Quotes & Sayings About The Mississippi River

Most long-distance travel and commerce went by water, which explains why most cities were seaports - Cincinnati on the Ohio River and St. Louis on the Mississippi being notable exceptions. To transport a ton of goods by wagon to a port city from thirty miles inland typically cost nine dollars in 1815; for the same price the goods could be shipped three thousand miles across the ocean. — Daniel Walker Howe

As the Mississippi snaked and their old home slipped further away, perhaps Samuel had finally left the curse behind. — Andrew Galasetti

Even more complex and dangerous than the river itself were the fishes, mammals, and reptiles that inhabited it. Like the rain forest that surrounds and depends upon it, the Amazon river system is a prodigy of speciation and diversity, serving as home to more than three thousand species of freshwater fishes - more than any other river system on earth. Its waters are crowded with creatures of nearly every size, shape, and evolutionary adaptation, from tiny neon tetras to thousand-pound manatees to pink freshwater boto dolphins to stingrays to armor-plated catfishes to bullsharks. By comparison, the entire Missouri and Mississippi river system that drains much of North America has only about 375 fish — Candice Millard

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

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

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

The Mississippi River will always have its own way; no engineering skill can persuade it to do otherwise ... — Mark Twain

These bears were reimagined in place through a collective belief and need. I do not know why they were sculpted into being, but their power is palpable. I may be blind to what has been buried here or held inside these effigy mounds for thousands of years, but I can read the landscape like Braille through the tips of my fingers translating the script of grasses into a narrative I can understand. The bears and birds and snakes written on the body of the Earth through the hands of humans who dwelled here in the Upper Mississippi River Valley are a reminder that we form the future by being caretakers of our past. — Terry Tempest Williams

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

My son's an idiot. His teacher asked him to spell Mississippi. He asked which one? The river or the state? — Rodney Dangerfield

Clearly we're in historic times here. We have - one of the tributaries of the Mississippi River is a river called the Merrimack. And the crest areas there - they're going to be a number of feet, 2, 3, 4, over what they were in '93 or '82. And on the Mississippi River itself, down below St. Louis, we're still projecting a couple of feet over that historic number. So the bottom line is there's a significant amount of water that's causing evacuations and challenges throughout that whole area. — Jay Nixon

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

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

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

If I poured all the lies I had told into the Mississippi, the river would rise and flood the city. — Ruta Sepetys

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

The sunset was a red slit of light like a devil's eye, hanging low and depraved over the Mississippi River bluff. — Lisa Turner

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

the sugar plantations on the Mississippi River. — Annie Seaton

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

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

I could see the cat was definitely on the steps. Still on the steps, 20 minutes after Carl's call. This was strange; Amy loved the cat. The cat was declawed, the cat was never let outside, never ever, because the cat ... was sweet, but extremely stupid ... Amy knew she'd never see the cat again if he ever got out. The cat would waddle straight into the Mississippi River, "deedlie-dum," and float all the way to the Gulf of Mexico into the maw of a hungry bull shark. But it turned out, the cat wasn't even smart enough to get past the steps. — Gillian Flynn

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

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

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

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

Thinking about our schooling in different decades and parts of the country, all three of us in that kitchen discover that we were taught more about ancient Greece and Rome than about the history of the land we live on. We learned about the pyramid builders of Egypt but not the pyramid builders of the Mississippi River. — Gloria Steinem

You know, they straightened out the Mississippi River in places, to make room for hourse and livable acreage. Occasionally the river floods these places. "Floods" is the word they use, but in fact it is not flooding; it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be. All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was. Writers are like that: remembering where we were, that valley we ran through, what the banks were like, the light that was there and the route back to our original place. It is emotional memory
what the nerves and the skin remember as well as how it appeared. And a rush of imagination is our "flooding. — Toni Morrison

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

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

Colonization would make of Germany a continental empire fit to rival the United States, another hardy frontier state based upon exterminatory colonialism and slave labor. The East was the Nazi Manifest Destiny. In Hitler's view, "in the East a similar process will repeat itself for a second time as in the conquest of America." As Hitler imagined the future, Germany would deal with the Slavs much as the North Americans had dealt with the Indians. The Volga River in Russia, he once proclaimed, will be Germany's Mississippi.9 — Timothy Snyder

Soon levees up and down the river were popping like buttons off a tight shirt. At Mounds Landing, Mississippi, a hundred black workers, kept at their posts by men with rifles, were swept to oblivion when a levee gave way. The coroner, for reasons unstated, recorded just two deaths. — Bill Bryson

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

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

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

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

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

This river is so old. When the Nephilim walked the land and men were like grasshoppers at their feet, it was flashing as thin and quick as a minnow. — Kristopher Reisz

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

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

One who knows the Mississippi will promptly aver - not aloud, but to himself - that ten thousand River Commissions, with the mines of the world at their back, cannot tame that lawless stream, cannot curb it or confine it, cannot say to it, Go here, or Go there, and make it obey; cannot save a shore which it has sentenced; cannot bar its path with an obstruction which it will not tear down, dance over, and laugh at. — Mark Twain

[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

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

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

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

While St. Louis is technically regarded as part of the Mid-West, it's actually - geographically and emotionally - more part of the South. I mean, the sensibility of St. Louis is really very much that of a Southern Mississippi river-town. — David Sanborn

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

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

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

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

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 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

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

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

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

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

A beauty beyond words," whispered Rini, mesmerized by the view. — Jason Medina

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

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

The morning sun in New Orleans felt like it was trying to make a point, convincing the old world to believe something new. — Hunter Murphy

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

Time is like the Mississippi River. It only flows in one direction. You can never go back. — Suzanne Woods Fisher

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

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

Just as the Mediterranean separated France from the country Algiers, so did the Mississippi separate New Orleans proper from Algiers Point. The neighborhood had a strange mix. It looked seedier and more laid-back all at the same time. Many artists lived on the peninsula, with greenery everywhere and the most beautiful and exotic plants. The French influence was heavy in Algiers, as if the air above the water had carried as much ambience as it could across to the little neighborhood. There were more dilapidated buildings in the community, but Jackson and Buddy passed homes with completely manicured properties, too, and wild ferns growing out of baskets on the porches, as if they were a part of the architecture. Many of the buildings had rich, ornamental detail, wood trim hand-carved by craftsmen and artisans years ago. The community almost had the look of an ailing beach town on some forgotten coast. — Hunter Murphy

I love even to see the domestic animals reassert their native rights - any evidence that they have not wholly lost their original wild habits and vigor; as when my neighbor's cow breaks out of her pasture early in the Spring and boldly swims the river, a cold grey tide, twenty-five or thirty rods wide, swollen by the melted snow. It is the Buffalo crossing the Mississippi. — Henry David Thoreau

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

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

Enormous oak trees towered over the boulevard, which boasted homes with fine woodwork, wraparound porches, and moss on the sidewalks. 'There's nothing like a house in New Orleans. Would you look at those balconies and columns?' He rolled his window down to take in the sounds of life in New Orleans. — Hunter Murphy

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

The living do not see eternity, just as they don't see Everlost, but they sense both in ways that they don't even know. They don't feel the Everlost barrier set across the Mississippi River, and yet no one had ever dared to draw city boundaries that straddle both sides of its waters. The living do not see Afterlights, and yet everyone has had times when they've felt a presence near them - sometimes comforting, sometimes not - but always strong enough to make one turn around and look over one's shoulder. — Neal Shusterman

It's a rented house right along the Mississippi River, a house that screams Suburban Nouveau Riche, the kind of place I aspired to as a kid from my split-level, shag-carpet side of town. The kind of house that is immediately familiar: a generically grand, unchallenging, new, new, new house that my wife would-and did-detest. 'Should I remove my soul before I come inside?' Her first line upon arrival. — Gillian Flynn

The plain truth is that you'd have an easier time standing in the middle of the Mississippi River and requesting that it flow backward than to expect people of different races and backgrounds to stop loving each other, stop marrying each other, stop starting families, stop enjoying the dreams that love inspires. Love is unstoppable. It is our greatest weapon, a natural force, created by God. I — James McBride

I've always been fascinated by the Mississippi River and the way of life in these small river towns. — Daniel Woodrell

I wrote a story about a man who is orphaned during the 1927 Mississippi River flood in Louisiana, and he's on the banks of levee, and he's starving. And there are other people starving, too. And he's so desperate, he's seven years old, that he finds a pig that's been abandoned. He kills it with a hammer, and he drags it back. — Susan Straight

I love being so tight on people in close-ups that the veins in their eyes look like the Mississippi River. — Sylvester Stallone