Friday Night Lights Quotes

“I'm gonna party, see how intoxicated I can get and how many rules I can flaunt. That's my motto.”
― H.G. Bissinger, Friday Night Lights

“Athletics lasts for such a short period of time. It ends for people. But while it lasts, it creates this make-believe world where normal rules don’t apply. We build this false atmosphere. When it’s over and the harsh reality sets in, that’s the real joke we play on people. . . . Everybody wants to experience that superlative moment, and being an athlete can give you that. It’s Camelot for them. But there’s even life after it.”
― H.G. Bissinger, Friday Night Lights: A Town, A Team, And A Dream

“I work not only for the gathering and assimilation of knowledge, but also to teach the fact that one can be brilliant without being arrogant, that great intellectual capacity brings great responsibility, that the quest for knowledge should never supplant the joy of learning, that one with great capacities must learn to be tolerant and appreciate those with lesser or different absolutes,”
― H.G. Bissinger, Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream

“Instead of understanding that they were the beneficiaries of history, they began to believe that they were the creators of it.”
― H.G. Bissinger, Friday Night Lights

“This must not be planet earth,” Cone told his partner. “This must be hell.” But it wasn’t. It was just Odessa.”
― H.G. Bissinger, Friday Night Lights: A Town, A Team, And A Dream

“Let each of you discover where your chance for greatness lies. Seize that chance and let no power on earth deter you.”
― H.G. Bissinger, Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream

“He saw the irresistible allure of high school sports, but he also saw an inevitable danger in adults’ living vicariously through their young. And he knew of no candle that burned out more quickly than that of the high school athlete.”
― H.G. Bissinger, Friday Night Lights: A Town, A Team, And A Dream

“the solemn ritual that was attached to almost everything, made them seem like boys going off to fight a war for the benefit of someone else, unwitting sacrifices to a strange and powerful god. In”
― H.G. Bissinger, Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream

“She said also that they absolutely hated any assignment in which they had to interpret what they had read. If they had to think about anything, make critical judgments and deliberations, the cause was hopeless. The best they could be expected to do was regurgitate.”
― H.G. Bissinger, Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream

“He firmly believed that football, like other sports, used blacks, exploited them and then spit them out once their talents as running backs or linebackers or wide receivers had been fully exhausted. For a few lucky ones, that moment might not come until they were established in the pros. For others, it might come at the end of college. For most, it would all end in high school.”
― H.G. Bissinger, Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream

“If the season could ever have any salvation, if it could ever make sense again, it would have to come tonight under a flood of stars on the flatiron plains, before thousands of fans who had once anointed him the chosen son but now mostly thought of him as just another nigger.”
― H.G. Bissinger, Friday Night Lights

“It was hard not to think that wherever he wound up, it was not going to be good. He drank. He drugged. He regarded life with devilish disdain. I could never see him turning it around. Which is why I have also learned that the worst predictor of future behavior is high school behavior.”
― H.G. Bissinger, Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream

“The solution to the problem of poor performance scores had been a new system of grading that would encourage students to stay in school as well as improve their self-esteem. Beyond these important, admirable goals, it also had a more immediate purpose: it would undoubtedly reduce the school’s notoriously high failure rate, which had become an embarrassment to the school and to the school board. Under the plan, equal weight was given to class participation (which to some teachers meant simply showing up, because how on earth were you supposed to quantify participation?), homework, weekly tests, and a final exam at the end of every six-week period. A student could flunk every weekly test as well as the final exam and still pass a course for that period.”
― H.G. Bissinger, Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream

“There were also those who had grown weary of it and the oft-repeated phrase that what made it special was the quality of its people. “Odessa has an unspeakable ability to bullshit itself,” said Warren Burnett, a loquacious, liberal-minded lawyer who after roughly thirty years had fled the place like a refugee for the coastal waters near Houston. “Nothing could be sillier than we got good people here. We got the same cross-section of assholes as anywhere.”
― H.G. Bissinger, Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream

“Molly Ivins, a columnist for the Dallas Times Herald, described Odessa as an “armpit,” which, as the Odessa American pointed out, was actually quite a few rungs up from its usual anatomical comparison with a rectum.”
― H.G. Bissinger, Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream

“J. D. Cone, when he came here from Oklahoma in 1948 to become a family practitioner, went on house calls with a thirty-eight pistol stuck into his belt after the sheriff told him it was always a good idea to be armed in case someone got a little ornery or disagreed with the diagnosis.”
― H.G. Bissinger, Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream

“you’ll be all right,” said Hanson. “As long as you don’t rock the boat, then they think”
― H.G. Bissinger, Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream

“nowhere. But it also may be that under the right circumstances, the demon wins the heart of the most steadfast soul, and the nemesis always becomes a lover.”
― H.G. Bissinger, Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream

“schools and change the compositions of their respective enrollments. But in Odessa, the drawback of doing that was obvious. “That would have destroyed the football program, and that’s why we didn’t do it,” said Bunton. The issue of race in the schools did not come up again for almost another ten years. The federal government’s suit sat untouched in the federal court. Then it came to the forefront again, spearheaded by a total stranger. III”
― H.G. Bissinger, Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream

“I’m not real certain we were ready for the kind of desegregation that currently exists. I think it would have caused some bad feelings and potentially would have hurt the school system,” said Bunton, who was ultimately appointed a federal judge by President Carter and went on to issue a landmark decision finding the FBI guilty of racial bias in the treatment of its Hispanic agents. At that time there were three high schools in the town: Ector, which was located on the Southside and 90 percent minority; Odessa High, the town’s first high school, which was 93 percent white; and Permian, which served the newer parts of town and was 99 percent white. One obvious way of accomplishing desegregation would have been to shift students among these three”
― H.G. Bissinger, Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream

“Jim Moore, the last principal of Ector High School before it was closed down as a means of achieving desegregation, felt the same way. Moore, who was white, saw no great social motive in the desegregation effort. It had nothing to do with true assimilation of the races and everything to do with percentages—how many whites, how many blacks, how many browns—little numbers that could be written down and submitted to a judge as proof that there was no longer any racism. “There’s no integration,” said Moore. “There is desegregation. There is no integration in this community, the same as any community in America.” II”
― H.G. Bissinger, Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream

“Integration has torn down some barriers,” he said. “There is not as much taboo in whites’ attitudes towards blacks. But I think that is all it has done.”
― H.G. Bissinger, Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream

“All this wasn’t accomplished with kids who weighed 250 pounds and were automatic major-college prospects, but with kids who often weighed 160 or 170 or even less. They had no special athletic prowess. They weren’t especially fast or especially strong. But they were fearless and relentlessly coached and from the time they were able to walk they had only one certain goal in their lives in Odessa, Texas. Whatever it took, they would play for Permian.”
― H.G. Bissinger, Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream

“When he spoke to the players that very first time, he told them to ignore the outside pressure that would inevitably swirl around them during the thick of the season. “I’m gonna get criticism and you’re gonna get criticism,” he said. “It don’t mean a hill of beans, because the only people that matter are in this room. It doesn’t make a difference, except for the people here.” In the solitude”
― H.G. Bissinger, Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream

“What pride they had in Odessa came from their very survival in a place they openly admitted was physically wretched.”
― H.G. Bissinger, Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream

“saw the irresistible allure of high school sports, but he also saw an inevitable danger in adults’ living vicariously through their young. And he knew of no candle that burned out more quickly than that of the high school athlete. “Athletics lasts for such a short period of time. It ends for people. But while it lasts, it creates this make-believe world where normal rules don’t apply. We build this false atmosphere. When it’s over and the harsh reality sets in, that’s the real joke we play on people. . . . Everybody wants to experience that superlative moment, and being an athlete can give you that. It’s Camelot for them. But there’s even life after it.”
― H.G. Bissinger, Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream

“there was no profession in the state of Texas with worse job security than that of high school football coach. Coaches were fired all the time for poor records. Sometimes it happened with the efficiency of a bloodless coup—one day the coach was there at the office decorated in the school colors and the next day he was gone, as if he had never existed. But sometimes he was paraded before school board meetings to be torn apart by the public in a scene like something out of the Salem witch trials, or had several thousands of dollars’ worth of damage done to his car by rocks thrown by irate fans, or responded to a knock on the door to find someone with a shotgun who wasn’t there to fire him but to complain about his son’s lack of playing time. When Gaines himself went home that Friday night at about two in the morning he found seven FOR SALE signs planted in his lawn. The next night, someone had also smashed a pumpkin into his car, causing a dent. It didn’t bother him. He was the coach. He got paid for what he did and he was tough enough to take it. But he did get upset when he heard that several FOR SALE signs had also been punched into Chavez’s lawn. Brian was just a player, a senior in high school, but that didn’t seem to matter. “That’s sick to me,” said Gaines. “I just can’t understand it.”
― H.G. Bissinger, Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream

“Her daughter Nicole had often joked with her, “If Daddy dies, and you would be nothing.” But during the past three years, sitting in the stands week after week had become a nightmare for her as she listened to the fans tear apart her husband and the teenagers who played for him with unrelenting venom, not caring one whit that she, the wife of the coach, was sitting within easy earshot. Sometimes she couldn’t stand it and had to move to one of the portals to get away from it all. “I don’t think they realize these are sixteen, seventeen, eighteen-year-old kids,” she once said. “I don’t think they realize these are coaches. They are men, they are not gods. They don’t realize it’s a game and they look at them like they’re professional football players. They are kids, high school kids, the sons of somebody, and they expect them to be perfect.” Yes, they did, and they had too much invested in it emotionally to ever change. Permian football had become too much a part of the town and too much a part of their own lives, as intrinsic and sacred a value as religion, as politics, as making money, as raising children. That was the nature of sports in a town like this. Football stood at the very core of what the town was about, not on the outskirts, not on the periphery. It had nothing to do with entertainment and everything to do with how people felt about themselves.”
― H.G. Bissinger, Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream

“If you took a poll, few people in town could tell you who the mayor was, or the police chief, or the city manager. Hardly anybody could tell you the name of a city councilman, or a county commissioner, or the head of the public works department, or the planning department, or the fire department. Those were jobs nobody cared about in Odessa unless a house burned down or a sewer line backed up. But just about everybody could tell you who the coach of Permian High School was, and that rubbed off on her.”
― H.G. Bissinger, Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream

“Their savagery was intimidating: we sissybritches Headquarters-City-of-the-Vast-Permian-Basin-Empire boys lost to Sintown by 20 to 7 and 48 to 0 in my time,” wrote King in Texas Monthly. “Only by joining the Army before my senior season did I avoid the record 55–0 plastering of 1946. High school football was, I think, a legitimate cultural and psychological measuring stick of that time and that place: many of us concluded that Odessa was, indeed, the rawer and tougher community.”
― H.G. Bissinger, Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream