Wright Thompson Quotes

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

Being Southern means carrying a responsibility to shake off the comforting blanket of myth and see ourselves clearly.

There’s the story of the Kentucky Derby party when a group of famous people, including baseball star Cal Ripken, had cornered Julian to talk whiskey and Wayne Gretzky kept coming up and interrupting, until Julian finally wheeled around and said, “Why don’t you shut the fuck up, Wayne?

The covering up of Till’s murder was not something that was perpetrated by a few bad apples. It couldn’t have been. The erasure was a collective effort, one that continues to this day. This isn’t comfortable history to face. The more I looked at the story of the barn and came to understand the forces that moved everyone involved into the Mississippi Delta in 1955, the more I understood that the tragedy of humankind isn’t that sometimes a few depraved individuals do what the rest of us could never do. It’s that the rest of us hide those hateful things from view, never learning the lesson that hate grows stronger and more resistant when it’s pushed underground. There lies the true horror of Emmett Till’s murder and the undeserved gift of his martyrdom. Empathy only lives at the intersection of facts and imagination, and once you know his story, you can’t unknow it. Once you connect all the dots, there’s almost nowhere they don’t lead. Which is why so many have fought literally and figuratively for so long to keep the reality from view.

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

Here's the story they don't want to tell: eight companies make 95 percent of the whiskey in America...And all those different brand names are just that. Brands. Perhaps no word sums up the death of truth in America better than the word brand.

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.

never feel jealous of other people’s success, and to try to see the best in people and to have empathy for whatever might be causing or fueling their worst behaviors.

man often spends his entire adult life trying to be exactly like his father or nothing like him.

He doesn’t inspire selfies as much as handshakes.

Buried violence is just a perennial bulb that is fertilized by fear and watered by insecurity.

Aging means losing things, and not just eyesight and flexibility. It means watching the accomplishments of your youth be diminished, maybe in your own eyes through perspective, maybe in the eyes of others through cultural amnesia. Most people live anonymous lives, and when they grow old and die, any record of their existence is blown away.

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.

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.

Nobody wants to hear what I have to say, which is just reps. Zen is a butt in a seat. There's no mystery. It's just reps.