Quotes & Sayings About Mississippi

In 1971, the Bureau of Reclamation released a plan to divert six million acre-feet from the lower Mississippi River and create a river in reverse, pumping the water up a staircase of reservoirs to the high plains in order to save the irrigation economy of West Texas and eastern New Mexico, utterly dependent on groundwater, from collapse. — Marc Reisner

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

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

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

I always wanted to grow up fast. I longed for more than the Mississippi Delta could give. — Charley Pride

I'm proud of where I come from. A lot of people leave Mississippi, and their claim to fame is somewhere else. But I have so many moral values that made me the person I am now. — Steve McNair

I'm pretty sure I can say that no one in my family ever asked Demetrie what it felt like to be black in Mississippi, working for our white family. It never occurred to us to ask. It was everyday life. It wasn't something people felt compelled to examine.
I have wished, for many years, that I'd been old enough and thoughtful enough to ask Demetrie that question. She died when I was sixteen. I've spent years imagining what her answer would be. And that is why I wrote this book. — Kathryn Stockett

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

Too thick to drink," as the boatmen used to say about the water of the Mississippi River, "too thin to walk on. — Paul Schneider

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

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

This is not the party of Reagan. Today the conservative movement took a backseat to liberal Democrats in the state of Mississippi. — Chris McDaniel

Start with a girl whose blood has been steeped in Korea for generations, imprinted with Confucianism and shamanism and war. Extract her from the mountains. Plant her in wheat fields between the Red River and the Mississippi. Baptize her. Indoctrinate her. Tell her who she is. Tell her what is real.
See what happens.
Witness a love affair with freaks, a fascination with hermaphrodites and conjoined twins, a fixation on Pisces and pairs of opposites. Trace a dream that won't die: a vision of an old woman slumped on a bench, her spirit sitting straight out of the body, joined to the corpse at the waist. — Jane Jeong Trenka

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

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

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

And here for the first time in my life I saw my beloved Mississippi River, dry in the summer haze, low water, with its big rank smell that smells like the raw body of America itself because it washes it up. — Jack Kerouac

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Baseball is the president tossing out the first ball of the season. And a scrubby schoolboy playing catch with his dad on a Mississippi farm. — Ernie Harwell

Each Fall the graves of my grandfathers call me, the brown
hills and red gullies of mississippi send out their electric
messages, galvanizing my genes. — Etheridge Knight

There were colored and white waiting rooms everywhere, from doctor's offices to the bus stations, as people may already know. But there were actually colored windows at the post office in, for example, Pensacola, Florida. And there were white and colored telephone booths in Oklahoma. And there were separate windows where white people and black people would go to get their license plates in Indianola, Mississippi. And there were even separate tellers to make your deposits at the First National Bank in Atlanta. — Isabel Wilkerson

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

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

I always order the banned books from a black market dealer in California, figuring if the State of Mississippi banned them, they must be good. — Kathryn Stockett

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

It's not enough to celebrate the ideals that we're built on, liberty and justice and equality for all. Those just can't be words on paper, the work of every generation is to make those words mean something, concrete in the lives of our children. And we won't get there as long as kids in Baltimore or Ferguson or New York or Appalachia or the Mississippi delta or the Pine Ridge reservation believe that their lives are somehow worthless. — Barack Obama

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

Teacher: Why is the Mississippi such an unusual river? Student: Because it has four eyes and can't see! *** — Various

What little family I got is in Mississippi. A whole lot of them died before I left, and my sister died a long time ago, before my mama did. — Pinetop Perkins

And concerning anything in this society involved in helping Negroes, the federal government shows an inability to function. But it can function in South Vietnam, in the Congo, in Berlin, and in other places where it has no business. But it can't function in Mississippi. — Malcolm X

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

There are a million Negroes in Mississippi. I think they'll take care of me. — James Meredith

She reads his poems gratefully in her small Mississippi town. It's an undramatic life, yet these past months she seems to have found the intensity he yearns for, This also sounds like bragging, though she doesn't mean it to. If she could, she'd let him bear her secret. She'd let all great men bear it, for s few hours. Then, when she too it back, they'd remember how it feels to be inhabited. — Beth Ann Fennelly

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

By 1971, a quarter of the white students were in private schools, the white families paying tuition many could scarcely afford. Mothers went back to work to help cover tuition, "spent all their savings and forfeited luxuries and necessities in life," some splitting their children up and enduring the "expense and inconvenience of transporting the children long distances to and from school," according to the Mississippi-born scholar Mark Lowry, to avoid having their children sit in the same classroom with black children. In — Isabel Wilkerson

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

It's easy to forget history or give it a cliff notes. The cliff notes of history. But mainly, so much of what happens in 'Eyes on the Prize' happened in Jackson, Mississippi. Jackson, Mississippi isn't really known for any other touchstone to the movement, other than Medgar Evers being killed. There were sit-ins and riots and atrocities. — Tate Taylor

The gifts of God should be enjoyed by all citizens in Mississippi. — Medgar Evers

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

Although I had intended to consider the impossibility of returning to those places we've come from - not because the places are gone or substantially different but because we are - by August of 2005, the poem had become quite literal: so much of what I'd known of my home was either gone or forever changed.

Trethewey, Natasha (2010-09-15). Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast (Sarah Mills Hodge Fund Publication) (Kindle Locations 79-81). University of Georgia Press. Kindle Edition. — Natasha Trethewey

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

The river itself has no beginning or end. In its beginning, it is not yet the river; in the end it is no longer the river. What we call the headwaters is only a selection from among the innumerable sources which flow together to compose it. At what point in its course does the Mississippi become what the Mississippi means? — T. S. Eliot

I already told you, I'm not gonna subscribe to your stupid magazine!' she yells.
'We're not selling anything,' Jake calls back. 'We just came to see my favorite chula this side of the Mississippi.'
The girl pauses and shields her eyes to get a better look. 'Jacob? That you?'
'In the flesh,' he confirms with a broad grin. — Hannah Harrington

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

As long as the struggle was down in Alabama and Mississippi, they could look afar and think about it and say how terrible people are. When they discovered brotherhood had to be a reality in Chicago and that brotherhood extended to next door, then those latent hostilities came out. — Martin Luther King Jr.

Courage isn't something you are born with. It comes to you with experience. — Patricia Neal

* Even though the restriction couldn't be enforced under federal law, the state ban on interracial marriage in Alabama continued into the twenty-first century. In 2000, reformers finally had enough votes to get the issue on the statewide ballot, where a majority of voters chose to eliminate the ban, although 41 percent voted to keep it. A 2011 poll of Mississippi Republicans found that 46 percent support a legal ban on interracial marriage, 40 percent oppose such a ban, and 14 percent are undecided. — Bryan Stevenson

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

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

There is a velvety sensuality here at the mouth of the Mississippi that you won't find anywhere else. Tell me what the air feels like at 3 A.M. on a Thursday night in August in Shaker Heights and I bet you won't be able to say because nobody stays up that late. But in New Orleans, I tell you, it's ink and honey passed through silver moonlight. — Andrei Codrescu

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

Mississippi and the world is two different places,' the Deacon say and we all nod cause ain't it the truth. — Kathryn Stockett

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

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

I am thankful for the strong, united response of our university community to the desecration of the James Meredith statue last year, confirming our university values of civility and respect. what it is saying is that the only possible justice for a black in the state of Mississippi is the federal government and if there's anything that we don't need it's that being our only means of expecting justice. — James Meredith

Humans are aware of very little, it seems to me, the artificial brainy side of life, the worries and bills and the mechanisms of jobs, the doltish psychologies we've placed over our lives like a stencil. A dog keeps his life simple and unadorned. — Brad Watson

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a desert state sweltering in the heat of injustice and oppression, will one day be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. — Martin Luther King Jr.

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

I would get songs sung to me, like 'Old Man River, 'or kids would call me Mississippi and things like that. At the time, I wished I had a name that blended in more with my surroundings. Now, though, I've really learned to love it. From fifteen, I really liked it. It felt appropriate. Before that, I don't think it quite fitted me. I had to grow into it . — River Phoenix

Libraries are about books. Books have no color. And they don't care who reads them. — Augusta Scattergood

Information helps you to see that you're not alone. That there's somebody in Mississippi and somebody in Tokyo who all have wept, who've all longed and lost, who've all been happy. So the library helps you to see, not only that you are not alone, but that you're not really any different from everyone else. — Maya Angelou

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

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

I grew up watching my dad scout games live. They played on Saturday. Sometimes they wouldn't get the films until Monday. Sunday air shipping from wherever the college team was located - Starkville, Mississippi, or wherever the film was coming from. It took two days. — Bill Belichick

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

My mother, a teacher, encouraged me to use my creativity as an actual way to make a living, and my father, a Mississippi physician, did two things. First, he taught me that all human beings should be treated equally because no one is better than anyone else, and he never pressured me to become a doctor. — Greg Iles

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

Mississippi blood is different. It's got some river in it. Delta soil, turpentine, asbestos, cotton poison. But there's strength in it, too. Strength that's been beat but not broke. — Greg Iles

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

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

Almost 70 percent of U.S. ag exports travel the upper Mississippi River and the Illinois waterway system. — Jerry Costello

The fairest state of them all, this tranquil and beloved domain - what has it now become? A nursery for Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas. A monstrous breeding farm to supply the sinew to gratify the maw of Eli Whitney's infernal machine, cursed be that blackguard's name! In such a way is our human decency brought down, when we pander all that is in us noble and just to the false god which goes by the vile name of Capital! Oh, Virginia, woe betide thee! Woe, thrice woe, and ever damned in memory be the day when poor black men in chains first trod upon thy sacred strand! — William Styron

History - a vast Mississippi of falsehoods — Matthew Arnold

Back when we was in school in Mississippi, we had Little Black Sambo. That's what you learned: Anytime something was not good, or anytime something was bad in some kinda way, it had to be called black. Like, you had Black Monday, Black Friday, black sheep ... Of course, everything else, all the good stuff, is white. White Christmas and such. — B.B. King

I am determined to get every Negro in the state of Mississippi registered. — Fannie Lou Hamer

He sings, "I'm in Mississippi, with mud all in my shoes / My girl in Louisiana with those high water blues." Later he says, "Listen here, you men, / one more thing I'd like to say / Ain't no womens out here, for they all got washed away. — Tom Franklin

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

When you educate a woman, you set her free. Had I not had books and education in Mississippi, I would have believed that's all there was. — Oprah Winfrey

People hear whispers as loud as guns. — Elizabeth Spencer

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

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

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 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

In the Spring of 1962, a white postal worker from Baltimore, William Moore, decided to use his ten-day vacation to showcase his passion for Civil Rights. Moore planned a "Freedom Walk" from Chattanooga, Tennessee, across Alabama, to Jackson, Mississippi, where he would confront Governor Ross Barnett about the injustice of racial segregation. Moore, who had a history of psychiatric illness, entered Alabama wearing signs that read MISSISSIPPI OR BUST, END SEGREGATION IN AMERICA, and EQUAL RIGHTS FOR ALL MEN. The much-publicized march ended tragically, when Moore's body was found on a roadside near Gadsen, Alabama - he had been shot to death. — Jeffrey K. Smith

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

I rode on a float in one of the parades in Mississippi. It's an experience. — Elliott Smith

To the Baptist Churches on Neal's Greek on Black Creek, North Carolina I have received, fellow-citizens, your address, approving my objection to the Bill containing a grant of public land to the Baptist Church at Salem Meeting House, Mississippi Territory. Having always regarded the practical distinction between Religion and Civil Government as essential to the purity of both, and as guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States, I could not have otherwise discharged my duty on the occasion which presented itself — James Madison

A cracker kid in a designated white house in a black neighborhood off in fly- bitten Mississippi was about to let loose the secret beat of race music, forever blowing away the enriched-flour, box stepping public. — Richard Powers

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

When, on their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, Jerome had played his parents an ethereal, far more beautiful version of 'Hallelujah' by a kid called Buckley, Kiki had thought yes, that's right, our memories are getting more beautiful and less real every day. And then the kid drowned in the Mississippi, recalled Kiki now, looking up from her knees to the colourful painting that hung behind Carlene's empty chair. Jerome had wept: the tears you cry for someone whom you never met who made something beautiful that you loved. Seventeen years earlier, when Lennon died, Kiki had dragged Howard to Central Park and wept while the crowd sang 'All You Need is Love' and Howard ranted bitterly about Milgram and mass psychosis. — Zadie Smith

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

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

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

One loses one's eye in the lanes of sea phosphorescence & the Mississippi of stars streaming across the heavens. — David Mitchell