Those We Thought We Knew Quotes

“The tree with the deepest roots in this country is a tree of White supremacy. And the thing is, you don’t have to be the one who planted that tree or even the one who kept it watered or trimmed the branches to be someone who directly benefits from the shade it provides. There’s a whole lot of people sitting comfortably under that tree, and some of them recognize where they’re sitting and just won’t do anything about it because they like where they’re sitting, and then there are some of them who won’t even acknowledge that the tree’s there at all. Maybe they don’t acknowledge it because they can’t see it, or maybe they just don’t want to see it, but in the end none of that matters because they’re all benefiting from the same thing.”
― David Joy, Those We Thought We Knew

“There’s a whole lot of people who care more about being called a racist than they care about addressing the institution.”
― David Joy, Those We Thought We Knew

“You can be proud of where you come from and not proud of everything that history entails. That’s what so many of these people don’t seem to be able to wrap their heads around.”
― David Joy, Those We Thought We Knew

“Them boys don’t read books. Only history they know’s whatever bullshit their daddy told them, and all he knows is whatever bullshit his daddy told him. They just use what they want and toss what they don’t, same as these people on TV do with the Bible. It ain’t never been about history, just like it ain’t ever had a thing in the world to do with a man on a cross.”
― David Joy, Those We Thought We Knew

“It’s good to be driven, but there’s a lot more to living than working it all away.”
― David Joy, Those We Thought We Knew

“We traded our robes for business suits. That’s what the world sees.”
― David Joy, Those We Thought We Knew

“The entire region had peddled tourism as some economic savior, never once acknowledging it as something equally extractive as timber or coal. Now that the people were here there wasn’t the infrastructure to support them. And worse yet, the people whose families had been rooted to this place for generations were being priced out.”
― David Joy, Those We Thought We Knew

“How could she know what anyone truly believed if they wouldn’t come out and say it? How could she know what anyone was truly capable of? People like Cawthorn were the easy ones. But it was the ones we thought we knew, those were the ones who broke our hearts.”
― David Joy, Those We Thought We Knew

“There was a right many folks in these mountains fought for the Union. So where’s them folks’ statue? Why ain’t their kin dancing around in uniforms playing dress-up and slapping stickers on the backs of their pickup trucks? Why ain’t they hung up on some little four-year window a hundred and fifty fucking years ago? Tell me that.”
― David Joy, Those We Thought We Knew