The Cost of These Dreams Quotes

“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.”
― Wright Thompson, The Cost of These Dreams: Sports Stories and Other Serious Business

“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”
― Wright Thompson, The Cost of These Dreams: Sports Stories and Other Serious Business

“There's a map on the Internet of the city's worst flood before Katrina, in 1849, when a levee ruptured on a sugarcane plantation west of town. Water rushed in, and if you look at the map of that flood and a map of the areas flooded by Katrina, they are almost the same. The United States invested millions of dollars, following plans drawn by the best scientific minds of the day, the construction coming at a great cost, both financial and human, and in the end, it didn't matter. Katrina flooded the same areas, almost down to the block. The high ground along the banks of the river, raised by a thousand years of floodwaters depositing silt, stayed dry in 1849. The land farther back, what is now Lakeview, New Orleans East, Chalmette, and the Lower 9th Ward- all that was then empty marshland. That's how it would have stayed, except that in the 1890's humans created the ability to drain swamps so that more people could build homes and lives. By 1915, the first phase of the draining project was complete, and new neighborhoods grew unchecked until Katrina turned them back into brackish swamps, But the drainage had an unintended side effect. As the pipes and pumps drained the water table, the land compacted, and the city began to sink. Today, almost everyone knows that New Orleans resides below sea level, but very few know that it didn't start that way. The city and its people, trying to survive and expand, literally sank themselves.”
― Wright Thompson, The Cost of These Dreams: Sports Stories and Other Serious Business

“None of this happens without Mama & Daddy. They raised me with curiosity, confidence, and empathy, the three most important traits in my line of work.”
― Wright Thompson, The Cost of These Dreams: Sports Stories and Other Serious Business

“I've learned in the past three years that I did many things solely to tell Daddy about them later.”
― Wright Thompson, The Cost of These Dreams: Sports Stories and Other Serious Business

“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.”
― Wright Thompson, The Cost of These Dreams: Sports Stories and Other Serious Business

“The most powerful four-letter word is home.”
― Wright Thompson, The Cost of These Dreams: Sports Stories and Other Serious Business

“The citizens in New Orleans, generation after generation, have chosen joy in the face of disaster and oppression. Everything unique about the city is a reflection of that.”
― Wright Thompson, The Cost of These Dreams: Sports Stories and Other Serious Business

“What I am doing today becomes important because I am exchanging a day of my life for it.”
― Wright Thompson, The Cost of These Dreams: Sports Stories and Other Serious Business

“What is the cost? I won't ever look at the Rebel flag the same again. Although I like "Dixie", especially when it is played slow, if it were never played again, I would be OK with that.”
― Wright Thompson, The Cost of These Dreams: Sports Stories and Other Serious Business

“Sometimes I worry we've already made our decisions and have no hope of undoing them.”
― Wright Thompson, The Cost of These Dreams: Sports Stories and Other Serious Business

“What is the cost of knowing our past?
And what is the cost of not?”
― Wright Thompson, The Cost of These Dreams: Sports Stories and Other Serious Business

“I know that success means reaching your goals and enjoying them and that one without the other is empty and meaningless.”
― Wright Thompson, The Cost of These Dreams: Sports Stories and Other Serious Business

“people in urban America aren’t Shakespearean characters with free will but actors in a Greek tragedy,”
― Wright Thompson, The Cost of These Dreams: Sports Stories and Other Serious Business

“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.”
― Wright Thompson, The Cost of These Dreams: Sports Stories and Other Serious Business

“Look at this place,” he says. “This big hotel, this town. It’s dust, all dust. Don’t none of it mean nothin’. It’s all only dust.”
― Wright Thompson, The Cost of These Dreams: Sports Stories and Other Serious Business