Wright Thompson Quotes

None of this happens without Mama & Daddy. They raised me with curiosity, confidence, and empathy, the three most important traits in my line of work.

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

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.

This guy is handier than a pocket in a shirt.

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

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.

I wanted her to have my dad's sense of wonder and fairness. He always celebrated other people's success and believed that greatness wasn't a zero-sum game. You were only ever competing against yourself and your own limitations. Someone else's joy was never your sadness, he always taught us.

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.

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.

The attitudes and intentions are why we should bring it up, to interrogate the present to see what of the past remains. Because our present day potential for violence is alive and undiminished.

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

The most powerful four-letter word is home.

...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.

"What is the cost? I won't ever look at the Rebel flag the same again. Although I like "Dixie", especially when it is played slow, if it were never played again, I would be OK with that."

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