Biloxi Mississippi Quotes

There's a potter that lived back in the 1800s, in Biloxi, Mississippi, and his name was George Ohr. He was of Russian descent, but they called him the "Mad Potter of Biloxi." I'd love to do a great character study and comedy about that guy's life. That would be my dream role. I know it's an oddball thing, but it's true. He lived at the turn of the century, in the 1800s. ~ Lance Henriksen

My parents were working in a hospital in Memphis. But I didn't live there for any length of time that I remember. The first thing I remember is the town in Mississippi that I live in now, Charleston. ~ Morgan Freeman

I grew up in Mississippi, and there's no fashion game there. Even in 'Bling Ring,' I had to learn a lot about fashion - you know, the differences between lapels - and it wasn't until we'd wrapped that I really started getting into it. ~ Israel Broussard

I used to think if I could be free I should be the happiest woman," a young Mississippi woman recalled. "But when my master come to me, and says 'Lizzie, you is free!' it seems like I was in a kind of daze. And when I would wake up in the morning I would think to myself, Is I free? Hasn't I got to get up before daylight and go into the field and work? ~ Leon F. Litwack

I can't speak for the Kathryn Stockett, but I would guess that she feels proud of the progress the South has made because, growing up, she experienced a very different Mississippi than the one that exists today. ~ Viola Davis

Yet, in 1850 nearly all the railroads in the United States lay east of the Mississippi River, and all of them, even when they were physically mere extensions of one another, were separately owned and separately managed. ~ John Moody

Everyone thinks because you're from the south you know everyone down there, but it's not like that; I never knew nothing about no Mississippi. ~ Buddy Guy

My grandmother was born in 1900, and she would regale me with tales I call 'Little House on the Prairie' tales, but they were tales of segregated and racist America growing up in Alabama and Mississippi, where she came from. ~ David Alan Grier

I walked straight to the library. Mrs. Bloom, the librarian, always knows everything. ~ Augusta Scattergood

A carriage will start from Washington in the morning, the passengers will breakfast at Baltimore, dine at Philadelphia, and sup in New York the same day ... Engines will drive boats 10 or 12 miles an hour, and there will be hundreds of steamers running on the Mississippi, as predicted years ago. ~ Oliver Evans

When I went to Memphis and Mississippi and Nashville, I learnt the blues is a whole way of life. I don't really have the blues, but I can appreciate the honesty and the simplicity of it. ~ Gin Wigmore

Had Nietzsche lived to be burned at the stake by outraged Mississippi Methodists, it would have been a glorious day for his doctrines. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

English literature, from the days of the minstrels to the Lake Poets - Chaucer and Spenser and Milton, and even Shakespeare, included - breathes no quite fresh and, in this sense, wild strain. It is an essentially tame and civilized literature, reflecting Greece and Rome. ...
Where is the literature which gives expression to Nature?
...
I do not know of any poetry to quote which adequately expresses this yearning for the Wild.
...
The West is preparing to add its fables to those of the East. The valleys of the Ganges, the Nile, and the Rhine having yielded their crop, it remains to be seen what the valleys of the Amazon, the Plate, the Orinoco, the St. Lawrence, and the Mississippi will produce. ~ Henry David Thoreau

The moon was obscured by heavy clouds. January was already past the mid-mark and the early delta spring would soon be on them. Already on the night was the faint, fresh smell of buddings and the intimacy that comes from the warm delta air trapped between slumbering earth and lowering clouds. ~ Leslie H. Whitten Jr.

Are all people from California so rude?" He shrugged. "Not as bad as the bitches from Mississippi."
"Burn. ~ Teresa Mummert

We know You love us. We love You, too. I mean, six, seven thousand years from now ... won't make no difference, will it? Everybody gonna be so mixed up by then that far in the future that they all gonna be the same color by then, ain't they? ~ Larry Brown

he later made the tobacco companies pay: over $200 billion to Mississippi and forty-five other states as compensation for Medicaid costs arising from tobacco-related illnesses. The case (immortalized in the film The Insider) made Scruggs a rich man. His fee in the tobacco class action is said to have been $1.4 billion, or $22,500 for every hour his law firm worked. ~ Niall Ferguson

Start with a girl whose blood has been steeped in Korea for generations, imprinted with Confucianism and shamanism and war. Extract her from the mountains. Plant her in wheat fields between the Red River and the Mississippi. Baptize her. Indoctrinate her. Tell her who she is. Tell her what is real.
See what happens.
Witness a love affair with freaks, a fascination with hermaphrodites and conjoined twins, a fixation on Pisces and pairs of opposites. Trace a dream that won't die: a vision of an old woman slumped on a bench, her spirit sitting straight out of the body, joined to the corpse at the waist. ~ Jane Jeong Trenka

My mother, a teacher, encouraged me to use my creativity as an actual way to make a living, and my father, a Mississippi physician, did two things. First, he taught me that all human beings should be treated equally because no one is better than anyone else, and he never pressured me to become a doctor. ~ Greg Iles

Words.

I'm surrounded by thousands of words. Maybe millions.

Cathedral. Mayonnaise. Pomegranate.
Mississippi. Neapolitan. Hippopotamus.
Silky. Terrifying. Iridescent.
Tickle. Sneeze. Wish. Worry.

Words have always swirled around me like snowflakes - each one delicate and different, each one melting untouched in my hands.

Deep within me, words pile up in huge drifts. Mountains of phrases and sentences and connected ideas. Clever expressions. Jokes. Love songs.

From the time I was really little - maybe just a few months old - words were like sweet, liquid gifts, and I drank them like lemonade. I could almost taste them. They made my jumbled thoughts and feelings have substance. My parents have always blanketed me with conversation. They chattered and babbled. They verbalized and vocalized. My father sang to me. My mother whispered her strength into my ear.

Every word my parents spoke to me or about me I absorbed and kept and remembered. All of them.

I have no idea how I untangled the complicated process of words and thought, but it happened quickly and naturally. By the time I was two, all my memories had words, and all my words had meanings.

But only in my head.

I have never spoken one single word. I am almost eleven years old. ~ Sharon M. Draper

One day I know the struggle will change. There's got to be a change-not only for Mississippi, not only for the people in the United States, but people all over the world. ~ Fannie Lou Hamer

In the '50s, listening to Elvis and others on the radio in Bombay - it didn't feel alien. Noises made by a truck driver from Tupelo, Mississippi, seemed relevant to a middle-class kid growing up on the other side of the world. That has always fascinated me. ~ Salman Rushdie

BY THE END OF MY JUNIOR YEAR, SCHOOL SHOOTINGS WERE MAKING their way into the news. The first one I heard about was in 1997, when Luke Woodham killed two students and wounded seven others in Pearl, Mississippi. Two months later, in West Paducah, Kentucky, Michael Carneal killed three students at a high school prayer service. In March of 1998, Mitchell Johnson and Andrew Golden of Jonesboro, Arkansas - one aged thirteen, the other eleven - set off a fire alarm to make their fellow students run outside, then opened fire from the trees. They killed four students and a teacher. Finally, Kip Kinkel went on a rampage in Springfield, Oregon in May of 1998. He murdered both of his parents at home, then went to school, killed two students, and wounded twenty-two others. ~ Brooks Brown

Mississippi blood is different. It's got some river in it. Delta soil, turpentine, asbestos, cotton poison. But there's strength in it, too. Strength that's been beat but not broke. ~ Greg Iles

Here is one way to conceptualize NASA's heroic era: in 1961, Kennedy gave his "moon speech" to Congress, charging them to put an American on the moon "before the decade is out." In the eight years that unspooled between Kennedy's speech and Neil Armstrong's first historic bootprint, NASA, a newborn government agency, established sites and campuses in Texas, Florida, Alabama, California, Ohio, Maryland, Mississippi, Virginia, and the District of Columbia; awarded multi-million-dollar contracts and hired four hundred thousand workers; built a fully functioning moon port in a formerly uninhabited swamp; designed and constructed a moonfaring rocket, spacecraft, lunar lander, and space suits; sent astronauts repeatedly into orbit, where they ventured out of their spacecraft on umbilical tethers and practiced rendezvous techniques; sent astronauts to orbit the moon, where they mapped out the best landing sites; all culminating in the final, triumphant moment when they sent Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to step out of their lunar module and bounce about on the moon, perfectly safe within their space suits. All of this, start to finish, was accomplished in those eight years. ~ Margaret Lazarus Dean

One loses one's eye in the lanes of sea phosphorescence & the Mississippi of stars streaming across the heavens. ~ David Mitchell

In Mississippi the important thing is hooch, not bar equipment. ~ Florence King

Of course that was my idol, Son House. I think he did a lot for the Mississippi slide down there. ~ Muddy Waters

I have been in the witness protection program for the last three weeks. I campaigned for Ralph Nader. I'm now living as a woman in Mississippi. ~ Phil Donahue

It affords me sincere pleasure to be able to apprise you of the entire removal of the Cherokee Nation of Indians to their new homes west of the Mississippi. ~ Martin Van Buren

Just look what happens to poets," I used to tell my honors class on the first day of school. "Half the time they go mad. And you know why I think that happens? Too much truth distilled to its essence, all surrounding evidence ignored or discarded. And I'm not faulting them for that. ~ Steve Yarbrough

So here is another shard of truth, which we must accept if we are to make sense of the trial: faith in our courts and our laws, in the statement chiseled above the columns of the U.S. Supreme Court building - 'Equal Justice Under Law' - can obscure the obvious, particularly with the passage of time. There was no equal justice, no universal protection of law in the Mississippi Delta, certainly not in 1955. ~ Timothy B. Tyson

He read it over twenty times and though the darkness that sang on held steady about him, the unhurried words fell bright through his mind, going down golden through deep water, and when one passed another came, ceaselessly, shining. ~ Elizabeth Spencer

This is said to us, even as this counterfeit president has legalized the Confederate Flag in Mississippi. ~ Amiri Baraka

You think y'all are off the hook for institutional bigotry because you come from a blue state. Not every white supremacist is a meth-head from Bumfuck Mississippi. There are plenty of them at Duke or UPenn on Daddy's money. ~ Casey McQuiston

It would appear that the state of Mississippi has decided to maintain white supremacy by murdering children. ~ Roy Wilkins

As with many Southern Writers, I believe that the special quality of the land itself indelibly shapes the people who dwell upon it. ~ Willie Morris

Sir Walter Scott created rank & caste in the South and also reverence for and pride and pleasure in them. Life on the Mississippi
Don Quixote swept admiration for medieval chivalry-silliness out of existence. Ivanhoe restored it. Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi ~ Mark Twain

I hold that establishing mixed schools will not harm the white race. I am their friend. I said in Mississippi, and I say here, and I say everywhere, that I would abandon the Republican party if it went into any measures of legislation really damaging to any portion of the white race, but it is not in the Republican party to do that. ~ Hiram Rhodes Revels

I'm a black writer from Mississippi. That's what I most consider myself. ~ Kiese Laymon

Mississippi is like my mother. I am allowed to complain about her all I want, but God help the person who raises an ill word about her around me, unless she is their mother too. ~ Kathryn Stockett

I have learned about bulk shopping in my four weeks as a Mississippi River resident. Republicans go to Sam's Club, Democrats go to Costco. But everyone buys bulk because - unlike Manhattanites - they all have space to store twenty-four jars of sweet pickles. ~ Gillian Flynn

If any of our refined and Christian readers object to the society into which this scene introduces them, let us beg them to begin and conquer their prejudices in time. The catching business, we beg to remind them, is rising to the dignity of a lawful and patriotic profession. If all the broad land between the Mississippi and the Pacific becomes one great market for bodies and souls, and human property retains the locomotive tendencies of this nineteenth century, the trader and catcher may yet be among our aristocracy. ~ Harriet Beecher Stowe

The sky had cleared, and now the sun was overhead, already baking the wet ground so that you could see the humidity drifting lazily above the cotton stalks. ~ John Grisham