Best Mississippi Authors Quotes | Short & Famous Sayings

“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.”

School Reading Spring Mississippi Authors

Book:Victory Over Japan: A Book of Stories

Source: Victory Over Japan: A Book of Stories

“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.”

Truth Poetry Poets Mississippi Authors

Book:Safe from the Neighbors

Source: Safe from the Neighbors

“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.”

Summer Weather Mississippi Authors

Book:Fire in the Morning

Source: Fire in the Morning

“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)”

Library Libraries Mississippi Authors

Author:Larry Brown

“Reading, for pleasure and knowledge, has always been, will always be one of my favorite things to do. (Larry Brown: A Writer's Life by Jean W. Cash)”

Reading Mississippi Authors

Author:Larry Brown

“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.”

Mississippi Mississippi Authors Mississippi Writers

Book:A Painted House

Source: A Painted House

“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?”

Love Race Mississippi Authors

Book:Dirty Work

Source: Dirty Work

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

Race Books Civil Rights Libraries Mississippi Authors

Book:Glory Be

Source: Glory Be

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

Mississippi Authors

Book:Joe

Source: Joe

“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.”

Civil Rights Movement Libraries Mississippi Authors

Book:Glory Be

Source: Glory Be

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

Books Libraries Mississippi Authors

Book:Dirty Work

Source: Dirty Work

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

Courage Civil Rights Movement Mississippi Authors

Book:Coming of Age in Mississippi: The Classic Autobiography of a Young Black Girl in the Rural South

Source: Coming of Age in Mississippi: The Classic Autobiography of a Young Black Girl in the Rural South

“Cuddle up. Rain always stops. It always stops. It always does. -The Brown Cape”

Rain Weather Mississippi Authors

Book:The Courts of Love: Stories

Source: The Courts of Love: Stories

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

Friends Mississippi Authors

Book:Victory Over Japan: A Book of Stories

Source: Victory Over Japan: A Book of Stories

“I walked straight to the library. Mrs. Bloom, the librarian, always knows everything.”

Civil Rights Movement Libraries Librarians Mississippi Authors

Book:Glory Be

Source: Glory Be

“It may sound funny, but I love the South. I don't choose to live anywhere else. There's land here, where a man can raise cattle, and I'm going to do that someday. There are lakes where a man can sink a hook and fight bass. There is room here for my children to play, and grow, and become good citizens...”

Civil Rights Movement Mississippi Authors

Book:For Us, The Living

Source: For Us, The Living

“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.”

Life Reading Books Mississippi Authors

Book:Witnessing

Source: Witnessing

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

Love Mississippi Authors

Book:Where the Line Bleeds

Source: Where the Line Bleeds

“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”

Rain Weather Mississippi Authors

Book:Light Can Be Both Wave and Particle

Source: Light Can Be Both Wave and Particle

“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.”

Happiness Books Civil Rights Movement Libraries Mississippi Authors

Book:Glory Be

Source: Glory Be

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

Mississippi Mississippi Authors

Book:Them Bones

Source: Them Bones

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

Civil Rights Movement Mississippi Authors

Book:Coming of Age in Mississippi: The Classic Autobiography of a Young Black Girl in the Rural South

Source: Coming of Age in Mississippi: The Classic Autobiography of a Young Black Girl in the Rural South

“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.”

Love Mississippi Authors

Book:Where the Line Bleeds

Source: Where the Line Bleeds

“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.”

Cars Mississippi Authors

Book:The Green-Eyed Hurricane

Source: The Green-Eyed Hurricane

“I had never read a book written by an African-American. I didn't know that black people could write books. I didn't know that blacks had done any great things. I was always conscious of my inferiority and I always remembered my place - until the Civil Rights Movement came to the town where I was born and grew up.”

Memoir African Americans Playwright Civil Rights Movement Mississippi Authors

Book:From the Mississippi Delta: A Memoir

Source: From the Mississippi Delta: A Memoir

“But the book! The siren song of the book!”

Book Books Book Lovers Mississippi Authors Mississippi Writers

Book:Witnessing

Source: Witnessing

“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.”

Mississippi Mississippi Authors Mississippi Writers The Wide Net

Book:The Collected Stories

Source: The Collected Stories

“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.”

Weather Mississippi Authors

Book:Joe

Source: Joe

“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.”

Reading Literacy Mississippi Authors Mississippi Writers

Book:The Queen of Palmyra

Source: The Queen of Palmyra

“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.”

Reading Words Mississippi Authors

Book:This Crooked Way

Source: This Crooked Way

“Later they took him to Jackson and that explained it; he was crazy.”

Mississippi Mississippi Authors Mississippi Writers

Book:Follow Me Down

Source: Follow Me Down

“People hear whispers as loud as guns.”

Mississippi Authors

Book:The Voice at the Back Door

Source: The Voice at the Back Door

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

Reading Mississippi Authors

Book:The Southern Woman: New and Selected Fiction

Source: The Southern Woman: New and Selected Fiction

“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.”

Love Children Happiness Mississippi Authors

Book:This Crooked Way

Source: This Crooked Way

“It never registered to them that I had time to read all of Balzac, Dickens, and Stendhal while Papa was dying, not to mention everything in the city library after Mother's operation. It would have been exactly the same to them if I had read through all twenty-six volumes of Elsie Dinsmore. (The White Azalea)”

Reading Mississippi Authors

Book:The Southern Woman: New and Selected Fiction

Source: The Southern Woman: New and Selected Fiction