Grisantis Memphis Quotes

Memphis held onto me until I was far enough along in my art and then it let me go. ~ Valerie June

F. Franklin the Fourth has a job with a firm rich in heritage, money and pretentiousness, a firm vastly superior to Brodnax and Speer. His sidekicks at the moment are W. Harper Whittenson, an arrogant little snot who will, thankfully, leave Memphis and practice with a mega-firm in Dallas; J. Townsend Gross, who has accepted a position with another huge firm; and James Straybeck, a sometimes friendly sort who's suffered three years of law school without an initial to place before his name or numerals to stick after it. With such a short name, his future as a big-firm lawyer is in jeopardy. I doubt if he'll make it. ~ John Grisham

I'm completely absorbed by Peter Guralnick's definitive, two-part biography of Elvis Presley: 'Last Train To Memphis' and 'Careless Love.' Meticulously researched, this is a compelling mix of history, myth-busting, and, of course, some timeless music. ~ Mark Billingham

I've made it clear for some time if somebody came up with the right offer, I'd consider selling the team. It wasn't a secret in Memphis or, really, around the country. ~ Michael Heisley

The thing about Memphis is that it's pleasingly off-kilter. It's a great big whack job of a city. The anti-Atlanta. You go there, and you can't believe the things people will say, the way they think, the wobbling orbits of their lives. There's an essential otherness. ~ Hampton Sides

I feel a lot of cities are like, you go and you are trying to do your art, and there are so many other artists there who are so brilliant. And it's kind of like they stomp on the scene, and they are like, "You're not already Picasso? Get the hell out of here!" And Memphis is like, "Well, you'll get there one day!" ~ Valerie June

Big train from Memphis, now it's gone gone gone, gone gone gone. Like no one before, he let out a roar, and I just had to tag along. ~ John Fogerty

Reagan Truman's cell phone clamored in the darkness. It took several rings to find it.
"Hello," she mumbled, hoping she didn't wake her uncle in the next room.
"Rea, this is Noah."
"It's late, Noah." She pulled she string on an old Tiffany-style lamp that was probably five times her age. Something was wrong; not even Noah called this late.
"I know, Rea. But I need to talk to you."
She shoved her hair out of her face and tried to force sleep away. "All right, what's up?"
"I'm in the hospital, Rea. I was hurt tonight in Memphis."
"How bad?" she laughed nervously. She'd almost asked if he was still alive. There was a long pause on the line. "I don't know. Bad. Broken arm, two ribs, but it's my back that has me worried." He didn't speak for a moment. When he began again, he sounded more like a frightened boy than a man of twenty. "I'm hurt bad enough to maybe kick me off the circuit. When I hit the dirt, I was out cold. They said I kept yelling your name in the ambulance, but I don't remember. All I remember is the pain."
"Noah, what can I do? Do you want me to go over to your folk's house? I think they're in town. I could call your sister, Alex."
"No, I don't want them to worry. I know mom. She'll freak out and dad will start lecturing me like I'm still a kid. I don't want them to know anything until I know how serious it is. They're still not telling me much yet." He paused, and she knew he was fighting to keep his voice calm. "Rea, ~ Jodi Thomas

God bless the boys from Memphis, blue suede shoes, and Elvis. ~ George Jones

In 1930 the price of cotton dropped. And so, in the spring of 1931, Papa set out looking for work, going as far north as Memphis and as far south as the Delta country. He had gone west too, into Louisiana. It was there he found work laying track for the railroad. He worked the remainder of the year away from us, not returning until the deep winter when the ground was cold and barren. The following spring after the planting was finished, he did the same. Now it was 1933, and Papa was again in Louisiana laying track. I ~ Mildred D. Taylor

Memphis can be thought of connected as much to Mississippi and Arkansas as it is to Tennessee, if not more so. William Faulkner once observed that Mississippi extends from a Memphis hotel room to the Gulf of Mexico. ~ Tav Falco

They damaged his nervous system with a wartime Russian mycotoxin. Strapped to a bed in a Memphis hotel, his talent burning out micron by micron, he hallucinated for thirty hours. The damage was minute, subtle, and utterly effective. For Case, who'd lived for the bodiless exultation of cyberspace, it was the Fall. ~ William Gibson

A friend of mine took me to Memphis advised me that I should get in the musicians' union. He gave me a set of drums and said, Stay on the job, son. ~ Levon Helm

What would we say if the Chinese sent a gunboat with their marines up the Mississippi River claiming they were protecting their laundries in Memphis? ~ Will Rogers

I think it is good for people who are incarcerated or who are bound up one way or the other-people like Lily Kimball and all the prostitues of Memphis. This gal, she needs some wings, and a good song can make that happen. ~ Ketch Secor

Case had always taken it for granted that the real bosses, the kingpins in a given industry, would be both more and less than people ... He'd seen it in the men who'd crippled him in Memphis, he'd seen Wage affect the semblance of it in Night City, and it had allowed him to accept Armitrage's flatness and lack of feeling. He'd always imagined it as a gradual and willing accommodation of the machine, the system, the parent organism. It was the root of street cool, too, the knowing posture that implied connection, invisible lines up to hidden levels of influence. ~ William Gibson

Man, that record came out and was real big in Memphis. They started playing it, and it got real big. Don't know why-the lyrics had no meaning. ~ Elvis Presley

Alliteration. It's when you repeat the same consonant in a phrase," Memphis explained. "Huh. I was hoping it was something dirty. ~ Libba Bray

After my early days of being a passionate young Elvis fan, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, etc. I got interested in Ray Charles and Ella Fitzgerald. Then I got turned on to the blues. I realized how important it was to our music in England at the time. Everyone was into the blues. Then you start looking at the different kinds of blues, and you follow the journey backwards from Chicago to earlier times back down to the Delta to the Memphis Blues. ~ Ian Gillan

Sam smirked. "You have a favorite librarian?"
"You've got a favorite speakeasy, don'tcha?" Memphis shot back. ~ Libba Bray

The man on the radio says Elvis Presley's died. We drove to Memphis, the sky was hard and black. ~ Bruce Springsteen

The city of Memphis has demonstrated that neither character nor standing avails the Negro if he dares to protect himself against the white man or become his rival. ~ Ida B. Wells

I love the South. Although I grew up primarily in Memphis, my family moved around a ton when I was a kid. I guess I never stayed in one place long enough to pick up the accent, but I definitely identify as a Southerner. ~ Chris Hardwick

Something is happening in Memphis; something is happening in our world. And you know, if I were standing at the beginning of time, with the possibility of taking a kind of general and panoramic view of the whole of human history up to now, and the Almighty said to me, "Martin Luther King, which age would you like to live in?" I would take my mental flight by Egypt and I would watch God's children in their magnificent trek from the dark dungeons of Egypt through, or rather across the Red Sea, through the wilderness on toward the promised land. And in spite of its magnificence, I wouldn't stop there.

I would move on by Greece and take my mind to Mount Olympus. And I would see Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Euripides and Aristophanes assembled around the Parthenon. And I would watch them around the Parthenon as they discussed the great and eternal issues of reality. But I wouldn't stop there.

I would go on, even to the great heyday of the Roman Empire. And I would see developments around there, through various emperors and leaders. But I wouldn't stop there.

I would even come up to the day of the Renaissance, and get a quick picture of all that the Renaissance did for the cultural and aesthetic life of man. But I wouldn't stop there.

I would even go by the way that the man for whom I am named had his habitat. And I would watch Martin Luther as he tacked his ninety-five theses on the door at the church of Wittenberg. But I wouldn't stop th ~ Martin Luther King Jr.

Life is an ear of buttered corn waiting to get stuck in your teeth. ~ Truant D. Memphis

Basically, Sam Phillips recorded Bill Haley, Johnny Cash, and all those other Memphis guys; Chuck Berry played the top two strings; Elvis appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show above the waist; the Beatles made all the girls squirm by singing about wanting to hold their "hands"; Ray Davies got lost in a sunset; Pete Townshend smashed his guitar; Brian Wilson heard magic in his head and made it come out of a studio; the Rolling Stones urinated on a garage door; and then (skipping a bit) you've got Joey Levine and Chapman-Chinn and Mott the Hoople and Iggy and the Runaways and KISS and the Pink Fairies and Rick Nielsen and Jonathan Richman and Johnny Ramone and Lemmy and the Young brothers and Cook and Jones and Pete Shelley and Feargal Sharkey and Rob Halford ... and Foghat. You get what I'm saying. It didn't happen in a vacuum, but it did happen, and now here we are in the aftermath. ~ Frank Portman

Most studios in Memphis had a house set of drums; the drummers just brought their own sticks. ~ Steve Cropper

LAURENE POWELL. Savvy and good-humored Penn graduate, went to Goldman Sachs and then Stanford Business School, married Steve Jobs in 1991. GEORGE RILEY. Jobs's Memphis-born friend and lawyer. ARTHUR ROCK. Legendary tech investor, early Apple board member, Jobs's father figure. JONATHAN "RUBY" RUBINSTEIN. Worked ~ Walter Isaacson

From Natchez to Mobile, from Memphis to St. Joe, wherever the four winds blowI been in some big towns an' heard me some big talk, but there is one thing I knowA woman's a two-face, a worrisome thing who'll leave ya to sing the blues in the night. ~ Johnny Mercer

It was funny how their odd little family of friends had changed him. Made him feel safe. Theta, Memphis, Henry, Jericho, Mabel, Ling, Isaiah, and especially Evie. They'd been there for him. Opened the parts of him he was afraid would be closed off forever. Why had he wasted so much time bottling up his feelings? What did that ever get anybody but dumb fights? He had friends. He had a home in them. And Evie was home, too. ~ Libba Bray

Growing up in Memphis, I have always admired St. Jude's for the magnificent work they do. ~ Ginnifer Goodwin

At fourteen he runs away. He will not see again the freezing kitchenhouse in the predawn dark. The firewood, the washpots. He wanders west as far as Memphis, a solitary migrant upon that flat and pastoral landscape. Blacks in the fields, lank and stooped, their fingers spiderlike among the bolls of cotton. A shadowed agony in the garden. Against the sun's declining figures moving in the slower dusk across a paper skyline. A lone dark husbandman pursuing mule and harrow down the rainblown bottomland toward night. ~ Cormac McCarthy

Look behind you now.
Do you feel in your heart a slight hastening of its beat, and a powerful sense that something momentous is about to happen?
... Perhaps, then, this is the hour that Mary Hightower takes to the sky with thousands Afterlights heading toward Memphis.
... Perhaps this is the moment that Nick, the Chocolate Ogre, arrives in the same city in search for Allie, only to find that he has no idea where to look.
... Perhaps this is the very instant that a monster called the McGill arrives there as well, aching to ease his pain by sharing his misery - not only with his new minions, but with anyone he can.
... And perhaps you can sense, in some small twisting loop of your gut, the covergence of the wrong, of the right, and the woefully misguided. If you do, then pay sharp attention to the moment you wake, and the moment you fall asleep ... For maybe then you will know, without a shadow of doubt, which is which. ~ Neal Shusterman

All the really great records or people who made them somehow came from Memphis or Louisiana or somewhere along the Mississippi River ... And singers like Howlin' Wolf and Muddy Waters gave me the feeling that they were right there, standing by the river. ~ John Fogerty

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

It's funny, when you're a child you think time will never go by, but when you hit about twenty, time passes like you're on the fast train to Memphis. I guess life just slips up on everybody. It sure did on me. ~ Fannie Flagg

They come into white people's lives like that in sudden sharp black trickles that isolate white facts for an instant in unarguable truth like under a microscope; the rest of the time just voices that laugh when you see nothing to laugh at, tears when no reason for tears. They will bet on the odd or even number of mourners at a funeral. A brothel full of them in Memphis went into a religious trance ran naked into the street. It took three policemen to subdue one of them. Yes Jesus O good man Jesus O that good man. The ~ William Faulkner

I find it deeply upsetting when I see justice not being served. How do we as human beings deal with the unknown? The West Memphis Three trial is a joke on so many different levels. ~ Atom Egoyan

when he finally tried to kissed me after all this time, i denied him. he took too long, and she left him. ~ Memphis

She would go to Memphis and this was after our divorce. And I would send her to Memphis to be with him. ~ Priscilla Presley

The Voice of Tomorrow
America, America, will you listen to the story of you?
You bruised mountains, purpled by majesty.
You shining seas that refuse to see.
You, haunted by ghosts of dreams,
From the many, one; the one, many.
I am in you and of you, America.
You of amber waving grain, shining
Like fool's gold in a plentiful river.
I am the dream coming, yes,
The Voice of Tomorrow
Ringing in freedom's ear.
Do you hear it now?
Calling, calling, all:
Listen, America -
I am the story.
I am you.
I am. ~ Libba Bray

[William] Eggleston's photographs look like they were taken by a Martian who lost the ticket for his flight home and ended up working at a gun shop in a small town near Memphis. On the weekend he searches for the ticket - it must be somewhere - with a haphazard thoroughness that confounds established methods of investigation. ~ Geoff Dyer

That was the big thing when I was growing up, singing on the radio. The extent of my dream was to sing on the radio station in Memphis. Even when I got out of the Air Force in 1954, I came right back to Memphis and started knocking on doors at the radio station. ~ Johnny Cash

I could not see myself going back into the studio without Tommy Dowd, our beloved producer who passed away in 2002. Then in 2009, Michael Lehman, my manager, really pushed me to meet with T Bone Burnett. I ended up meeting with T Bone in Memphis, and we hit it off right away; I knew he was a guy I could work with. ~ Gregg Allman

All inquiry into antiquity, all curiosity respecting the Pyramids, the excavated cities, Stonehenge, the Ohio Circles, Mexico, Memphis,
is the desire to do away this wild, savage, and preposterous There and Then, and introduce in its place the Here and Now. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Memphis - it's just a bird. Birds fly around, brother. It's what they do. It's not following you, and it's not a sign. Unless you really did give it candy and flowers, in which case you are one strange brother. ~ Libba Bray

Everyone went and had some turkey and cornbread dressing, and hot biscuits, and mashed potatoes running with butter, and when they prayed, they thanked God for the good fortune that had found their boy, who had sense enough to know that if you're going to be hit by a train, you have to go stand on the tracks in Memphis, Tennessee. Amen. ~ Rick Bragg

Memphis is in a very lucky position on the map. Everything just gravitated to Memphis for years. ~ Steve Cropper