Ava's Man Quotes

“It is easy to be liked when the world has no jagged edges, when life is electric blankets and peach ice cream. But to be beloved, a man needs a dragon.”
― Rick Bragg, Ava's Man

“But if she was going to live in a damn jungle, she preferred it be a damn jungle in Georgia, she always said, and never saw any reason to elaborate on that.”
― Rick Bragg, Ava's Man

“It is true that almost everyone in the foothills farmed and hunted, so there were no breadlines, no men holding signs that begged for work and food, no children going door to door, as they did in Atlanta, asking for table scraps. Here, deep in the woods, was a different agony. Babies, the most tenuous, died from poor diet and simple things, like fevers and dehydration. In Georgia, one in seven babies died before their first birthday, and in Alabama it was worse.
You could feed your family catfish and jack salmon, poke salad and possum, but medicine took cash money, and the poorest of the poor, blacks and whites, did not have it. Women, black and white, really did smother their babies to save them from slow death, to give a stronger, sounder child a little more, and stories of it swirled round and round until it became myth, because who can live with that much truth.”
― Rick Bragg, Ava's Man

“Like most men, Jimmy Jim was neither all good nor all bad. It is just that when he was bad, gentler people saw in him a disturbing fury. People, a lot them, don't understand fury. They understand anger and even hatred, but fury is one of those old words that have gone out of style. Jimmy Jim Bundrum understood it. It rode his shoulder like a parrot.”
― Rick Bragg, Ava's Man

“What kind of man was this, I wondered, who is so beloved, so missed, that the mere mention of his death would make them cry forty-two years after he was preached into the sky?”
― Rick Bragg, Ava's Man

“They named him James, for Charlie's daddy. In the South, you do not have to love someone a real whole lot to name a child for them. It is just something you do, naming the first boy after his grandfather.”
― Rick Bragg, Ava's Man

“They lived, though simply, richly, if rich means a good cup of coffee.”
― Rick Bragg, Ava's Man

“Some people are just interesting. They can't help it. They just are.”
― Rick Bragg, Ava's Man

“Newt thought that it was Charlie who was beating his wife to death, instead of the other way around, . . .. So he reached into his overalls pocket, fished out his pocketknife and flicked out a blade long enough to cut watermelon.
Ava took one look at that knife and flung her body across her husband, to shield him. Then she looked up at Newt, and when she spoke there were spiders and broken glass in her voice.
"Don't you touch him," she hissed.
. . .
Everybody has a moment like it. If they never did, they never did love nobody truly. People who have lived a long, long time say it, so it must be so.”
― Rick Bragg, Ava's Man