Richard Grant > Quotes

“that it was good for different cultures to come together, and chip away at human prejudice one party at a time.”
― Richard Grant, Dispatches from Pluto: Lost and Found in the Mississippi Delta

“At the same time I grew increasingly dissatisfied and irritable with what we are prone to call normal life. Except for wine, music, and books, I disliked shopping. Television grated on my nerves, the commercials in particular, so I got rid of the television. I found it harder and harder to rouse any interest in sports, celebrities, electronic gadgets, the chatter of the culture, the latest this or that. Nor did I have any desire to own a house, or get rich, or start a family. I wanted to keep traveling and see the world, live an eventful, unpredictable life with as much personal freedom as possible, and have a few adventures along the way.”
― Richard Grant, God's Middle Finger: Into the Lawless Heart of the Sierra Madre

“It’s why the Delta doesn’t progress. It’s not having anything, and not really wanting anything, because that would mean change. That would mean taking on more responsibility. Too many of our people are not interested in progress and change.”
― Richard Grant, Dispatches from Pluto: Lost and Found in the Mississippi Delta

“Things have come a long way in Mississippi. That’s the usual shorthand. Perhaps nowhere else in America has made more progress in its race relations, but then again, nowhere else had so far to go. Mississippi had the most lynchings, the worst Klan violence, the staunchest resistance to the civil rights movement. When the Emmett Till case was tried, the all-white jury found the two defendants not guilty in an hour and eight minutes. One juror said it would have been quicker if they hadn’t taken a break to drink Coca-Colas. Those days are gone now, but inevitably, they bleed through and stain the present.”
― Richard Grant, Dispatches from Pluto: Lost and Found in the Mississippi Delta

“In Natchez, you only use the word home if it’s antebellum,” said Doug. “If your house was built after the Civil War, it’s trashy to call it a home.”
― Richard Grant, The Deepest South of All: True Stories from Natchez, Mississippi

“No state has a more beautiful name—Miss and Sis are sipping on something sippy, and it’s probably a sweet tea or an iced bourbon drink—but no state is more synonymous in the rest of the country with racism, ignorance, and cultural backwardness.”
― Richard Grant, Dispatches from Pluto: Lost and Found in the Mississippi Delta

“Mississippi is the center of the universe,” he said. “The two biggest issues in western Christian civilization are the white-black race issue and the rich-and-poor issue. Mississippi is at the apex of both. And if anybody in the world can solve the problem, it’s Mississippi.”
― Richard Grant, Dispatches from Pluto: Lost and Found in the Mississippi Delta

“People here talk about firearms and hunting in the same way that urban liberals go on about nutrition and exercise.”
― Richard Grant, Dispatches from Pluto: Lost and Found in the Mississippi Delta

“White people were similarly invented. Europeans coming to America boarded ships as Germans, Poles, English, French, and so on. They soon learned that in America they had a new privileged identity based on something they had scarcely considered before: the pale color of their skins.”
― Richard Grant, The Deepest South of All: True Stories from Natchez, Mississippi

“It’s just the South. There’s no point trying to explain it.”
― Richard Grant, The Deepest South of All: True Stories from Natchez, Mississippi

“Sometimes, when people in the South tell you to have a blessed day, it means fuck you and I hope you have a nice time in hell.”
― Richard Grant, Dispatches from Pluto: Lost and Found in the Mississippi Delta

“We drank a glass of wine on the front porch, and the Thompsons made some generalizations about black people that made us feel uncomfortable, although I had certainly heard worse from my father and his friends in London. They loved Lucy and Monk like family, and Cadi loved to go to black church, but there were a lot of worthless blacks on welfare who didn’t want to work, and we should never stop in Tchula, even if we ran down a pedestrian, because the people there would surely rob us, and quite possibly rape Mariah by the side of the road.”
― Richard Grant, Dispatches from Pluto: Lost and Found in the Mississippi Delta

“One famous study on the subject found that poor children on average hear thirty million fewer words than rich children in the first four years of their life. Closing that gap is extremely difficult, especially when you factor in all the social ills associated with poverty in America. The poorest Americans have the highest rates of alcohol and drug abuse, violence against children, sexual abuse of children, neglect of children, illiteracy, mental illness, teenage pregnancy, delinquency, incarceration.”
― Richard Grant, Dispatches from Pluto: Lost and Found in the Mississippi Delta

“Sometimes when you are feeling buried, you're just planted”
― Richard Grant, Dispatches from Pluto: Lost and Found in the Mississippi Delta

“We made our plans and we grew attached to them.”
― Richard Grant, God's Middle Finger: Into the Lawless Heart of the Sierra Madre

“The mean drunken hillbillies who lived up there could all feud themselves into extinction and burn in hell. I was out of courage, out of patience, out of compassion. They were sons of their whoring mothers, who had been fornicating with dogs.”
― Richard Grant, God's Middle Finger: Into the Lawless Heart of the Sierra Madre

“Judging from payroll documents obtained through a Freedom of Information request, the Natchez–Adams County school district was functioning more like a patronage system than a normal American educational system. The district had over 700 staff, including teachers, for approximately 3,400 students—or one employee for every 4.9 students. There were 70 administrators, not including principals and assistant principals, for those 3,400 students. A typical American school district has about 50 administrators for 20,000 students.”
― Richard Grant, The Deepest South of All: True Stories from Natchez, Mississippi

“For inspiration, he read Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” and listened to the Drive-By Truckers singing about the duality of pride and shame they felt as white Southerners.”
― Richard Grant, The Deepest South of All: True Stories from Natchez, Mississippi

“Mariah and I had never thought so much about race and racism in our lives. It was the great underlying obsession of the Mississippi delta. The elephant in every room. Almost every charming, gracious, hospitable, generous white landowner we met came from a family that had profited from an American version of apartheid. Or more accurately a blueprint for the South African version.”
― Richard Grant, Dispatches from Pluto: Lost and Found in the Mississippi Delta

“And there’s a whole spectrum of behavior that we refer to politely as ‘eccentricity.”
― Richard Grant, The Deepest South of All: True Stories from Natchez, Mississippi

“Theophilus Freeman was right over here. He’s the one that sold Solomon Northup out of Twelve Years a Slave.”
― Richard Grant, The Deepest South of All: True Stories from Natchez, Mississippi

“Legal segregation was long gone, but a strong tradition prevailed in both communities that it was best to live separately.”
― Richard Grant, Dispatches from Pluto: Lost and Found in the Mississippi Delta

“These are not traditional Tarahumara or Tepehuan principles but they had picked them up through exposure to the mestizo culture. When Isidro’s father was killed, his mother implored him to take vengeance. “It was very hard, but I decided not to because if I avenged my father, I would end up losing my brothers and maybe my uncles. It wouldn’t bring back my father and would bring more sorrow into my family. My mother didn’t understand. She never really forgave me.”
― Richard Grant, God's Middle Finger: Into the Lawless Heart of the Sierra Madre

“If you were from a state that didn’t fight for the Confederacy, you were a Yankee.”
― Richard Grant, Dispatches from Pluto: Lost and Found in the Mississippi Delta

“They have to square their well-earned reputation for kindness and hospitality with their equally well-earned reputation for violence and bigotry.”
― Richard Grant, The Deepest South of All: True Stories from Natchez, Mississippi

“By tracing paternal ancestry through Y-DNA, geneticists have found that a third of African American men today are directly descended from a white male ancestor who fathered a mulatto child in the slavery era, “most probably from rape or coerced sexuality,” in the words of Henry Louis Gates Jr., professor of African American studies at Harvard, and presenter of popular television shows on black genealogy.”
― Richard Grant, The Deepest South of All: True Stories from Natchez, Mississippi

“Now the city, led by the new mayor, Darryl Grennell, was erecting a monument to honor the survivors of the Parchman Ordeal, and others who were arrested for attempting to march. The “Proud to Take a Stand” monument, a black granite wall with the names of all the 439 people who were wrongfully arrested, will stand in the grounds of the city auditorium. “It’s the first monument in Natchez that addresses a very traumatic, difficult, but ultimately victorious era in our history,” said Mayor Grennell. “No tour of civil rights history in the Deep South will be complete without a visit to this site.”
― Richard Grant, The Deepest South of All: True Stories from Natchez, Mississippi

“Mariah put something useful in a nutshell when she said: If white person is lazy around here, it is because they have a poor work ethic. If a black person is lazy, it’s because they are black.”
― Richard Grant, Dispatches from Pluto: Lost and Found in the Mississippi Delta

“It was all so familiar from Latin America, Africa, and the Caribbean: the collapsing infrastructure, the intermittent electricity supply, the air of lassitude and disorganization, the ancient forms. It brought back memories of multiple trips to the visa office in Bujumbura, in the small African county of Burundi. I was also reminded of Britain in the 1970s, when nothing worked properly, the tea break was sacrosanct and an obstructive time-wasting surliness prevailed at every interface between institutions and the public. But I'd never come across anything like it in America before.”
― Richard Grant, Dispatches from Pluto: Lost and Found in the Mississippi Delta

“Each of us is a cosmic improbability, brought into this life and sentenced to experience it”
― Richard Grant