Wright Thompson Quotes

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

The hidden history of Kentucky is everywhere, relics of the booms and busts of people who tried to grab a piece of that permanence only to have it slip through their fingers. Most of these farms are owned by someone who made a breathtaking amount of money doing something else. In the rush of their pruchase, most never stopped ot think that they were probably buying from someone who'd lost a similarly breathtaking fortune. Nearly every horse farm comes with the silent warning of the construction magnate who took on one project too many, the coal baron who couldn't survive his industry's decline, the industrialist family that burned through its inheritance.

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

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

Then she pointed across the rolling hill to the most famous grave in the [All Saints] cemetery, which is where she was headed next, to pay respects to Harry Caray before going to watch the game. His stone has green apples on top, an inside joke referencing a quote about the Cubs one day making it to a World Series just as surely as God made green apples

There's a map on the Internet of the city's worst flood before Katrina, in 1849, when a levee ruptured on a sugarcane plantation west of town. Water rushed in, and if you look at the map of that flood and a map of the areas flooded by Katrina, they are almost the same. The United States invested millions of dollars, following plans drawn by the best scientific minds of the day, the construction coming at a great cost, both financial and human, and in the end, it didn't matter. Katrina flooded the same areas, almost down to the block. The high ground along the banks of the river, raised by a thousand years of floodwaters depositing silt, stayed dry in 1849. The land farther back, what is now Lakeview, New Orleans East, Chalmette, and the Lower 9th Ward- all that was then empty marshland. That's how it would have stayed, except that in the 1890's humans created the ability to drain swamps so that more people could build homes and lives. By 1915, the first phase of the draining project was complete, and new neighborhoods grew unchecked until Katrina turned them back into brackish swamps, But the drainage had an unintended side effect. As the pipes and pumps drained the water table, the land compacted, and the city began to sink. Today, almost everyone knows that New Orleans resides below sea level, but very few know that it didn't start that way. The city and its people, trying to survive and expand, literally sank themselves.

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

I think these stories are like a prayer for empathy — to try to understand each other, to understand another human being a little bit at a time, and then slowly, thread by thread, you understand yourself.

You drink expensive bourbon and then you piss it out. No getting around that.

Most every man competes with his father and imitates his father, lives in fear of disappointing, and craves approval, and on the extreme ends of this potentially fraught relationship, a man often spends his entire adult life trying to be exactly like his father or nothing like him.

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,

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.

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

everyone was drinking like they needed to forget some horrible thing they'd done

Less than a decade had passed since the murder, but a world had died. All that violence to protect a way of life, and in the end, it just crumbled to dust.