Top 100 The Mississippi Quotes
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. It is sometimes necessary to repeat what all know. All mapmakers should place the Mississippi in the same location and avoid originality.
Saul Bellow
#5. 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
#6. The sunset was a red slit of light like a devil's eye, hanging low and depraved over the Mississippi River bluff.
Lisa Turner
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. My rhythm was joined with that of the Mississippi seasons. To change would shift everything inside of me ...
Carolyn Haines
#16. 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
#17. Only remember west of the Mississippi it's a little more look, see, act. A little less rationalize, comment, talk.
F Scott Fitzgerald
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. I always wanted to grow up fast. I longed for more than the Mississippi Delta could give.
Charley Pride
#21. 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
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. It's a treat to beat your feet on the Mississippi mud.
James Kavanaugh
#28. 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
#29. The Mississippi River will always have its own way; no engineering skill can persuade it to do otherwise ...
Mark Twain
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. I've always been fascinated by the Mississippi River and the way of life in these small river towns.
Daniel Woodrell
#33. 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
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. Andrew Jackson was the implementer of the final solution for the Indigenous peoples east of the Mississippi. Andrew
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
#40. I don't remember any impression [from blues].The blues was just everywhere in the Mississippi Delta. It was mostly black sharecroppers living there, and there was a lot of blues around. Sometimes the guys would sing the blues in the fields, working.
Mose Allison
#41. 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
#42. The Mississippi coast is not like south Florida, but it always seems warm enough for sandals and short-sleeved shirts, except for now and then.
Ellen Gilchrist
#43. I wrote some of the worst poetry west from the Mississippi River, but I wrote. And I finally sometimes got it right.
Maya Angelou
#44. They rounded up the Indians in camps, the women and children and whatever they could carry on their backs, and marched them west of the Mississippi. The Trail of Tears and Death,
Colson Whitehead
#45. the sugar plantations on the Mississippi River.
Annie Seaton
#46. When I made 'Who Needs Pictures,' my first album, I had been west of the Mississippi River one time in my life, and that was in fourth grade. We traveled to California for vacation and stayed with some friends of my parents. It was culture shock, and it was different.
Brad Paisley
#47. As the Mississippi snaked and their old home slipped further away, perhaps Samuel had finally left the curse behind.
Andrew Galasetti
#48. The distance between taking social action and having the knowledge is as wide as the mouth of the Mississippi.
Mort Sahl
#49. One of the first things I did as a new Member of Congress was help form a bipartisan Mississippi River Caucus so we could work together from both the North and the South in order to draw attention to the resources that are needed along the Mississippi River.
Ron Kind
#50. Soon the Mississippi night hummed by outside his windows, bug, bird, frog, the wind on his face.
Tom Franklin
#51. 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
#52. Vicksburg lies on top of a bluff on the east side of a large tongue of land jutting out into the Mississippi.
Knute Nelson
#53. The Mississippi and its paddle boats, and the rivers of Bengal and their gleaming steamers evoked a similar atmosphere of romance, of long, song-filled voyages, high winds and lonely sunsets.
Qurratulain Hyder
#54. As noted in 1964 by Robert P. "Bob" Moses, director of the Mississippi project of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC): "It's not contradictory for a farmer to say he's nonviolent and also pledge to shoot a marauder's head off.
Charles E. Cobb
#55. The river breeze washed over him. He saw the magnificent views of the city and the bridge connecting Algiers Point to New Orleans. He marveled at the crescent shape of New Orleans as the ferry traveled nearly parallel to the curve in the Mississippi River.
Hunter Murphy
#56. I love being so tight on people in close-ups that the veins in their eyes look like the Mississippi River.
Sylvester Stallone
#57. While I remain troubled by the Corps' inability to fully justify the Model they used for their commercial traffic predictions, America clearly has an aging lock and dam infrastructure on the Mississippi.
Ron Kind
#59. Unquestionably the discovery of the Mississippi is a datable fact which considerably mellows and modifies the shiny newness of our country, and gives her a most respectable outside-aspect of rustiness and antiquity.
Mark Twain
#60. 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
#61. Too thick to drink," as the boatmen used to say about the water of the Mississippi River, "too thin to walk on.
Paul Schneider
#62. The Mississippi River towns are comely, clean, well built, and pleasing to the eye, and cheering to the spirit. The Mississippi Valley is as reposeful as a dreamland, nothing worldly about it ... nothing to hang a fret or a worry upon.
Mark Twain
#63. Grief is just so scary ... If we finally begin to cry all those suppressed tears, they will surely wash us away like the Mississippi River. That's what our parents told us. We got sent to our rooms for having huge feelings. In my family, if you cried or got angry, you didn't get dinner.
Anne Lamott
#64. You can take the girl out of Mississippi but you can't take the Mississippi out of the girl.
Kristi Cook
#65. In several sections, both natural in the banks of the Mississippi and its numerous arms, and where artificial canals had been cut, I observed erect stumps of trees, with their roots attached, buried in strata at different heights, one over the other.
Charles Lyell
#66. Teacher: Why is the Mississippi such an unusual river? Student: Because it has four eyes and can't see! ***
Various
#67. 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
#68. That means if my son was gay, I would want him to suck the best dick this side of the Mississippi.
Josh Wolf
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. Owing to the difficulty of obtaining horses, Mr. Henry returns from this place. In descending the Mississippi I will request him to pay his respects to you.
Zebulon Pike
#72. If ever we are constrained to lift the hatchet against any tribe, we will never lay it down till that tribe is exterminated, or driven beyond the Mississippi ... in war, they will kill some of us; we shall destroy them all.
Thomas Jefferson
#73. Of course that was my idol, Son House. I think he did a lot for the Mississippi slide down there.
Muddy Waters
#74. 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
#75. Simultaneously with the establishment of the Constitution, Virginia ceded to the United States her domain, which then extended to the Mississippi, and was even claimed to extend to the Pacific Ocean.
William H. Seward
#76. Time is like the Mississippi River. It only flows in one direction. You can never go back.
Suzanne Woods Fisher
#77. The Missouri is, perhaps, different in appearance and character from all other rivers in the world; there is a terror in its manner which is sensibly felt, the moment we enter its muddy waters from the Mississippi.
George Catlin
#78. One loses one's eye in the lanes of sea phosphorescence & the Mississippi of stars streaming across the heavens.
David Mitchell
#79. If I poured all the lies I had told into the Mississippi, the river would rise and flood the city.
Ruta Sepetys
#80. 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
#81. The South is full of memories and ghosts of the past. For me, it is the most inspiring place to write, from William Faulkner's haunted antebellum home to the banks of the Mississippi to the wind that whispers through the cotton fields.
Alexandra Adornetto
#82. The Mississippi looks like diluted mud by day but by night it's again the grand and majestic river of the days of tomahawks and coonskin caps.
Rodney P. Romig
#83. Finally, the ecological health of the Mississippi River and its economic importance to the many people that make their living or seek their recreation is based on a healthy river system.
Ron Kind
#84. She was so Southern that she cried tears that came straight from the Mississippi, and she always smelled faintly of cottonwood and peaches.
Sarah Addison Allen
#85. 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
#86. The case of the Seminoles constitutes at present the only exception to the successful efforts of the Government to remove the Indians to the homes assigned them west of the Mississippi.
Martin Van Buren
#87. 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
#88. Mark Twain gave us an insight into the life on the Mississippi at the turn of the century.
Bob Newhart
#89. I'm that same David Crockett, fresh from the backwoods, half-horse, half-alligator, a little touched with the snapping turtle; can wade the Mississippi, leap the Ohio, ride upon a streak of lightning, and slip without a scratch down a honey locust [tree].
Davy Crockett
#90. In fiction, too, after the death of Cooper the main tendency for nearly a generation was away from the conquest of new borders to the closer cultivation, east of the Mississippi, of ground already marked.
Carl Clinton Van Doren
#91. The Mississippi, the Ganges, and the Nile, ... the Rocky Mountains, the Himmaleh, and Mountains of the Moon, have a kind of personal importance in the annals of the world.
Henry David Thoreau
#92. The public conviction that a railroad linking the West and the East was an absolute necessity became so pronounced after the gold discoveries of '49 that Congress passed an act in 1853 providing for a survey of several lines from the Mississippi to the Pacific.
John Moody
#93. I'm guessing this isn't the Mississippi," I said.
"The River of Night," Bloodstained Blade hummed. "It is every river and no river - the shadow of the Mississippi, the Nile, the Thames. It flows throughout the Duat, with many branches and tributaries."
"Clears that right up," I muttered.
Rick Riordan
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. They cried. Yes, yes, they cried. Cried more tears than the Mississippi could hold, but those tears never washed away their faith ...
Andrew Galasetti
#98. Unless engineers can stop southern Louisiana from sinking into the Gulf - the Mississippi Delta is the fastest-disappearing land on the planet - even post-Katrina's modernized levees will be overwhelmed.
Nina Easton
#99. You'd give up all this for me?"
"Sure. In a heartbeat."
"I couldn't let you do that."
"The hell you couldn't. I'd go live in a trailer park in the middle of the Mississippi swamps if it meant I could be with you and give this a shot.
Elle Casey
#100. [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
