My Southern Journey Quotes

“The children start school now in August. They say it has to do with air-conditioning, but I know sadism when I see it.”
― Rick Bragg, My Southern Journey: True Stories from the Heart of the South

“But I hope I will never have a life that is not surrounded by books, by books that are bound in paper and cloth and glue, such perishable things for ideas that have lasted thousands of years, or just since the most recent Harry Potter. I hope I am always walled in by the very weight and breadth and clumsy, inefficient, antiquated bulk of them, hope I spend my last days on this Earth arranging and rearranging them on thrones of good, honest pine, oak, and mahogany, because they just feel good in my hands, because I just like to look at their covers, and dream of the promise of the great stories inside.”
― Rick Bragg, My Southern Journey: True Stories from the Heart of the South

“I wonder if, north of here, they might even run out of stories someday. It may seem silly, but it is cold up there, too cold to mosey, to piddle, to loafer, and summer only lasts a week and a half. The people spit the words out so fast when they talk, like they are trying to discard them somehow, banish them, rather than relish the sound and the story. We will not run out of them here. We talk like we are tasting something.”
― Rick Bragg, My Southern Journey: True Stories from the Heart of the South

“I once banged out a story in Peshawar, Pakistan, while eating a chicken salad sandwich, as demonstrators shouted their displeasure of all things American in the glow of burning flags and some steel-edged radials. I was told, by well-meaning people, that I should tell the angry crowds that I was, in fact, Canadian.
I just looked at them.
How in the world do you pretend to be from Calgary, when you talk like me?
I thought briefly, I would say I was from Alabama, and hope they didn’t know exactly where that was, but I am pretty sure that, if I had, someone would answer back:
“Roll Tide.”
― Rick Bragg, My Southern Journey: True Stories from the Heart of the South

“To be a Southerner, or to live Southern, is to feel, well, something special even in the quiet, something fine in itself after all those rebel yells and fight songs have finally faded into silence.”
― Rick Bragg, My Southern Journey: True Stories from the Heart of the South

“If one piddles correctly, time just goes away, without regret on the part of the piddler, or even any particular notice.”
― Rick Bragg, My Southern Journey: True Stories from the Heart of the South

“How do you not love a place where the faded beads from a parade six years before still hang in the branches of the live oak trees.”
― Rick Bragg, My Southern Journey: True Stories from the Heart of the South

“and tried to learn to surf, which was really just buying a really small boat and practicing to drown.”
― Rick Bragg, My Southern Journey: True Stories from the Heart of the South

“I know, nostalgia is a veil, a piece of colored glass.”
― Rick Bragg, My Southern Journey: True Stories from the Heart of the South

“It has the pictures of my people, the books I love, the music I hear. I guess it is really just a wooden box to hold a life in, for days or decades, until someone else takes it over.”
― Rick Bragg, My Southern Journey: True Stories from the Heart of the South

“They say a kitchen is the heart of a house, but I believe the porch is its soul.”
― Rick Bragg, My Southern Journey: True Stories from the Heart of the South

“But I am a Southerner, and it is our prerogative, being us, to remember things as well damn well please.”
― Rick Bragg, My Southern Journey: True Stories from the Heart of the South

“My Uncle Jimbo never challenged a man to a duel to defend his honor, but he did win a $20 bet by eating a bologna sandwich while sitting on a dead mule. My grandmother prayed a tornado away, and punched a city woman in the eye.”
― Rick Bragg, My Southern Journey: True Stories from the Heart of the South

“But I hope I will never have a life that is not surrounded by books, by books that are bound in paper and cloth and glue, such perishable things for ideas that have lasted thousands of years, or just since the most recent Harry Potter. I hope I am always walled in by the very weight and breadth and clumsy, inefficient, antiquated bulk of them, hope that I spend my last days on this Earth arranging and rearranging them on thrones of good, honest pine, oak, and mahogany, because they just feel good in my hands, because I just like to look at their covers, and dream of the promose of the great stories inside.”
― Rick Bragg, My Southern Journey: True Stories from the Heart of the South

“A lot of the people dancing were the same ones I had seen the night before. One of them, Ted Couvillion, said hello. “My wife died of cancer two years ago,” he said. He vanished into his grief, until his friends dragged him out dancing. Now, every week, he dances and dances his way out of heartache. I can’t dance a lick. But I have two bags of cracklin’s in the trunk of my car.”
― Rick Bragg, My Southern Journey: True Stories from the Heart of the South

“just cook better than anybody else. A Cajun knows he’s got it right when, after it’s done, you can throw away the meat and just eat the gravy.”
― Rick Bragg, My Southern Journey: True Stories from the Heart of the South

“You have to be raised in the atmosphere of the food,” said Dickie Breaux.”
― Rick Bragg, My Southern Journey: True Stories from the Heart of the South

“The children ate their spice cake with Kool-Aid.”
― Rick Bragg, My Southern Journey: True Stories from the Heart of the South

“can’t write well enough to tell you how good it was.”
― Rick Bragg, My Southern Journey: True Stories from the Heart of the South

“boudin, the sausage made from pork, liver, onions, rice,”
― Rick Bragg, My Southern Journey: True Stories from the Heart of the South

“If it had not been for clam chowder, I would have jumped from a bridge into the frozen River Charles.”
― Rick Bragg, My Southern Journey: True Stories from the Heart of the South

“The woman also tried to save me at lunchtime. We ate salads and fruit and whole-wheat everything, and I was not happy, but I did it for love. I lost a pound.”
― Rick Bragg, My Southern Journey: True Stories from the Heart of the South

“Moonshine. I get it now.”
― Rick Bragg, My Southern Journey: True Stories from the Heart of the South

“They called it, oddly, a “toddy.” Their homemade remedies for the cold, flu, and croup varied a little, depending on which grandparents were mixing the concoctions, but the active”
― Rick Bragg, My Southern Journey: True Stories from the Heart of the South

“the late writer Lewis Grizzard once wrote, it is hard to get drunk and fall off a backyard.”
― Rick Bragg, My Southern Journey: True Stories from the Heart of the South

“There ain’t enough pats in the world.”
― Rick Bragg, My Southern Journey: True Stories from the Heart of the South

“Her driveway is about a quarter-mile long. She walks to the mailbox, for her health. “Now they all follow her in a straight line, all of them, there and back,” my brother told me.”
― Rick Bragg, My Southern Journey: True Stories from the Heart of the South

“Self-righteousness is without a true bottom.”
― Rick Bragg, My Southern Journey: True Stories from the Heart of the South