Mississippi Authors Quotes

#1. I told him. We got a library here. Got plenty of good books, too. -Larry Brown, Dirty Work

Larry Brown

#2. You can take the girl out of Mississippi but you can't take the Mississippi out of the girl.

Kristi Cook

#3. 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

#4. People hear whispers as loud as guns.

Elizabeth Spencer

#5. Then the light changed the water, until all about them the woods in the rising wind seemed to grow taller and blow inward together and suddenly turn dark. The rain struck heavily. A huge tail seemed to lash through the air and the river broke in a wound of silver.

Eudora Welty

#6. The road lay long and black ahead of them and the heat was coming now through the thin soles of their shoes. There were young beans pushing up from the dry brown fields, tiny rows of green sprigs that stretched away in the distance.

Larry Brown

#7. Generally the first week in September brings the hottest weather of the year, and this was no exception. Overhead the fans turned slow, their paddle blades stirring the air up close to the ceiling but nowheres else ...

Shelby Foote

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. I sat there listening to "We Shall Overcome," looking out of the window at the passing Mississippi landscape.

Anne Moody

#11. Love don't just go away like that, Cille," Sandman said.
"It do.

Jesmyn Ward

#12. We were running all over the front lawn and under the rainspouts, barefooted, in our underpants, with the rain pelting down, straight cold gray rain of Delta summers, wonderful rain. -Mexico

Ellen Gilchrist

#13. Christophe peeled the shrimp slowly and carefully: that was his way around her, and it was the exact opposite of his usual demeanor. She knew it for what it was: love.

Jesmyn Ward

#14. Books, the books that I loved above all else to spend my time with, were the great tools for understanding one's life and the lives of other people.

Ellen Douglas

#15. But courage was growing in me too. Little by little it was getting harder and harder for me not to speak out.

Anne Moody

#16. I have always had a love for American geography, and especially for the landscapes of the South. One of my pleasures has been to drive across it, with no one in the world knowing where I am, languidly absorbing the thoughts and memories of old moments, of people vanished now from my life.

Willie Morris

#17. It's so nice to be around a man who isn't hung up about his car," she said.
"Mom, I can't believe you're saying that. You treat that Coupe Deville like it's a member of the family."
"But I'm a woman, darling. I'm supposed to feel that way about my Deville.

Martin Hegwood

#18. I walked straight to the library. Mrs. Bloom, the librarian, always knows everything.

Augusta Scattergood

#19. Later they took him to Jackson and that explained it; he was crazy.

Shelby Foote

#20. For the rest of the afternoon, Miss Bloom smiled almost as bright as the big yellow sun shining through the front picture window. Her library was filled up with people who loved books.

Augusta Scattergood

#21. His house to me was a child was a heart of happiness. If there is a wonder childhood possesses which makes it forever superior to what shall come after, it is the happy and uncritical love of whatever is happy, place or person, it does not matter which.

Elizabeth Spencer

#22. The Mississippi Delta is not always dark with rain. Some autumn mornings, the sun rises over Moon Lake, or Eagle, or Choctaw, or Blue, or Roebuck, all the wide, deep waters of the state, and when it does, its dawn is as rosy with promise and hope as any other.

Lewis Nordan

#23. The boy didn't know where he and his family were, other than one name: Mississippi.

Larry Brown

#24. She was always saying things like that but I let her be my best friend anyway.

Ellen Gilchrist

#25. My rhythm was joined with that of the Mississippi seasons. To change would shift everything inside of me ...

Carolyn Haines

#26. 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

#27. 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

#28. When she thinks a book is very good, what she says to herself is: yes, that's how things are. I hadn't thought of it before, but that's how things are.

Ellen Douglas

#29. 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

#30. 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

#31. It was spring when it happened and the schoolroom windows were open all day long, and every afternoon after Billy left we had milk from little waxy cartons and Mrs. Jansma would read us chapters from a wonderful book about some children in England that had a bed that took them places at night.

Ellen Gilchrist

#32. Cuddle up. Rain always stops. It always stops. It always does. -The Brown Cape

Ellen Gilchrist

#33. To each other, they talked at a gallop. Literature turned them on; their ideas flowed, ran back and forth like a current. (The Cousins)

Elizabeth Spencer

#34. In the underlying bill, I think the authors of the legislation, those in support of it, understand the use of the Mississippi River. Yes, there is commercial navigation on it, and there will be tomorrow.

Ron Kind

#35. 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

#36. Libraries are about books. Books have no color. And they don't care who reads them.

Augusta Scattergood

#37. She wore heavy sandals, with socks. No kid in the entire state of Mississippi wore black socks in the summer. Shoot, if I wasn't standing smack-dab in the middle of the library, I wouldn't be wearing shoes.

Augusta Scattergood

#38. But the book! The siren song of the book!

Ellen Douglas