Top 60 Rick Bragg Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Every life deserves a certain amount of dignity, no matter how poor or damaged the shell that carries it.”

— Rick Bragg

2. “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

3. “Don’t worry about what people think, because once it’s all over the people who love you will make you what they want you to be, and the people who don’t love you will, too.”

— Rick Bragg

4. “This is a place where grandmothers hold babies on their laps under the stars and whisper in their ears that the lights in the sky are holes in the floor of heaven.”

— Rick Bragg

5. “It was a good moment, the kind you would like to press between the pages of a book, or hide in your sock drawer, so you could touch it again.”

— Rick Bragg

6. “You do not hate the time you waste; it evokes a much more passive emotion than that. You only wish you had it back, like a quarter in an unlucky slot machine.”

— Rick Bragg

7. “Momma kept a garden, which sounds romantic to people who have never held a hoe.”

— Rick Bragg

8. “The best writers who have put pen to paper have often had a journalism background.”

— Rick Bragg

9. “For maybe the first time in my life, I had tried to do the safe thing, and it had blown up in my face. Never, ever again.”

— Rick Bragg

10. “I believe that if we are going to write about life and death, we should not do it from the cheap seats.”

— Rick Bragg

11. “The past is where we go when we are helpless; the past, no matter what the psychiatrists say, can’t really hurt you much more than it already has, not like the future, which comes at you like a train around a blind curve.”

— Rick Bragg

12. “But I just stood there, trapped somewhere between my long-standing comfortable hatred, and what might have been forgiveness. I am trapped there still.”

— Rick Bragg

13. “Passion is something you really don’t miss, after it has cooled. It is like looking at an empty bottle on the side of the road and thinking, “Boy, I wish I had a Coke.” The loves you miss are the ones that go away when they are still warm, even hot, to the touch.”

— Rick Bragg

14. “The children start school now in August. They say it has to do with air-conditioning, but I know sadism when I see it.”

— Rick Bragg

15. “To be a Southerner, or to live Southern, is to feel, well, something special even in the quiet, something fine in itself after all those rebel yells and fight songs have finally faded into silence.”

— Rick Bragg

16. “This is home and home is not something you remember, it is something you see every day and every moment.”

— Rick Bragg

17. “I made some friends for life, the way I usually make them. Any jackass can be pleasant company, but if people help you when you’re at your worst, that’s a friend.”

— Rick Bragg

18. “These were people who remembered the weight of the cotton sack, people with grease under their fingernails that no amount of Octagon soap would ever scrub away, people who built redwood decks on their mobile homes and have no idea that smart-aleck Yankees think that is somehow funny. People of the pines. My people.”

— Rick Bragg

19. “There was hope, not much hope, but some, that her husband would change. She dreamed he would stop drinking up his paycheck, stop disappearing for days, for weeks, for months. She dreamed he would stop running around and shaming her, dreamed she would not have to beg him for money for milk for the baby, Sam. She dreamed that this time it might be bearable, it might last. She didn’t want much, really, just something decent. All she got was me.”

— Rick Bragg

20. “I wonder if, north of here, they might even run out of stories someday. It may seem silly, but it is cold up there, too cold to mosey, to piddle, to loafer, and summer only lasts a week and a half. The people spit the words out so fast when they talk, like they are trying to discard them somehow, banish them, rather than relish the sound and the story. We will not run out of them here. We talk like we are tasting something.”

— Rick Bragg

21. “But I am a Southerner, and it is our prerogative, being us, to remember things as well damn well please.”

— Rick Bragg

22. “If one piddles correctly, time just goes away, without regret on the part of the piddler, or even any particular notice.”

— Rick Bragg

23. “And, thought it is far too late, I must say how sorry I am for letting my feelings for my father keep me for so long from his people, from my grandmother, especially. I am told she loved without condition, loved my mother and loved us boys. I never gave her a reason. It was just the kind of person she was.”

— Rick Bragg

24. “I don’t think there’s a difference between writing for a newspaper or magazine and doing a chapter in a book.”

— Rick Bragg

25. “He crashed a dozen Cadillacs in one year and played the Apollo. With racial hatred burning in the headlines, the audience danced in the seats to a white boy from the bottomland, backed by pickers who talked like Ernest Tubb. “James Brown kissed me on my cheek,” he says. “Top that.”

— Rick Bragg

26. “Some people are just interesting. They can’t help it. They just are.”

— Rick Bragg

27. “I felt lonely then. This is the time when you need somebody. This is the time when it is good to have a wife, and children, to absorb your grief, to hold on to you. This is when you pay, and pay and pay, for pretending that you don’t need anybody.”

— Rick Bragg

28. “You can dream on welfare. You can hope as you take in ironing. It is just less painful if you don’t.”

— Rick Bragg

29. “My Uncle Jimbo never challenged a man to a duel to defend his honor, but he did win a $20 bet by eating a bologna sandwich while sitting on a dead mule. My grandmother prayed a tornado away, and punched a city woman in the eye.”

— Rick Bragg

30. “There are these boutique writers out there who think if they are not writing their novels sitting at a bistro with their laptops, then they’re not real writers. That’s ridiculous.”

— Rick Bragg

31. “Sam believes in taking life in his two hands and squeezing and pounding it until it gives you something, even if it’s just a little bit. But the important thing is to keep squeezing, keep pounding, keep working.”

— Rick Bragg

32. “We are good at stories. We hoard them, like an old woman in a room full of boxes, but now and then we pull out our best, and spread them out. We talk of the bad years when the cotton didn’t open, and the day my cousin Wanda was washed in the Blood. We buff our beloved ancestors until they are smooth of sin, and give our scoundrels a hard shake, although sometimes we can’t remember exactly which is who.”

— Rick Bragg

33. “Most national correspondents will tell you they rely on stringers and researchers and interns and clerks and news assistants.”

— Rick Bragg

34. “How do you not love a place where the faded beads from a parade six years before still hang in the branches of the live oak trees.”

— Rick Bragg

35. “I don’t know anything about wars. I don’t think even the most erudite scholars do. I think you have to fight one, to know it.”

— Rick Bragg

36. “If you cannot eat what you want in the South, life is not worth living.”

— Rick Bragg

37. “They, especially, taught me that you can’t go through life not liking people because they didn’t have to work as hard or come as far as you did.”

— Rick Bragg

38. “She had hoped for a daughter to pass her skills and stories to – that or a thoughtful son, someone worthy of the history, secrets, and lore; instead, she got three nitwit boys who would eat a bug on a bet and still cannot do much more than burn a weenie on a sharp stick, and could not bake a passable biscuit even if you handed us one of those whop-’em cans from the Piggly Wiggly and prayed for bread.”

— Rick Bragg

39. “He spent two decades wandering the wilderness, overmedicated, set upon by the tax man, divorce lawyers, everything but a rain of toads. There were more fights and pills and liquor and car crashes and women and discharge of firearms – accidental and on purpose – than a mortal man could be expected to survive, but he played.”

— Rick Bragg

40. “I think it may be fine to live in the past if that is where your people have all disappeared to – if that is a place where things still make some kind of sense to you.”

— Rick Bragg

41. “That night, he just picked, and they let the liquor run through their blood, circle their heart, and soften their heads, like a pillow, without laying down.”

— Rick Bragg

42. “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

43. “It is one thing to be sure of yourself. It is another to have someone tell you to quit dancing, look them in the eye, and tell them the truth even if it hurts your pride.”

— Rick Bragg

44. “That is where a big part of the Old South is, on coffee tables in Greenwich Village.”

— Rick Bragg

45. “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

46. “People who think there is something pedestrian about journalism are just ignorant.”

— Rick Bragg

47. “I could not even ask myself how in the fuzzy hell I got here, because I knew precisely how it happened, year by year.”

— Rick Bragg

48. “I have dictated stories from an airport after writing the story out in longhand on the plane that I got from phone interviews and then was applauded by editors for ’working magic.”

— Rick Bragg

49. “Finally, I must thank the boy, for forgiving me for all that I have fumbled, broken and lost, and the simple fact that, sometimes, I just don’t have good sense.”

— Rick Bragg

50. “It has the pictures of my people, the books I love, the music I hear. I guess it is really just a wooden box to hold a life in, for days or decades, until someone else takes it over.”

— Rick Bragg