All Over But the Shoutin'
Rick Bragg
Top 10 Best Quotes
“Every life deserves a certain amount of dignity, no matter how poor or damaged the shell that carries it.”
“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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“I know I grew up in the time when a young man in a baggy suit and slicked-down hair stood spraddle-legged in the crossroads of history and talked hot and mean about the colored, giving my poor and desperate people a reason to feel superior to somebody, to anybody. I know that even as the words of George Wallace rang through my Alabama, the black family who lived down the dirt road from our house sent fresh-picked corn and other food to the poor white lady and her three sons, because they knew their daddy had run off, because hungry does not have a color.”
“One: Don't kill yourself. Two: Don't kill each other. Three: Try hard not to kill nobody else, but if you have to, better if it ain't fam'ly.”
“I know how silly and paranoid that sounds, especially coming from a man who gets a perverse thrill from taking chances. But it is a common condition of being poor white trash: you are always afraid that the good things in your life are temporary, that someone can take them away, because you have no power beyond your own brute strength to stop them.”
“The only thing poverty does is grind down your nerve endings to a point that you can work harder and stoop lower than most people are willing to. It chips away a person's dreams to the point that the hopelessness shows through, and the dreamer accepts that hard work and borrowed houses are all this life will ever be.”
“I believe that if we are going to write about life and death, we should not do it from the cheap seats.”
“Mama just stepped back on the treadmill of worry and hopeless, and kept walking.”
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Book Keywords:
compassion, george-wallace, poverty, dignity, all-over-but-the-shoutin, hunger, all-over-but-the-shoutin-4, alabama
