People From Mississippi

"So many black kids are put in that position, so I wanted to show that there is no one way to talk black. There is a stereotype that if you sound ghetto, and you use a lot of slang, that makes you black. I wanted to show this girl who exists in these two different worlds. Which Starr is the real Starr? There are so many adults who identify with that, too. I went through it myself when I was in college…"

"[Asked if she has any favorite Mississippi or Louisiana authors to recommend) There are so many: Ernest Gaines, Natasha Trethewey, Donna Tartt, Richard Wright, Margaret Walker and Robert Olen Butler are just a few I love."

"This is something that the novel does better than any other art form: reproducing the inner life and the inner experience of another person, particularly extreme forms of consciousness like grief, dreams, drunkenness, spiritual revelations, even insanity. Unlike movies, where we’re always onlookers, in novels we have the experience of being someone else: knowing another person’s soul from the inside. No other art form does that. And I like dealing with particularly intense inner experiences because I think that in many ways, this is what the novel does best."

"Something I think you’re very conscious of growing up in the South is people who speak correctly and people who don’t…George Orwell said, ‘Englishmen are all branded on the tongue.’ It’s the same for southerners. I grew up around people who had wonderful, mellifluous voices; there’s also that twangy cracker accent. And then you were also aware of black English…"

"I don’t think it’s a good idea for a writer to psychoanalyze herself or try to explain why she writes what she writes—it’s a reductive way of looking at oneself and one’s work. Readers really participate in the writing of a book. As a writer I’m giving the reader signs to help create the story with me. The reader is bringing his or her own memories, intelligence, preconceptions, prejudices, likes, dislikes. So the characters in your copy of the book are going to look and sound different than in mine. I have my own ideas, but once the book is out there it’s not really mine anymore, and my own idea isn’t any more valid than yours. And then I begin the long process of disengaging."

"I’m a bit of a lone wolf…I don’t give interviews or do publicity unless I have a book out—too distracting. My desk is where the real work happens."

"As a writer, I think I’m more an eye than an ear — the world comes mainly in for me at the eye. So I’m glad the visuals came through for you. As I’m writing my books, I really do see them almost literally — I experience scenes almost as an onlooker, watching from the outside."

"There's a light There's a fire shining Day and night It came burning through Shine on me Shine on down you keep me High and dry I'm in love with you"

"My problems are few If I don't stop to think The red golden leaves Scream the song of the sun The high rolling hills Give it all in the fall The hot days are gone... now"

"You sure looked good, bound for Shilburn Town Tryin' to drive that car while the rain came down And you sure looked fine Oh yeah, readin' highway signs And you sure looked good up on Crystal Beach Reelin' in them fish, with your hair all bleached And you sure looked fine Hey, yeah, with your hooks and lines La, da, di, dumb, da, la, da, di, dumb, day Every move you make, everything you say Well, you sure are fine Oh yes and you blow my mind"

"It ain’t no big secret the trouble you're in You wear a thin mask and it smiles and it grins ..., it’s heard at the parties yes and over the phones Because it's cellophane city and everyone knows There's no secret, nothing, and that's how it goes Cellophane city, you try as you may There's no secret, nothing, it's all on display"

"Wait till the sidewalk shivers the beggars Robbed in their blankets they try to hang on Light from the street lane seems to shine better After the autumn has been here and gone ... God help the lost and lonely, God help the poor Cold days and ice nights only Hard times for sure, hard times for sure"

"You know you make your own decisions and you live the life you choose I watch it from the sidelines and it sure gives me the blues You know you're sure to find me waiting, should you ever come around"

"Waking up and trying to think, what went down, what'd we do? I rub my eyes and I shake my head and feel the sun Plane takes off on the old runway, snow fell light on the ground today Lost an hour that I gained before, headed back to my New York door. Fare thee well, adios, adieu and best of luck to all of you I ain't no saint and I don't pretend to be, but I hope you all found a friend in me City lights blink and shine, down below, let it change It's often said that life is strange, oh yes, but compared to what?"

"I'm traveling alone Up the highway of sight The blue shadows fall On the graveyard of stone The mild afternoon Puts the coffee cup down My eyes see the moon... rise And all I am is energy And now I'm in this form I came shooting down the universe at birth"

"Meet me in the middle of the day Let me hear you say, "Everything's okay" Bring me southern kisses from your room Meet me in the middle of the night Let me hear you say, "Everything's alright" Let me smell the moon in your perfume ... Oh, Gods and years will rise and fall And there's always something more Lost in talk, I waste my time And it's all been said before..."

"I bear about me daily the keenest sense of their weight, and that feeling prompts me now to lift my voice for the first time in this council chamber of the nation; and, sir, I stand today on this floor to appeal for protection from the strong arm of the government for her loyal children, irrespective of color and race, who are citizens of the southern states, and particularly of the State of Georgia. I am well aware, sir, that the idea is abroad that an antagonism exists between the whites and blacks, that that race which the nation raised from the degradation of slavery, and endowed with the full and unqualified rights and privileges of citizenship, are intent upon power, at whatever price it can be gained. It has been the well-considered purpose and aim of a class not confined to the south to spread this charge over the land, and their efforts are as vigorous today to educate the people of this nation into that belief as they were at the close of the war. It was not uncommon to find this same class, even during the rebellion, prognosticating a servile war."

"Wicker is just playing political games by trying to hide his role as a member of Mitch McConnell’s leadership team, as a McConnell ‘yes’ man, if Wicker truly cared about the Trump agenda, then he would not obstruct President Trump by refusing to change the senate rules and eliminate the 60 vote filibuster requirement. He would also stop blindly supporting McConnell. But I’m not surprised by Wicker’s current charade. He’s facing the possibility of a serious primary challenge. It’s what the swamp creatures do when threatened — morph into political chameleons."

"Republicans may be in control of the legislative branch, but they lack principled leadership. Consequently, true conservatives have faced an increasingly hostile environment from the DC establishment. It takes more than empty rhetoric to lead. The GOP must become a party of principle again. And in so doing, we have to learn to fight for conservatism and our Constitution again."

"The second model of ethnogenesis drew on Central Asian steppe peoples for the charismatic leadership and organization necessary to create a people from a diverse following. . . . these polyethnic confederations were if anything more inclusive than the first model [in which ethnic formation followed the identity of a leading or royal family], being able to draw together groups which maintained much of their traditional linguistic, cultural, and even political organization under the generalship of a small body of steppe commanders. The economic bases of these confederations was semi-nomadic rather than sedentary. Territory and distance played little role in defining their boundaries, although elements of the confederation might practice traditional forms of agriculture and social organization quite different from those of the steppe leadership."

"As Frankish, Longobard, Anglo-Saxon, and Visigothic kingdoms assimilated surviving Roman political and cultural traditions, they became the center of post-Roman Europe, while new barbarian peoples, most notably the Saxons, Slavs, and Avars, replaced them on the periphery, Ethnic labels remained significant designations within the Romano-barbarian kingdoms, but they designated multiple and at times even contradictory aspects of social and political identity"

"For most of the Goths defeated by the Huns, entering the confederation was an obvious choice . Although a Hunnic core of Central Asians provided central leadership to the Hunnic armies, the peoples they conquered were assimilated with ease . Good warriors, whether of Gothic, Vandal, Frankish, or even Roman origins, could rise rapidly within the Hunnic hierarchy Even among the central leadership, this polyethnicity was obvious. The Hunnic leader Edika was simultaneously a Hun and a Scirian, and ruled the short-lived Scirian kingdom as king. The greatest of the Hunnic leaders, Attila, bore a Gothic name (or title): Attila means "little father:" Gothic, Greek, and Latin were used alongside Hunnic in his court, and among his advisers were not only leaders of various barbarian peoples but even former Greek merchants. For a time the Italian aristocrat Orestes, father of the last Roman emperor in the west, Romulus Augustulus, served the Hunnic king."

"Modern history was born in the nineteenth century, conceived and developed as an instrument of European nationalism. As a tool of nationalist ideology, the history of Europe's nations was a great success, but it has turned our understanding of the past into a toxic waste dump, filled with the poison of ethnic nationalism, and the poison has seeped deep into popular consciousness."

"The peoples of Europe are a work in progress and always must be... The history of the people of Europe has not ended -- it never will. Ethnogenesis is a process of the present and future as much as it is the past. No efforts of romantics, politicians, or social scientists can preserve once and for all some essential soul of a people or nation. Nor can any effort ensure that nations, ethnic groups, and communities of today will not vanish utterly in the future. The past may have set the parameters within which one can build the future, but it cannot determine what that future must be."

"Much of the objection against Western Civ. is Whiggish Western Civ. - the glorious progress of Western civilization against Asiatic barbarism. I think that that is dead, except as a rhetorical device. The important issue is that, for good and for ill, the world in every corner has been very, very profoundly affected and transformed by certain kinds of cultural attitudes and institutions, which need to be understood, and which developed in, and then out, of western Eurasia. Whether one likes them or not, we have to understand them. If the largest country in the world, China, adopts a philosophy which is at least theoretically developed by a German Jew in the nineteenth century... (1998)"

"It's my show, and there's no place for opinion on my show. It's uninteresting to me. I don't care what Sean Hannity thinks and I don't care what Alan Colmes thinks and I guarantee they don't care what I think and they don't know, either. You know what's interesting to me? What's interesting to me is that the thing people want to know about is the part on which I spend absolutely no time."

"We are America! I don't give a rat's ass if it helps! We are America! We do not fucking torture! We don't do it!"

"J. Lo's new song 'Jenny From the Block', all about Lopez' roots. About how she's still a neighborhood gal at heart. But folks from that street in New York, the Bronx section, sound more likely to give her a curb job than a blow job. Or, uh. A block party. [...] Sorry about that slip-up there. I have no idea how that happened, but it won't happen again. And that's your news and the G Block as Fox reports this Monday, November the 4th, 2002."

"And on that day, at that time, we as a collective being must not give in. On that day, we don’t have to change everything about our lives, we don’t have to add things that make us not a free people ... if we want to have a free nation, there’s give and there’s bend. If you see something, say something, but beyond that don’t freak out when it happens. Easier said than done, isn’t it?"

"[Trump] keeps repeating ridiculous throwaway lines that are not true at all and sort of avoiding this issue of Russia as if we're some kind of fools for asking the question. Really? Your opposition was hacked and the Russians were responsible for it and your people were on the phone with Russia on the same day it was happening and we're fools for asking the questions? No sir. We are not fools for asking this question, and we demand to know the answer to this question. You owe this to the American people. Your supporters will support you either way. If your people were on the phone, what were they saying? We have a right to know, we absolutely do and that you call us fake news and put us down like children for asking these questions on behalf of the American people is inconsequential. The people deserve an answer to this question at very least."

"I may be too cynical," Catherine says."

"It's probably nice to know your parents were once not your parents."

"People surprise you, Frank, with just how fuckin stupid they are. I mean, do you actually realize how much adult conversation is spent on this fuckin business? Facts treated like they were opinions just for the simple purpose of talking about it longer? Some people might think that's interesting, bub, but I'll tell you. It's romanticizing a goddamn rock by calling it a mountain range to me. People waste a helluva lot of time they could be putting to useful purposes. This is a game. See it and forget about it."

"In the fall of 1960, when I was sixteen and my father was for a time not working, my mother met a man named Warren Miller and fell in love with him."

"Sometimes we do not really become adults until we suffer a good whacking loss, and our lives in a sense catch up with us and wash over us like a wave and everything goes."

"When you are sixteen you do not know what your parents know, or much of what they understand, and less of what's in their hearts. This can save you from becoming an adult too early, save your life from becoming only theirs lived over again - which is a loss. But to shield yourself - as I didn't do - seems to be an even greater error, since what's lost is the truth of your parents' life and what you should think about it, and beyond that, how you should estimate the world you are about to live in."

""I'm not worried," I said. And I wasn't, because I thought things would be fine. And even though I was wrong, it is still not so bad a way to set your mind toward the unknown just when you are coming into the face of it."

"You can get carried away with how things were once, and not how you need to make them better."

"I don't see at all why good fiction has to be global fiction. It's the lot of some writers, who are-because of the accidents of history-forced to be on the move. Then there are the Richard Fords and the Russell Banks who may be writing of small town America, but with great gifts, and great compassion. It's making life important, making a single life important, rather than having to have a prescription for the global ills which afflict us."

"I’ve loved all his books, from the characters to the parenthetical sentences. His voice always sounds so casual, as if the narrator is working it out in his head for the first time. There’s quiet intensity, an easy familiarity with the character. You know the habits in how the character thinks, what he might take into account. The narrator is more observational than judgmental, and forgiving in that way. It has much to do with a need to be rewarded for doing more, or compensated for following the rules or recognized as better for working harder. It’s not simple greed. It’s about a sense of self before and after you’ve taken the wrong road to a land of diminishing opportunity."

"Her complexion seemed slowly to be losing its olive color, and the set of her mouth hardened as though interior shifts were taking place she herself didn't know about but which had already corrected her outlook toward the rest of the world."

"One day you think you never even made a choice and then you have to make one, even a wrong one, just so you're sure you're still able. And once that's over, you can go back and be happy again with what you were before you started worrying."

"And though they may both have felt that something had died between them, something they may not even have been aware or until it was gone and disappeared from their lives forever, they must've felt - both of them - that there was something of themselves, something important, that could not live at all in any other way but by their being together, much as they had been before."

"Walk right in, sit right down, baby let your hair hang down. Everybody's talking 'bout a new way of walking; Do you want to lose you mind?"

"The quality that made him great is that he loved greatly"

"We have considered filing a petition to oust him [Bilbo] by a two-thirds vote, but he would revel in the publicity of a trial. Of course, as a general thing, senators cannot begin denouncing other senators because they disagree with them, but certainly Bilbo is not on the same basis as any other senator that I know of."

"It’s been six years since the voters have seen him, six years since they elected him as their senior senator to Congress. In that time, he has made himself known throughout the nation. Indeed, his infamy has spread across the high seas. In Germany, today, citizens of the Reich sometimes ask the American military, ‘What kind of man is this Senator Bilbo?’"

"When Bilbo went home to campaign in the summer of 1946, he faced a dramatically different situation from that of 1940. Northern and border state Democrats no longer wished to campaign with him. An extraordinarily broad coalition of elites— including both the Nation and the Saturday Evening Post, the Communist Party and the Jewish War Veterans, Robert Wagner and Robert Taft— desired and/or seriously considered his expulsion from the Senate."

"I am one of those unfortunates whose kids did not come back [from the war], and there were thousands of them, Catholic, Protestant and Jews, Negro and white, who died to keep this sweet land free. I hate and despise those bigots, like the nefarious Senator Bilbo of Mississippi."

"To defeat this measure, so help me God, I would be willing to speak every day of the year 1938."