmett Till’s murder and the undeserved gift of his martyrdom. Empathy only lives at the intersection of facts and imagination, and once you know his story, you can’t unknow it. Once you connect all the dots, there’s almost nowhere they don’t lead. Which is why so many have fought literally and figuratively for so long to keep the reality from view.

More and more today, we don’t want to do the work or take the chances required for greatness, and we try to fix all those shortcuts on the back end with marketing and branding — modern, fancy words that mean lie.

I ordered us another, and we sat there, me and my father’s older brother and best friend, and we sipped this beautiful, rare, expensive whiskey and we didn’t need to say a thing.

...left to write Darkness and stew. To me it's a record about trying to protect a dream while confronted with a growing wall of reality that says the dream is dead — and worse: useless, pathetic, impossible.

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.

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

That’s what Patterson Hood called the “Duality of the Southern Thing.

Longing for a vanished agrarian past (that probably never existed) dominates much of the American story.

That's writing, he said. Be simple, blunt, and profound.