Wright Thompson Quotes

Perhaps it is almost justice, dad, that we should have to go through war every so often to pay for the peace years.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

I wish someone had told me a long time ago that if you're going to be a professional writer for decades, writing is not going to be about words, but it's going to be about architecture. And only when you really understand how things fit together and move can you then actually be thinking about the words.

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

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?

The most powerful four-letter word is home.

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.

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”.

Our fathers are often mysteries to us and therefore we are often mysteries to ourselves.

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.

A great detail will do the work of 50 shitty sentences.