Pappyland Quotes

“Being Southern means carrying a responsibility to shake off the comforting blanket of myth and see ourselves clearly. I was bringing a child into this world, and into our long history of trying to do the right think while benefiting mightily from the wrong thing, and I wanted her to see it clearly without the nostalgia that so often softens my anger and desire to tear it down and build a new world in its place.”
― Wright Thompson, Pappyland: A Story of Family, Fine Bourbon, and the Things That Last

“That's the work of adulthood. Sorting out the good and bad within.”
― Wright Thompson, Pappyland: A Story of Family, Fine Bourbon, and the Things That Last

“Our fathers are often mysteries to us and therefore we are often mysteries to ourselves.”
― Wright Thompson, Pappyland: A Story of Family, Fine Bourbon, and the Things That Last

“Families stay together because of active decisions, because of patters that turn into tribunals, and they are torn apart most often not by anger or feuds but by careless inertia.0”
― Wright Thompson, Pappyland: A Story of Family, Fine Bourbon, and the Things That Last

“So this is what it means,” she said and I understood. We build a life to share, to pass on, so that some idea of us can live in our children and grandchildren, so that we might live forever and they might never be alone.”
― Wright Thompson, Pappyland: A Story of Family, Fine Bourbon, and the Things That Last

“This guy is handier than a pocket in a shirt.”
― Wright Thompson, Pappyland: A Story of Family, Fine Bourbon, and the Things That Last

“our long history of trying to do the right thing while benefitting mightily from the wrong thing”
― Wright Thompson, Pappyland: A Story of Family, Fine Bourbon, and the Things That Last

“everyone was drinking like they needed to forget some horrible thing they'd done”
― Wright Thompson, Pappyland: A Story of Family, Fine Bourbon, and the Things That Last

“When tomorrow comes this day will be gone forever, leaving something it its place I have traded for it.”
― Wright Thompson, Pappyland: A Story of Family, Fine Bourbon, and the Things That Last

“When I tell my daughter, Wallace the story of the place she's from--when I play Muddy Waters or Son House or Skip James--I want her to see the complete picture. I want her to hear that music and know that people like us--planters and landowners, which we are--often caused the pain these musicians turned into beauty,”
― Wright Thompson, Pappyland: A Story of Family, Fine Bourbon, and the Things That Last

“This all makes me think a lot about what it means to be from the Mississippi Delta; to be from the South, For me and other White people of a certain social class, it means that I carry a legacy of a roguish and faded gentility, a love for whiskey, and fast cars on riding road,s and a knowledge of roadside blues clubs that offered guitars and tall boys of beer.”
― Wright Thompson, Pappyland: A Story of Family, Fine Bourbon, and the Things That Last

“Longing for a vanished agrarian past (that probably never existed) dominates much of the American story.”
― Wright Thompson, Pappyland: A Story of Family, Fine Bourbon, and the Things That Last

“That's writing, he said. Be simple, blunt, and profound.”
― Wright Thompson, Pappyland: A Story of Family, Fine Bourbon, and the Things That Last

“You're deep in the nostalgia now,' I told him.

'You get older, you got nothing left,' he said.”
― Wright Thompson, Pappyland: A Story of Family, Fine Bourbon, and the Things That Last

“man often spends his entire adult life trying to be exactly like his father or nothing like him.”
― Wright Thompson, Pappyland: A Story of Family, Fine Bourbon, and the Things That Last

“Being Southern means carrying a responsibility to shake off the comforting blanket of myth and see ourselves clearly.”
― Wright Thompson, Pappyland: A Story of Family, Fine Bourbon, and the Things That Last

“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?”
― Wright Thompson, Pappyland: A Story of Family, Fine Bourbon, and the Things That Last

“He doesn’t inspire selfies as much as handshakes.”
― Wright Thompson, Pappyland: A Story of Family, Fine Bourbon, and the Things That Last

“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.”
― Wright Thompson, Pappyland: A Story of Family, Fine Bourbon, and the Things That Last

“The story sums him up best to me. He thought of the grand gesture and then did it.”
― Wright Thompson, Pappyland: A Story of Family, Fine Bourbon, and the Things That Last

“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.”
― Wright Thompson, Pappyland: A Story of Family, Fine Bourbon, and the Things That Last

“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.”
― Wright Thompson, Pappyland: A Story of Family, Fine Bourbon, and the Things That Last

“I knew the roads by heart now, turning at the top of the holler and winding my way down toward the water tower that peeks through the trees, built like a shotgun shell with a Coco Chanel wig on top.”
― Wright Thompson, Pappyland: A Story of Family, Fine Bourbon, and the Things That Last

“More and more today, we don’t want to do the work or take the chances required for greatness, and we try to fix all those shortcuts on the back end with marketing and branding—modern, fancy words that mean lie.”
― Wright Thompson, Pappyland: A Story of Family, Fine Bourbon, and the Things That Last

“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.”
― Wright Thompson, Pappyland: A Story of Family, Fine Bourbon, and the Things That Last

“Close is always the only possible outcome when someone tries to make the present match up with his memory of the past. Home always seems warmer and safer than it really was. That’s where the pain comes from. We long for a fantasy that won’t ever come true and feel surprise at our inability to create it from force of will.”
― Wright Thompson, Pappyland: A Story of Family, Fine Bourbon, and the Things That Last

“What’s in a Vanhattan?” I asked as he started to mix. “It’s half rye, half bourbon,” he said. When he said rye, he meant the Van Winkle rye. And when he said bourbon, he meant Pappy. The bar was on the wall near the grill. He poured from feel; he didn’t need jiggers. “Carpano Antica vermouth,” he said.”
― Wright Thompson, Pappyland: A Story of Family, Fine Bourbon, and the Things That Last

“I ordered us another, and we sat there, me and my father’s older brother and best friend, and we sipped this beautiful, rare, expensive whiskey and we didn’t need to say a thing.”
― Wright Thompson, Pappyland: A Story of Family, Fine Bourbon, and the Things That Last

“Bourbon became popular again, and then it became expensive and rare, which made it more popular and yet so hard to get that its original purpose as a way to facilitate and lubricate fellowship was being replaced by the hunting for and finding of it.”
― Wright Thompson, Pappyland: A Story of Family, Fine Bourbon, and the Things That Last

“That’s what Patterson Hood called the “Duality of the Southern Thing.”
― Wright Thompson, Pappyland: A Story of Family, Fine Bourbon, and the Things That Last