H.G. Bissinger > 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

“Because Cards' fans are the most knowledgeable and loyal in all of baseball, they booed almost reluctantly, polite as booing goes, what would have passes as a standing ovation in Philly.”
― Buzz Bissinger, Three Nights in August: Strategy, Heartbreak, and Joy Inside the Mind of a Manager

“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

“He realized that he agonized over everything all the time, and he admitted that part of the problem in the Carter game had been his own lack of belief in his abilities. He knew the reason why he was like this, that it was the price he paid for carefully watching out for himself ever since he had been a little boy. 'I've never taken a chance in life,' he said. 'I need to run in front of traffic bucknacked and get arrested.”
― H.G. Bissinger

“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

“Odessa is the setting for this book, but it could be anyplace in this vast land where, on a Friday night, a set of spindly stadium lights rises to the heavens to so powerfully, and so briefly, ignite the darkness.”
― H. G. Bissinger

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“It was stupid not to let MacArthur finish off those rice eaters. Push 'em back.”
― H.G. Bissinger

“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

“Will Bates was drummed out of Carter and reassigned to teach industrial arts in a middle school. He was given an unsatisfactory evaluation rating, placed on probation for a year, and had his salary frozen. And, of course, he was forbidden to teach math to prevent further threats to the sanctity of football.”
― H.G. Bissinger, Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream

“The war against Perot escalated quickly. The booster club geared up a letter-writing campaign to him, state legislators, and the governor. Nearly a thousand letters were sent in protest of Perot’s condemnation of Odessa. Some of the ones to him were addressed “Dear Idiot” or something worse than that, and they not so gently told him to mind his own damn business and not disturb a way of life that had worked and thrived for years and brought the town a joy it could never have experienced anywhere else. “It’s our money,” said Allen of the funds that were used to build the stadium. “If we choose to put it into a football program, and the graduates from our high schools are at or above the state level of standards, then screw you, leave us alone.” At one point Perot, believing his motives had been misinterpreted and hoping to convince people that improving education in Texas was not a mortal sin, contemplated coming to Odessa to speak. But he decided against it, to the relief of some who thought he might be physically harmed if he did. “There are so few other things we can look at with pride,” said Allen. “We don’t have a large university that has thirty or forty thousand students in it. We don’t have the art museum that some communities have and are world-renowned. When somebody talks about West Texas, they talk about football. “There is nothing to replace it. It’s an integral part of what made the community strong. You take it away and it’s almost like you strip the identity of the people.”
― H.G. Bissinger, Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream

“Bob Rutherford, who was sitting next to him in the booth and spent his days in the herculean task of trying to sell real estate in Odessa, felt the same stirrings. “It’s just a part of our lives. It’s just something that you’re involved in. It’s just like going to church or something like that. It’s just what you do.” They wouldn’t have missed the Watermelon Feed for the world. Neither would Ken Scates, a gentle man with a soft sliver of a voice who had been to the very first Permian practice in the fall of 1959, when the school opened. Since that time he had missed few practices, and it went without saying that he hadn’t missed any games, except for the time he had heart bypass surgery in Houston. But even then he had done what he could to keep informed. After his surgery, he had resisted taking painkillers so he would be conscious for the phone calls from his son-in-law updating him every quarter on the score of the Permian-Midland Lee game. When he learned that Permian had the game safely in hand, he then took his medicine.”
― H.G. Bissinger, Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream

“But “love” is the most empty and overused word in the English language after “brilliant.”
― H.G. Bissinger, Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream

“They liked George Bush in the same way they absolutely worshipped Ronald Reagan, not because of the type of America that Reagan actually created for them but because of the type of America he so vividly imagined.”
― H.G. Bissinger

“The first murder in Odessa occurred late in the nineteenth century when a cowboy rode into a water-drilling camp one afternoon and demanded something to eat from the cook. The cook, described as a “chinaman,” refused, so the cowboy promptly shot him. He was taken to San Angelo and put on trial, but the judge freed him on the grounds that there were no laws on the books making it illegal to kill a Chinaman. For”
― H.G. Bissinger, Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream

“They clearly saw their town as the one exception in an area of the country once described as having enough ignorance to support not simply a four-year university but an eight-year one.”
― H.G. Bissinger, Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream

“Permian had established itself as perhaps the most successful football dynasty in the country—pro, college, or high school. Few brands of sport were more competitive than Class AAAAA Texas high school football, the division for the biggest schools in the state. Odessa was hardly the only town that nurtured football and cherished it and went crazy over it. But no one came close to matching the performance of Permian. Since 1964 it had won four state championships, been to the state finals a record eight times, and made the playoffs fifteen times. Its worst record in any season over that time span had been seven and two, and its winning percentage overall, .825, was by far the best of any team in the entire state in the modern era of the game dating back to 1951. 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