"People say, 'Man, you must have some amazing realizations about
life.' It's funny, but what I learned from my injury was something I
already knew: Family and relationships are the most important things,
not what kind of job you have or the car you drive."
— Jim Kane, who recovered from a traumatic brain injury in a car accident that initially left him unable to walk and talk
"I
came home to a pale and elegant body in an open coffin, her thin hands
crossed on her breast.... A million sights and sounds rang through my
head as I stared down at her. I thought about the times when I was a
little boy, no more than five, when she would let me sleep at the foot
of her bed so we could listen to her Philco, how I drifted off to sleep
with the tinny voices.... She told me she saw Hank Williams once, back
before he died. But she was flying pretty high on her medicine that
night and might have told a lie, since she felt that another benefit of
old age (in addition to playing your radio all night long if you want
to) was that it gave you license to lie (with a smile).... But it was
then, as that dead man's poetry ran through my mind, as I stared down at
that old woman I had seen for just a few hours a year on Thanksgiving
and Christmas because I wrongly believed I was doing more important
things, that I knew I should not wait any longer to write some of this
down, whether anyone ever read it or not."
— Rick Bragg, All Over but the Shoutin'
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