Mississippi Quotes

I could never live happily in Africa-or anywhere else-until I could live freely in Mississippi. ~ Alice Walker

To secure the safety of the navigation of the Mississippi River I would slay millions. On that point I am not only insane, but mad ... I think I see one or two quick blows that will astonish the natives of the South and will convince them that, though to stand behind a big cottonwood and shoot at a passing boat is good sport and safe, it may still reach and kill their friends and families hundreds of miles off. For every bullet shot at a steamboat, I would shoot a thousand 30-pounder Parrots into even helpless towns on Red, Ouachita, Yazoo, or wherever a boat can float or soldier march. ~ William Tecumseh Sherman

I hear Raleigh's new accounting business isn't doing well. Maybe up in New York or somewhere it's a good thing, but in Jackson, Mississippi, people just don't care to do business with a rude, condescending asshole. ~ Kathryn Stockett

Mark Twain gave us an insight into the life on the Mississippi at the turn of the century. ~ Bob Newhart

Her family had no such ties. She was able to forge her way into that world. And then to those people, the idea of going to Arkansas, if you're gonna stop and think about it, you don't do it. It wouldn't have made any sense. It's like going to Mississippi. Why would you go to Alabama? You wouldn't go. You wouldn't ... That would be throwing your life away! For some reason, Hillary Clinton wanted to latch on to this guy [Bill Clinton] - and for some reason, this guy wanted her to latch on to him. ~ Rush Limbaugh

I've lined my throat
with the river bottom's best
silt,

allowed my fingers to shrivel
and be taken for crawfish.

I've laced my eyelashes with algae.

I blink emerald.
I blink sea glass green.

I am whatever gleams
just under the surface.

Scoop at my sparkle. I'll give you nothing
but disturbed reflection.

Bring your ear to the water
and I'll sing you

down into my arms.

Let me show you how

to make your lungs
a home for minnows, how

to let them flicker

like silver

in and out of your mouth
like last words,

like air. ~ Saeed Jones

All my life, the library has always been one of my favorite places to go. (Larry Brown: A Writer's Life by Jean W. Cash) ~ Larry Brown

You ain't too smart, are ya boy? I'm Javier "Bones" Jones. I'm the baddest man there is in this town or any town through The Mississippi. You thinking you're gonna waltz up on me and kill me? Ha! I'll do for you like I did for my late dog and put you out of your misery. ~ Justin Bienvenue

Only remember west of the Mississippi it's a little more look, see, act. A little less rationalize, comment, talk. ~ F Scott Fitzgerald

Old black water, keep on rollin'
Mississippi moon won't you keep on shinin' on me? ~ Patrick Simmons

If we want to understand the actions of a man in the early 1860's, put yourself back there in his shoes. As a young man he began piloting steamboats on the Mississippi, a job he loved and wanted to do the rest of his life, he said. The Civil War ended traffic on the River and his job. He wrote about it in A History of A Campaign That Failed. He said: "I joined the Confederacy, served for two weeks, deserted, and the Confederacy fell." His attachment to the Southern ideal of slavery does not appear very sturdy. ~ Hal Holbrook

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

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

Naturally the question suggests itself, Why did these people want the river now when nobody had wanted it in the five preceding generations? Apparently it was because at this late day they thought they had discovered a way to make it useful; for it had come to be believed that the Mississippi emptied into the Gulf of California, and therefore afforded a short cut from Canada to China. Previously the supposition had been that it emptied into the Atlantic, or Sea of Virginia. ~ Mark Twain

A great paradox...red states are poorere and have more teen mothers, more divorce, worse health, more obesity, more trauma-related deaths, more low-birth-weight babies, and lower school enrollment....The gap in life expectancey between Louisiana (75.7) and Connecticut (80.8) is the same as that between the U.S. and Nicaragua....And the problem transcends race; an average black in Maryland lives four years longer, earns twice as much, and is twice as likely to have a college degree as a black in Louisiana. And whites in Louisiana are wrose off than whites in Maryland or anywhere else outside Mississippi. Louisiana has suffered many environmental problems too: there are nearly 400 miles of low, flat, subsiding coastline, adn the state loses a football field-size patch of wetland every hour. It is threatened by rising sea levels and severe hurricanes, which the world's top scientists connect to climate change. ~ Arlie Russell Hochschild

If you write a book about a bygone period that lies east of the Mississippi River, then it's a historical novel. If it's west of the Mississippi, it's a western, a different category. There's no sense to it. ~ Louis L'Amour

I was born in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1969, in a time and place where no one was saying, 'Look how far we've come,' because we hadn't come very far, to say the least. Although Jackson's population was half white and half black, I didn't have a single black friend or a black neighbor or even a black person in my school. ~ Kathryn Stockett

Before, the woods had always done so much for me. Once I could actually go out into the woods and communicate with God, or Nature or something. Now that something didn't come through. It was just not there anymore. More than ever I began to wonder whether God actually existed. Maybe God changed as the individual changed, or perhaps grew as one grew. ~ Anne Moody

My favorite figure of the American author is that of a man who breeds a favorite dog, which he throws into the Mississippi River for the pleasure of making a splash. The river does not splash, but it drowns the dog. ~ Henry Adams

From that night the thousand streets ran as one street, with imperceptible corners and changes of scene, broken by intervals of begged and stolen rides, on trains and trucks, and on country wagons with he at twenty and twentyfive and thirty sitting on the seat with his still, hard face and the clothes (even when soiled and worn) of a city man and the driver of the wagon not knowing who or what the passenger was and not daring to ask. The street ran into Oklahoma and Missouri and as far south again as Mexico and then back north to Chicago and Detroit and then back south again and at last to Mississippi. It was fifteen years long. ~ William Faulkner

I hear people say all the time, "I'm not really religious, but I consider myself spiritual." I definitely have always been spiritual, being raised by my grandmother on that little acre in Mississippi, indoctrinated, born into the church and the ways of the church. ~ Oprah Winfrey

It was my first-year Latin teacher in high school who made me who made me discover I'd fallen in love with it (grammar). It took Latin to thrust me into bona fide alliance with words in their true meaning. Learning Latin fed my love for words upon words in continuation and modification, and the beautiful, sober, accretion of a sentence. I could see the achieved sentence finally standing there, as real, intact, and built to stay as the Mississippi State Capitol at the top of my street. ~ Eudora Welty

the Battle of San Juan. Two years later, the regiment held its first reunion, with a grand three-day celebration at Oklahoma City. The young metropolis would show the world that it could do things. There would be visitors from every state. "T. R.," national hero, would attend. A grand display of fireworks, the largest ever seen west of the Mississippi, was ordered. Quanah was besought to bring a troop of Indians for the parade. They would be fed and cared for, paid a small sum, and could see the show. The agent agreed, and there was no difficulty in assembling a troop. The young men gathered their gayest finery and borrowed the carefully saved costumes of their fathers, war bonnets, belts, and beads and feather ornaments. ~ U.C. Berkeley

After my dad started making duck calls, he'd leave town for a few days, driving all over Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Texas trying to sell them. He left me in charge of the fishing operation. I was only a teenager, but it was my responsibility to check almost eighty hoop nets three times a week. Looking back now, it was pretty dangerous work for a teenager on the river, especially since I'd never done it alone. If you fell out of the boat and into the river, chances were you might drown if something went wrong and you were alone. But I was determined to prove to my father that I could do it, so I left the house one morning and spent all day on the river. I checked every one of our hoop nets and brought a mound of fish back to Kay to take to market. I was so proud of myself for pulling it off without anyone's help!
When Dad came home a couple of days later, Mom told him about the fish I'd caught and how much money we'd made. I could see the smile on his face. But then he went outside to check his boat and noticed that a paddle was missing. Instead of saying, "Good job, son," he yelled at me for losing a paddle! I couldn't believe he was scolding me over a stupid oar! I'd worked from daylight to dusk and earned enough money for my family to buy a dozen paddles! Where was the gratitude?
I was so mad that I jumped in the boat and headed to the nets to see if I could find the missing paddle. After checking about seventy nets, I was resigned to the fact that it w ~ Jase Robertson

Jesmyn Ward is an alchemist. She transmutes pain and loss into gold. Men We Reaped illustrates hardships but thankfully, vitally, it's just as clear about the humor, the intelligence, the tenderness, the brilliance of the folks in DeLisle, Mississippi. A community that's usually wiped off the literary map can't be erased when it's in a book this good. ~ Victor LaValle

His [the President's] earnest desire is, that you may perpetuated and preserved as a nation; and this he believes can only be doneand secured by your consent to remove to a country beyond the Mississippi ... Where you are, it is not possible you can live contented and happy. ~ Andrew Jackson

The only thing worse than saying something boring is to quote someone else's boring saying ~ Lee Owens

That's just it, Eva said with a gleam in her eyes that matched the rhinestones on her glasses, you had to get somebody to teach you, to facilitate. Literacy wasn't like a piece of my mama's lemon cake you handed over to somebody on a plate. ~ Minrose Gwin

I've known people that was a part of a family and always feel that the family liked everyone else but them. That hurts, and that's as deep a hurt as you can possibly get. I've known people that would have problems with their love life. This is kind of how blues began - out of feeling misused, mistreated. Feeling like they had nobody to turn to. Blues don't necessarily have to be sung by a person that came from Mississippi as I did, because there are people having problems all over the world. ~ B.B. King

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

The nation is sick; trouble is in the land, confusion all around ... But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough can you see the stars. And I see God working in this period of the twentieth century. Something is happening in our world. The masses of people are rising up. And wherever they are assembled today, whether they are in Johannesburg, South Africa; Nairobi, Kenya; Accra, Ghana; New York City; Atlanta, Georgia; Jackson, Mississippi; or Memphis, Tennessee, the cry is always the same: 'We want to be free.' ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

Had it not been for James Meredith, who was willing to risk his life, the University of Mississippi would still be all white. ~ Constance Baker Motley

The future inhabitants of [both] the Atlantic and Mississippi states will be our sons. We think we see their happiness in their union, and we wish it. Events may prove otherwise; and if they see their interest in separating why should we take sides? God bless them both, and keep them in union if it be for their good, but separate them if it be better. ~ Thomas Jefferson

My name is Natasha Trethewey, and I was born in Gulfport, Mississippi, in 1966, exactly 100 years to the day that Mississippi celebrated the first Confederate Memorial Day, April 26, 1866. ~ Natasha Trethewey

Most of the locks and dams on the upper Mississippi River system are over 60 years old and many are in serious need of repair and rehabilitation. ~ Ron Kind

Freedom Summer, the massive voter education project in Mississippi, was 1964. I graduated from high school in 1965. So becoming active was almost a rite of passage. ~ Danny Glover

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

She was always saying things like that but I let her be my best friend anyway. ~ Ellen Gilchrist

August in Mississippi is different from July. As to heat, it is not a question of degree but of kind. July heat is furious, but in August the heat has killed even itself and lies dead over us. ~ Elizabeth Spencer

It was very clear to me in 1965, in Mississippi, that, as a lawyer, I could get people into schools, desegregate the schools, but if they were kicked off the plantations - and if they didn't have food, didn't have jobs, didn't have health care, didn't have the means to exercise those civil rights, we were not going to have success. ~ Marian Wright Edelman

In the 1920s, Jim Crow Mississippi was, in all facets of society, a kleptocracy. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

One of two historically African American communities that sprang up along the Mississippi Gulf Coast after emancipation, North Gulfport has always been a place where residents have had fewer civic resources than those extended to other outlying communities. ~ Natasha Trethewey

Toulouse Street ran one way toward the Mississippi River. Jackson looked over [Imogene's] head into one of those famous New Orleans courtyards, full of lush foliage, mossy brick, secrets, and wonder. ~ Hunter Murphy

But the book! The siren song of the book! ~ Ellen Douglas

[For American consumer society], the country's reserves of ignorance constitute a natural resource as precious as the Mississippi River or the long-lost herds of buffalo. ~ Lewis H. Lapham

I was always very aware of the nature of the place where I was growing up in Gulfport, Mississippi, how that place was shaping my experience of the world. I had to go to the Northeast for graduate school because I felt like I had to get far away from my South, be outside it, to understand it. ~ Natasha Trethewey

Soon the Mississippi night hummed by outside his windows, bug, bird, frog, the wind on his face. ~ Tom Franklin

Even Solon Gregg was finding it hard to speak to a woman who had just paid hard cash for tampons and on her face wore the look of a woman who meant to use them, as advertised. ~ Lewis Nordan

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

This United States Government should go down to Mississippi and protect my people. That is what should happen. ~ Paul Robeson

Many people in this country who want to see us the minority, and who don't want to see us taking too militant or too uncompromising a stand, are absolutely against the successful regrouping or organising of any faction in this country whose thought and whose thinking pattern is international rather than national ... There's a world wide revolution going on, it goes beyond Mississippi, it goes beyond Alabama, it goes beyond Harlem. What is it revolting against? The power structure. The American power structure? No. The French power structure? No. The English power structure? No. Then, what power structure? An international Western power structure. ~ Malcolm X

During the canvass in the State of Mississippi, I traveled into different parts of that state, and this is the doctrine that I everywhere uttered: that while I was in favor of building up the colored race, I was not in favor of tearing down the white race. ~ Hiram Rhodes Revels

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

I've always been in love with that Delta-flavored music ... the music that came from Mississippi and Memphis and, especially, New Orleans. When I was 14, I was in a wanna-be New Orleans band in Toronto. ~ Robbie Robertson

J.W. and Roy didn't just snatch the childhood away from Emmett; they stole it from every single black child in Mississippi. ~ Bernice L. McFadden

I wrote some of the worst poetry west from the Mississippi River, but I wrote. And I finally sometimes got it right. ~ Maya Angelou

I never thought I'd see the day that I would see white folks as frightened, or more so, than black folks was during the civil rights movement when we was in Mississippi. ~ Dick Gregory

The second person to write a story about a young boy and an escaped slave on the Mississippi wasn't a novelist, he was a typist. ~ Seth Godin

His life was absurd. He went all over the world accepting all kinds of bondage and escaping. He was roped to a chair. He escaped. He was chained to a ladder. He escaped. He was handcuffed, his legs were put in irons, he was tied up in a strait jacket and put in a locked cabinet. He escaped. He escaped from bank vaults, nailed-up barrels, sewn mailbags; he escaped from a zinc-lined Knabe piano case, a giant football, a galvanized iron boiler, a rolltop desk, a sausage skin. His escapes were mystifying because he never damaged or appeared to unlock what he escaped from. The screen was pulled away and there he stood disheveled but triumphant beside the inviolate container that was supposed to have contained him. He waved to the crowd. He escaped from a sealed milk can filled with water. He escaped from a Siberian exile van. From a Chinese torture crucifix. From a Hamburg penitentiary. From an English prison ship. From a Boston jail. He was chained to automobile tires, water wheels, cannon, and he escaped. He dove manacled from a bridge into the Mississippi, the Seine, the Mersey, and came up waving. He hung upside down and strait-jacketed from cranes, biplanes and the tops of buildings. He was dropped into the ocean padlocked in a diving suit fully weighted and not connected to an air supply, and he escaped. He was buried alive in a grave and could not escape, and had to be rescued. Hurriedly, they dug him out. The earth is too heavy, he said gasping. His nails bled. Soil fell f ~ E.L. Doctorow

When we have a favorite writer, it's always the places where they grew up, lived, worked, and that they recreated on the page that we most want to visit and commune with. Faulkner's Mississippi, Raymond Chandler's Los Angeles, etc. The mind of the reader longs to be somewhere, not just anywhere, and certainly not nowhere. ~ Walter Kirn

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

Like a majority of Americans in recent years, I came to understand that fear of homosexuality was leading our governments - including the one I ran as Governor of Mississippi - to deny the equal rights to an entire segment of our population that are afforded all of us under the Constitution. ~ Ronnie Musgrove

Take Washington, D.C., which spends over $10,000 per student for education whose student achievement would be dead last if Mississippi chose to secede from the Union. Suppose Washington gave each parent even a $5,000 voucher - that wouldn't mean less money available per student. To the contrary, holding total education expenditures constant, it'd mean more money per student remaining in public schools. ~ Walter E. Williams

Within days they'd formed an unholy alliance with a foppish young French vampire in the Garden District who had implausibly golden hair and a streak of ruthlessness as wide as the Mississippi ~ Deborah Harkness

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

My father came from Germany. My mom came from Venezuela. My father's culturally German, but his father was Japanese. I was raised in New York and spent two years in Rio. My parents met at the University of Southern Mississippi, and they had me there, and then we moved to New York. I'm not very familiar with Mississippi. ~ Fred Armisen

Very few writers understand the complex history and maddening social order of the Mississippi Delta. For Steve Yarbrough, though, it's home turf. He is wickedly observant, funny, cynical, evocative, and he possesses a gift that cannot be taught: he can tell a story. ~ John Grisham

For a black student to work in southwest Mississippi for example - or in the Delta in 1960, 1961, 1962 - was high-risk work. ~ John Doar

In the wake of this disaster, the people of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida should know that the United States Congress stands ready to help them in their time of need,. ~ Bill Frist

I grew up in Florida in different cities. I was born in Mississippi. My parents moved a lot, so I moved to Tennessee, Alabama, South Carolina, Virginia, all through the South. But my family's roots were from central Florida, like Daytona Beach area, so we ended up moving there. ~ Diplo

Bags and boxes across the hot parking lot to the van. On the way back to the mall, Willa Jean, who spotted the ice-cream store that sold fifty-two flavors, told her uncle she needed an ice-cream cone. Uncle Hobart agreed that ice-cream cones were needed by all. Inside the busy shop, customers had to take numbers and wait turns. Ramona, responsible for Willa Jean, who could not read, was faced with the embarrassing task of reading aloud the list of fifty-two flavors while all the customers listened. Strawberry, German chocolate, vanilla, ginger-peachy, red-white-and-blueberry, black walnut, Mississippi mud, green bubble gum, baseball nut. ~ Beverly Cleary

I remember my first job, when I was working in a retail store down there, growing up in Laurel, Mississippi. I was making, like, $2.15 an hour. And I was taught how to responsibly handle those customer interactions. ~ Marsha Blackburn

THE BLUE DRESS

Her blue dress is a silk train is a river
is water seeps into the cobblestone steps of my sleep, is still raining
is monsoon brocade, is winter stars stitched into puddles
is goodbye in a flooded, antique room, is goodbye in a room of crystal bowls
and crystal cups, is the ring-ting-ring of water dripping from the mouths
of crystal bowls and crystal cups, is the Mississippi river is a hallway, is leaks
like tears from windowsills of a drowned house, is windows open to waterfalls
is a bed is a small boat is a ship, is a currant come to carry me in its arms
through the streets, is me floating in her dress through the streets
is the moon sees me floating through the streets, is me in a blue dress
out to sea, is my mother is a moon out to sea. ~ Saeed Jones

I'm from the Mississippi delta originally. ~ Little Milton

I lived in a small city on the Mississippi River across from Iowa, so I didn't have a country upbringing, but in high school we would go drink kegs in cornfields. ~ Lissie

In 1998 Gordon Hempton, a sound recordist attempting to build a library of natural sounds, toured fifteen states west of the Mississippi and found only two areas--in the mountains of Colorado and the Boundary Waters of Minnesota--that were free of motors, aircraft, industrial clamor, or gunfire for more than fifteen minutes during daylight. ~ Robyn Griggs Lawrence

I didn't come east of the Mississippi for the first time in my life until I was 26 years of age, but I knew. I read magazines, I listened to radio, I watched television. I knew there was something out there, and I wanted a part of it. ~ Sam Donaldson

The attorney general would call at 5 o'clock in the evening and say: 'Tomorrow morning we are going to try to integrate the University of Mississippi. Get us a memo on what we're likely to do, and what we can do if the governor sends the National Guard there.' ~ Harold H. Greene

I will always remember that year in Almonte, and how their sun seemed to shine a little brighter, and the Mississippi seemed to rush along a little quicker through their town. ~ Arlene Stafford-Wilson

Knocking on doors wasn't working. We had to try something else. Remember the kids whose natural curiosity brought them into our little office on the corner? We set up a Freedom School that was fashioned after the SNCC Freedom Schools in Mississippi and other places. ~ Junius Williams

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

I see more genuine sociability between the races in Mississippi than I see in Michigan. No question. ~ Jim Harrison

The only way he could truly stick out in New Orleans was if he were walking down the street on fire. ~ Hunter Murphy

Forget it once. *** Knock, knock! Who's there? Accordion! Accordion who? Accordion to the TV, it's going to rain tomorrow. *** Yo momma so stupid she tried to commit suicide by jumping off a building but got lost on the way down. *** Teacher: Why is the Mississippi such an unusual river? Student: Because it has four eyes and can't see! *** Teacher: "Why are you on the floor?" Johnny: "Because you said to do this math problem without tables!" *** How do you make an elephant float? Take one elephant, two tons of ice cream, and one ton of soda. Blend. *** In ~ Various

When I think about growing up, I feel most affected by two travels that I made working in cargo boats when I was 16 and 18. One of them crossed through the Mississippi and Baton Rouge and Mobile, Alabama, and another went all the way to Europe. ~ Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu

Leave the glare and get under this meaning with me,
a bit soft but of interest, an aspect dawning,
or, more likely, debilitatingly tender,
like the hour just prior to some sought-after thought
that comes nothing like rushing there to be with you.

"Love Poem," Mississippi Review (vol. 46, no. 3, Winter
2019) ~ Graham Foust

My personal beliefs were shaped more by experience and by watching the news when I was young: images of angelic-looking college students in Mississippi crying like the world was ending because black people were being allowed on their campus; the slow mounting horror of Vietnam on the evening news every night; sitting with my parents in front of the TV and being appalled at the way the Chicago police were treating the protesters during the '68 Democratic convention. Being eyed with suspicion because of my age and the way I wore my hair. ~ James Vance

The average Southerner has the speech patterns of someone slipping in and out of consciousness. I can change my shoes and socks faster than most people in Mississippi can speak a sentence. ~ Bill Bryson

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

Grant Foreman, the leading authority on Indian removal, estimates that during confinement in the stockade or on the march westward four thousand Cherokees died. In December 1838, President Van Buren spoke to Congress: It affords sincere pleasure to apprise the Congress of the entire removal of the Cherokee Nation of Indians to their new homes west of the Mississippi. The measures authorized by Congress at its last session have had the happiest effects. ~ Howard Zinn

We have in America "The Big Two-Hearted River" tradition: taking your wounds to the wilderness for a cure, a conversation, a rest, whatever. And as is in the Hemingway story, if your wounds aren't too bad, it works. But this isn't Michigan (or Faulkner's Big Woods in Mississippi for that matter). This is Alaska. ~ Edward Hoagland

The Delta is a conservative place, .. District 28 is a very conservative district. We don't have many conservative districts in the Delta. Mississippi is a conservative place. We need to keep it that way. ~ Charles Capps

Lee Mellon told me that he was born in Meridian, Mississippi, and grew up in Florida, Virginia, and North Carolina, 'Near Asheville,' he said. 'That's Thomas Wolfe country.'

'Yeah,' I said.

Lee Mellon didn't have any Southern accent. 'You don't have much of a Southern accent,' I said.

'That's right, Jesse. I read a lot of Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and Kant when I was a kid,' Lee Mellon said.

I guess in some strange way that was supposed to get rid of a Southern accent. Lee Mellon thought so, anyway. I couldn't argue because I had never tried a Southern accent against the German philosophers. ~ Richard Brautigan

We are in the midst of an exciting canvass ... I am working very hard in politics as well as in other matters. We are determined that Mississippi shall be settled on a basis of justice and political and legal equality. ~ Hiram Rhodes Revels

Demetrie came to wait on my grandmother in 1955 and stayed for 32 years. It was common, in Mississippi, to have a black domestic cleaning the kitchen, cooking the meals, looking after the white children. ~ Kathryn Stockett

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

It can not be done; it shall not be done! I speak for the great masses of the Mississippi Valley, and those west of it, when I say you shall not do it! ~ Richard Parks Bland

Nothing could stop Mississippi. ~ Gwendolyn Brooks

Snark is what people on the inside call any attempt at protest from people on the outside. I hate it on principle, as do all Columbia professors, Catholic priests, and Mississippi Klansmen. ~ David Denby

I remember reading 'The Hobbit' on a car trip from Ohio to Mississippi and getting out at a rest-stop in Mississippi and feeling jet-lagged at my return from Middle-earth. ~ Garth Risk Hallberg