Top 100 The Mississippi Quotes
#1. This is said to us, even as this counterfeit president has legalized the Confederate Flag in Mississippi.
Amiri Baraka
#2. 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
#3. The Mississippi River carries the mud of thirty states and two provinces 2,000 miles south to the delta and deposits 500 million tons of it there every year. The business of the Mississippi, which it will accomplish in time, is methodically to transport all of Illinois to the Gulf of Mexico.
Charles Kuralt
#4. Barge traffic on the Mississippi River represents the most efficient, most cost-effective, most environmentally sound means of transporting commodity goods from this region of the country to market.
Leonard Boswell
#5. I don't think the folks in the low-tax states really want to go into a fairness discussion. Residents of Connecticut and New York would love to remind them how much they pay in federal taxes to support programs for Mississippi and South Dakota.
Gail Collins
#6. When I visited the Water Institute's Baton Rouge offices overlooking the Mississippi River, I couldn't find a drop of the charged politics that drives so many environmental conversations in Washington.
Nina Easton
#7. It is sometimes necessary to repeat what all know. All mapmakers should place the Mississippi in the same location and avoid originality.
Saul Bellow
#8. 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
#9. The region west of the Mississippi continued in the popular mind to be a strange land for which the reports of explorers and travellers did the work of fiction, and Cooper's Prairie had few followers.
Carl Clinton Van Doren
#10. The sunset was a red slit of light like a devil's eye, hanging low and depraved over the Mississippi River bluff.
Lisa Turner
#11. 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
#12. Water seeks its own level. Look at them. The Tigris, the Euphrates, the Mississippi, the Amazon, the Yangtze. The world's great rivers. And every one of them finds its way to the ocean.
Alison McGhee
#13. I loved Mississippi and do to this day. The rainbows that stretch from horizon to horizon after a summer rain are the most spectacular I have ever seen.
Charley Pride
#14. If you talk to the Whites in Mississippi they will tell you, 'You can go to any school you want to; we don't see race.' Biggest lie ever told.
Bennie Thompson
#15. As a youngster I worked the river boats going down the Mississippi and Illinois Rivers, pushing barges to Chicago, then all the way down to New Orleans.
Clint Walker
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. Death and loss, they plague you. So do memories. Like the Mississippi's incessant slap against the levees, they creep up with deceptive sweetness before grabbing your heart and pulling it under.
Karen White
#19. If you write a book set in the past about something that happened east of the Mississippi, it's a 'historical novel.' If you write about something that took place west of the Mississippi, it's a 'Western'- and somehow regarded as a lesser work. I write historical novels about the frontier.
Louis L'Amour
#20. The boy didn't know where he and his family were, other than one name: Mississippi.
Larry Brown
#21. New Orleans is of such key importance to American music because historical factors combined to make it the strongest center of African musical practice in the United States, and, cliches aside, that practice really did travel up the Mississippi and did spread overland.
Ned Sublette
#22. I am determined to get every Negro in the state of Mississippi registered.
Fannie Lou Hamer
#23. Mississippi and the world is two different places,' the Deacon say and we all nod cause ain't it the truth.
Kathryn Stockett
#24. I stand here struggling for the rights of my people to be full citizens in this country. They are not-in Mississippi. They are not-in Montgomery. That is why I am here today ... You want to shut up every colored person who wants to fight for the rights of his people!.
Paul Robeson
#25. A hot city, slaked out on the banks of the Mississippi, with too much of its muscle showing to be a dignified city.
Richard Jessup
#26. My rhythm was joined with that of the Mississippi seasons. To change would shift everything inside of me ...
Carolyn Haines
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. In the state of Mississippi, Many Years Ago, a boy of 14 years got a taste of Southern law.
Phil Ochs
#30. And there was no entertainment for them at night. They were too poor to own a television set. But they seemed content. Truman with his sculpting and building the recreation center. Lynne writing poems occasionally, reading them to her friends, then tearing them up.
Alice Walker
#31. 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
#32. Mississippi gets more than their fair share back in federal money, but who the hell wants to live in Mississippi?
Charles Rangel
#33. The gifts of God should be enjoyed by all citizens in Mississippi.
Medgar Evers
#34. As for my state of Mississippi, our governor, Phil Bryant, said the state could not afford the matching funds required to trigger the federal match for Medicaid expansion. We won't do it even though in 2014, the federal government would pay over $50 for every one dollar Mississippi chips in.
Ronnie Musgrove
#35. 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
#36. Finally, in the Mississippi state Senate, earmarks are often hidden in bond bills, which I have voted against many times, because our bonded indebtedness is too high and we simply can't afford it. For example, building museums in the middle of a recession makes little sense.
Chris McDaniel
#37. Only remember west of the Mississippi it's a little more look, see, act. A little less rationalize, comment, talk.
F Scott Fitzgerald
#38. The time for running has come to an end. You tell them white folk in Mississippi that all the scared niggers are dead!
Stokely Carmichael
#39. 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
#40. All good New Orleanians go to look at the Mississippi at least once a day. At night it is like creeping into a dark bedroom to look at a sleeping child
something of that sort
gives you the same warm nice feeling, I mean.
Sherwood Anderson
#41. I always wanted to grow up fast. I longed for more than the Mississippi Delta could give.
Charley Pride
#42. Elvis was the only man from Northeast Mississippi who could shake his hips and still be loved by rednecks, cops, and hippies.
Jimmy Buffett
#43. 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
#44. My mom's collard greens. No one else in the world can make them like hers. I'm not just saying that because she's my mom. She's got some Mississippi secret. I could seriously eat them every day.
Santigold
#45. A great symphony is a man-made Mississippi down which we irresistibly flow from the instant of our leave-taking to a long forseen destination.
Aaron Copland
#46. It would appear that the state of Mississippi has decided to maintain white supremacy by murdering children.
Roy Wilkins
#47. A beauty beyond words," whispered Rini, mesmerized by the view.
Jason Medina
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. And in the stillness of the room you heard the roar and howl and crash of the great river whose flood had caught them land shaken them and brought Magnolia Ravenal to bed ahead of her time.
Edna Ferber
#52. While the level of support we can each provide certainly varies, it is very important at this time that we all do what we can to help our neighbors - not only our immediate neighbors here in Alabama, but those further away in Mississippi and Louisiana.
Jo Bonner
#53. Stella Suberman's Suggestions for Further Reading
The Peddler's Grandson: Growing Up Jewish in Mississippi, by Edward Cohen
The Provincials: A Personal History of Jews in the South, by Eli N. Evans
Insecure Prosperity, by Ewa Morawska
The Slow Way Back, by Judy Goldman
Stella Suberman
#54. it's just a shame how that Hurricane Katrina tore up New Orleans and Mississippi. They knew better than to name a storm after a black woman. "Katrina." Not only was that bitch black, but the way she tore shit up, "Katrina" must have been from the projects too!
Ron'Netta LeDoux-Henderson
#55. My mother was from Mississippi, or is from 'Mississippi;' my father was from Alabama. He speaks about conditions in Mississippi and Alabama. They were really the poster children for the bad public laws that segregated, according to race, in our country.
Faye Wattleton
#56. I've been enjoying 'Life on the Mississippi' by Mark Twain that I picked up at the airport randomly. It's very witty and interesting to read about his time as a steamboat pilot.
Roman Coppola
#57. 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
#58. Forty percent of the United States drains into the Mississippi. It's agriculture. It's golf courses. It's domestic runoff from our lawns and roads. Ultimately, where does it go? Downstream into the gulf.
Sylvia Earle
#59. 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
#60. I only write when the spirit moves me ... and the spirit moves me every day. William Faulkner, Oxford, Mississippi
William Faulkner
#61. 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
#62. As founder and co-chair of the upper Mississippi River Congressional task force, I have long sought to preserve the river's health and historical multiple uses, including as a natural waterway and a home to wildlife, for the benefit of future generations of Americans.
Ron Kind
#63. It's a treat to beat your feet on the Mississippi mud.
James Kavanaugh
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. I was always singing the way I felt, and maybe I didn't exactly know it, but I just didn't like the way things were down there-in Mississippi.
Muddy Waters
#67. A thousand times, when the train slowed or stopped, I thought of jumping off. I wanted to die in a ditch. I wanted to disappear. I wanted a different history and geography. In rhythm with the wheels I said I want I want I want I want I stayed on the train.
Lewis Nordan
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. The Mississippi River will always have its own way; no engineering skill can persuade it to do otherwise ...
Mark Twain
#71. Kennedy's guy had never been the same. Quit the Service, divorced, finished his human existence in obscurity in some rat's hole in Mississippi,
David Baldacci
#72. 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
#73. And the fact that Emmett Till, a young black man, could be found floating down the river in Mississippi, as, indeed, many had been done over the years, this set in concrete the determination of people to move forward.
Fred Shuttlesworth
#74. 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
#75. For the good of our environment, the good of the economy, and the good of the Nation, I strongly urge support of the upper Mississippi locks and dams project.
Leonard Boswell
#76. Meredith Chambers, hottest romance agent in New York, filthiest mouth east of the Mississippi. Or west, come to think of it. Some women walking by give her a shocked, slightly annoyed expression. She responds with aplomb. "Legs together, ladies. I'm not afraid of a little muff diving.
Lila Monroe
#77. Georgia Tech beat us and Mississippi Southern tied us last year, and Texas beat us after we had the game won. We only played about five games the way we were capable of playing and lost one of those.
Bear Bryant
#78. This is not the party of Reagan. Today the conservative movement took a backseat to liberal Democrats in the state of Mississippi.
Chris McDaniel
#79. I live by the sea, but the body of water I have the most feeling about is the Mississippi River, where I used to row and skate, ride on the ferry in childhood, watch the logs or just dream.
Susan Glaspell
#80. I've always been fascinated by the Mississippi River and the way of life in these small river towns.
Daniel Woodrell
#81. 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
#82. Oh, definitely and I talk about all the things that I really needed to make me happy at that point in time were outside of Mississippi, and now all the things that I need to make me happy are back there.
Sela Ward
#83. 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
#84. Ya got cigarettes?" she asks. "Yes," I say,
"I got cigarettes." "Matches?" she asks.
"Enough to burn Rome." "Whiskey?"
"Enough whiskey for a Mississippi River
of pain." "You drunk?" "Not yet.
Charles Bukowski
#85. The literacy level at Mississippi prisons? Fifth grade. Can't read, what are you going to do? If you've got a conviction rap, what are you going to do? It's a real crisis.
Marian Wright Edelman
#86. My own life would make a pretty dull story, I think, and I envy him as I drive to work on a cold Minnesota morning across the Mississippi River with its coal barges still struggling upstream like so many of us nowadays.
Garrison Keillor
#87. I wanted to read immediately. The only fear was that of books coming to an end.
Eudora Welty
#88. Almost 70 percent of U.S. ag exports travel the upper Mississippi River and the Illinois waterway system.
Jerry Costello
#89. Of course, Mississippi participates in federal matching programs for everything from preserving the post-Civil War home of Jefferson Davis to beaver control.
Ronnie Musgrove
#90. In 2000, the Mississippi state legislature introduced a bill to make it illegal for a man to have an erection at a strip club even if he is fully dressed.
Steven Lamm
#91. The one thing I have wanted to stay away from is the steroids. When I had an attack two years ago in my home state of Mississippi, they put me on steroids, thinking they were doing the right thing, and I had a violent reaction.
Mary Ann Mobley
#92. That Mississippi sound, that Delta sound is in them old records. You can hear it all the way through.
Muddy Waters
#93. 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
#94. The major concern ... was to create a monument which would have lasting significance and would be a landmark of our time ... Neither an obelisk nor a rectangular box nor a dome seemed right on this site or for this purpose. But here, at the edge of the Mississippi River, a great arch did seem right.
Eero Saarinen
#95. 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
#96. She said that time was like the Mississippi River. It only flows in one direction. She meant you could never go back. But of course we had. She'd taken me back.
Richard Peck
#97. The thing that most critics miss about Faulkner is that his famous storytelling voice is, in fact, a standard Southern storytelling voice that is typical of the Gulf Coast - Mississippi, Alabama and so on.
Gregory Benford
#98. Condoms instantly shot to the number-one position on my mental list of must-find survival supplies, far ahead of food, water, and a way across the Mississippi River.
Mike Mullin
#99. 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
#100. Cuddle up. Rain always stops. It always stops. It always does. -The Brown Cape
Ellen Gilchrist
