Wright Thompson > 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

“The covering up of Till’s murder was not something that was perpetrated by a few bad apples. It couldn’t have been. The erasure was a collective effort, one that continues to this day. This isn’t comfortable history to face. The more I looked at the story of the barn and came to understand the forces that moved everyone involved into the Mississippi Delta in 1955, the more I understood that the tragedy of humankind isn’t that sometimes a few depraved individuals do what the rest of us could never do. It’s that the rest of us hide those hateful things from view, never learning the lesson that hate grows stronger and more resistant when it’s pushed underground. There lies the true horror of Emmett Till’s murder and the undeserved gift of his martyrdom. Empathy only lives at the intersection of facts and imagination, and once you know his story, you can’t unknow it. Once you connect all the dots, there’s almost nowhere they don’t lead. Which is why so many have fought literally and figuratively for so long to keep the reality from view.”
― Wright Thompson, The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi

“It is not what we do, but also what we do not do, for which we are accountable.’ ”
― Wright Thompson, The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi

“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

“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

“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

“That's writing, he said. Be simple, blunt, and profound.”
― 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

“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

“The attitudes and intentions are why we should bring it up, to interrogate the present to see what of the past remains. Because our present day potential for violence is alive and undiminished.”
― Wright Thompson, The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi

“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

“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

“I knelt down. The dirt felt cool as it ran through my fingers. Nothing hits the nose quite like freshly tilled topsoil, carrying the scent of life and death. The ground around here smells rotten after a rain, gray buckshot petrichor, grabbing tires and axles and feet. I’ve lost shoes in this mud. Delta folks call it gumbo and it feels hungry, aggressive even, as if it actively wants to pull more living things down into its stinking maw.”
― Wright Thompson, The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi

“A cult is built on believing the absurd if the absurd justifies the cult.”
― Wright Thompson, The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi

“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

“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

“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

“You drink expensive bourbon and then you piss it out. No getting around that.”
― Wright Thompson

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

“Buried violence is just a perennial bulb that is fertilized by fear and watered by insecurity.”
― Wright Thompson, The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi

“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

“up, to interrogate the present to see what of the past remains. Because our present day potential for violence is alive and undiminished.”
― Wright Thompson, The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi

“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

“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

“The pervasive idea of the Lost Cause reframed the Civil War to be about states’ rights and not slavery. It turned the Confederate soldiers from traitors into American patriots defending the original ideals of the nation. This mythology took root as those old soldiers began dying in droves, another one every day, and their sons and daughters tried to sort out what their beloved parents had done in their lives and what they had done it for.”
― Wright Thompson, The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi

“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 unspoken issue at the core of the debate, he knew, was always sexual. It had always been about white girls sitting in desks next to Black boys. The southern farming class lived in mortal fear of Black men doing to them what the planters and overseers had done to Black women for two hundred years. The accusation, as it often is in Mississippi, was the confession.”
― Wright Thompson, The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi

“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

“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