Top 15 Wright Thompson Quotes

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.

That's the work of adulthood. Sorting out the good and bad within.

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

Families stay together because of active decisions, because of patters that turn into tribunals, and they are torn apart most often not by anger or feuds but by careless inertia.0

So this is what it means,” she said and I understood. We build a life to share, to pass on, so that some idea of us can live in our children and grandchildren, so that we might live forever and they might never be alone.

It is not what we do, but also what we do not do, for which we are accountable.’

This guy is handier than a pocket in a shirt.

This all makes me think a lot about what it means to be from the Mississippi Delta; to be from the South, For me and other White people of a certain social class, it means that I carry a legacy of a roguish and faded gentility, a love for whiskey, and fast cars on riding road,s and a knowledge of roadside blues clubs that offered guitars and tall boys of beer.

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

You're deep in the nostalgia now,' I told him.

'You get older, you got nothing left,' he said.

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

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

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

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,

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