Rick Bragg Quotes

The DVD does make it a little easier for myself to trim things that are otherwise very difficult to let loose of - knowing that they'll make it on the DVD.

a book always keeps something of its owner between its pages.

I came across a photograph of him not long ago... his black face, the long snout sniffing at something in the air, his tail straight and pointing, his eyes flashing in some momentary excitement. Looking at a faded photograph taken more than forty years before, even as a grown man, I would admit I still missed him.

I cut off my dreadlocks, but I couldn't face throwing them away. They were so hard to grow, man. There's a lot of work goes into those things. Some people keep a diary or a photo album to remind them of their past lives - well, I've got hair. Who knows? One day, maybe my grandchildren might want to see it.

Whatever I like, even after a long time, I still like it. And I reminisce about the moment when I first heard it. That's what I love. Just remembering those moments.

Men fill up their heads and drawers and sheds with stuff from their teenage years.

Singapore has always held a special place in my heart.

Baltimore will always have a piece of my heart.

I have talked about this before, I have always been bad at saving memorabilia.

I was really inspired by keeping alive these things of my childhood.

The books that charmed us in youth recall the delight ever afterwards; we are hardly persuaded there are any like them, any deserving our equal affections.

All you do is to look / At a page in this book / Because that's where we always will be. / No book ever ends / When it's full of your friends / The Giraffe and the Pelly and me.

What shop did this book come from? she asked. Her father was looking worried at the cooker. He always got rice wrong. I don't know, Brooksie, he said, I don't remember. That was unimaginable, not remembering where a book has come from! and where it was bought from! That was part of the whole history, the whole point, of any book that you owned! And when you picked it up later in the house at home, you knew, you just knew by looking and having it in your hand, where it came from and where you got it and when and why you'd decided to buy it.

Memory is curated. All this paraphernalia you collect to ward off forgetting

Then I turned the page and at the top it said THINGS I MISS ABOUT M and there was a list of 15 things, and the first was THE WAY HE HOLDS THINGS. I did not understand how you can miss the way somebody holds things.

From Blue Valentine I kept my wedding ring. I actually kept it on for a while. After the shooting had stopped, I was still wearing it – I couldn’t quite take it off – and now I keep it above the kitchen sink where I do dishes, as a little memento.

(in response to the question: what do you think of e-books and Amazon’s Kindle?) Those aren’t books. You can’t hold a computer in your hand like you can a book. A computer does not smell. There are two perfumes to a book. If a book is new, it smells great. If a book is old, it smells even better. It smells like ancient Egypt. A book has got to smell. You have to hold it in your hands and pray to it. You put it in your pocket and you walk with it. And it stays with you forever. But the computer doesn’t do that for you. I’m sorry.

O friendship, I too will press flowers between the pages of Shakespeare's sonnets!

Be it a weakness, it deserves some praise, We love the play-place of our early days; The scene is touching, and the heart is stone, That feels not at that sight, and feels at none.

It was neat to see a plaque on the 18th fairway, and go up there and kind of look at the green and just remembering the moment.

He read the letter again, but could not take in any more meaning than he had done the first time and was reduced to staring at the handwriting itself. She had made her g's the same way he did : he searched through the letter for every one of them, and each felt like a friendly little wave glimpsed from behind a veil. The letter was an incredible treasure, proof that Lily Potter had lived, really lived, that her warm hand had once moved across this parchment, tracing ink into these letters, these words, words about him, Harry, her son.

... letters freeze time for us, eternalizing shared experiences so we can go back and draw strength from them. Letters are like deposits in a secret bank that can be withdrawn when they are needed. And as we look back in love, we appreciate anew the thought and time that was taken to express those feelings.

The apartment was entirely, was only, for her: a wall of books, both read and unread, all of them dear to her not only in themselves, their tender spines, but in the moments or periods they evoked… Her self, then, was represented in her books; her times in her records; and the rest of the room she thought of as a pure, blank slate.

Call me a troglodyte; I'd rather peruse those photos alongside my sweetheart, catch the newspaper on the way to work, and page thorough a real book.

When we finish a book, why do we hold it in both hands and gaze at it as if it were somehow alive?