C

“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, The Best Cook in the World

“…dreaming backwards can carry a man through some dark rooms where the walls seem lined with razor blades.”
― Rick Bragg, All Over But the Shoutin'

“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, The Best Cook in the World: Tales from My Momma's Southern Table: A Memoir and Cookbook

“It is true that almost everyone in the foothills farmed and hunted, so there were no breadlines, no men holding signs that begged for work and food, no children going door to door, as they did in Atlanta, asking for table scraps. Here, deep in the woods, was a different agony. Babies, the most tenuous, died from poor diet and simple things, like fevers and dehydration. In Georgia, one in seven babies died before their first birthday, and in Alabama it was worse.
You could feed your family catfish and jack salmon, poke salad and possum, but medicine took cash money, and the poorest of the poor, blacks and whites, did not have it. Women, black and white, really did smother their babies to save them from slow death, to give a stronger, sounder child a little more, and stories of it swirled round and round until it became myth, because who can live with that much truth.”
― Rick Bragg, Ava's Man