Wright Thompson Quotes

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.

When somebody says something is overwritten, all overwritten really means is underreported.

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

wasn’t there for the best bourbon-fetish bar moment. Once, in New York, Preston leaned against a bar and ordered a Van Winkle how he drinks it, as Julian drinks it, as Julian Jr. and Pappy drank it: on the rocks with a twist. The bartender snootily told him he didn’t feel right serving such fine bourbon like that. Preston grinned. He paused, for dramatic effect, and then delivered the kill shot: Well, sir, that sure is disappointing, given that’s how my grandfather and father taught me to drink it, and my family made the stuff after all. Hi, I’m Preston Van Winkle. . .

A cult is built on believing the absurd if the absurd justifies the cult.

I brought along a bottle of 1978 Old Fitzgerald and we drank it the whole way down. That's how we acknowledged the ghosts who'd be at the game with us. That's how we toasted them while we flew.

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.

Music is often the kingdom the dead inhabits in our soul.

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.

The most powerful four-letter word is home.

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.

"But, today, he listens to just a few songs on repeat, by singer-songwriter Jason Isbell, "Something More Than Free", and "Traveling Alone."

They're about loneliness and labor and the emptiness of being made to travel on a road not of your choosing."

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

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

What became clear in Michigan was that Julian and Sissy have become the fully realized version of themselves through success. That's actually rare. 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. Do you use it to try to get more success? To maintain the attention and bright lights? Or do you buy a life with it? The kind of life most people really want. I wanted what they have, wanted to organize the next act of my life, the one that moved finally past my youthful dreams and the rage and ambition that come shaped and fueled by my most broken and insecure self.