Wright Thompson Quotes

the game always the same no matter how much the men who love it change, a simplicity that waits day after day, beautiful and addictive.

When I tell my daughter, Wallace the story of the place she's from — when I play Muddy Waters or Son House or Skip James — I want her to see the complete picture. I want her to hear that music and know that people like us — planters and landowners, which we are — often caused the pain these musicians turned into beauty,

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

What became clear in Michigan was that Julian and Sissy have become the fully realized version of themselves through success. That's actually rare. I profile famous and successful athletes for a living and almost no one understands that success is merely a currency to spend on one big purchase. Do you use it to try to get more success? To maintain the attention and bright lights? Or do you buy a life with it? The kind of life most people really want. I wanted what they have, wanted to organize the next act of my life, the one that moved finally past my youthful dreams and the rage and ambition that come shaped and fueled by my most broken and insecure self.

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.

What’s in a Vanhattan?” I asked as he started to mix. “It’s half rye, half bourbon,” he said. When he said rye, he meant the Van Winkle rye. And when he said bourbon, he meant Pappy. The bar was on the wall near the grill. He poured from feel; he didn’t need jiggers. “Carpano Antica vermouth,” he said.

Meeting Julian and making him talk about his family made me ask myself the same question I'd been asking him: What did I owe my late father? What did I owe a grandfather I never met? What is demanded of a son or daughter? What was demanded of me?

I brought along a bottle of 1978 Old Fitzgerald and we drank it the whole way down. That's how we acknowledged the ghosts who'd be at the game with us. That's how we toasted them while we flew.

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

When somebody says something is overwritten, all overwritten really means is underreported.

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.

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

What is the cost of knowing our past?
And what is the cost of not?

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

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