People From Mississippi

"I thank God that there are men like you who are not afraid to tell the truth about the past."

"You are a menace to democracy and to the people defending it."

"I see Mississippi had disgraced itself again."

"The attacks on Bilbo only intensified in August when he revealed his old Klan membership on the radio program “Meet the Press.” He was unrepentant... The reaction to his admission was another example of changing elite perceptions. Dixie Demagogues, published in 1939, had exposed Bilbo’s Klan membership but drawn little notice; in 1946, however, the Federation of Italian Americans and the Shriners joined the chorus demanding Bilbo’s removal."

"His endorsement of the Ku Klux Klan and his boast of membership appear to have genuinely shocked many Senators."

"He has become so vile that the men who would sit with him in Congress can bear him no longer."

"To those on the lowest rung of the ladder he does not offer a lift; he merely offers to create another rung, still lower, so that the progress of man will be a series of descending steps. This is the same sort of cheap thrill that was peddled in Germany by an ambitious house painter some ten years ago."

"The same groups which for the past four years have been fighting Senator Bilbo and what he stands for are behind this movement. But instead of having the courage to come into the Senate and say, “Throw him out because of his views on the poll tax bill,” they have camouflaged the issue."

"There are diverse opinions as to the parliamentary means of preventing Theodore Bilbo from taking or holding a seat in the United States Senate, but there can be no reasonable or honest doubt of his unfitness to do so."

"The Bilbo compromise reached by the Senate late Saturday afternoon was really a victory for those who carried on the fight against the Senator-elect."

"The chances were very slim that he [Bilbo] would ever enter it [the Senate] again as a U.S. Senator."

"The Senate ‘compromise,’ so-called, on the issue of Senator Bilbo’s admission, may be defended on the grounds of expediency, but not it seems to us, upon constitutional or moral grounds."

"I am very sorry that you are physically unable to continue your ‘fight’ in Washington at this time. As I see it, our civilization is already in the evening twilight of its existence, and nothing can stop it."

"Like everybody in Mississippi, I have been watching the newspapers and listening to the radio and have kept up with you, and just want you to know that friends and foes alike are for you 1000%... In Kemper, Winston, and Sunflower counties I have heard, during the past week, a score or more men who have never voted for you in their lives say that if the election was being held now they would vote for you regardless of who opposed you."

"Bilbo never took his Senate seat again. He went to a New Orleans hospital to have surgery for throat cancer and died there six months later on August 21, 1947. In death, he was hailed as a hero by defenders of white supremacy and condemned as a symbol of racism by Jim Crow’s opponents."

"Senator Bilbo died a martyr to southern traditions, and his name will long be remembered when those of his most bitter critics will be forgotten before they are cold in their graves."

"We would be hard put to find a kinder word for Theodore G. Bilbo than the classic observation that he was not always as bad as he was sometimes."

"News of Senator-Elect Theodore G. Bilbo’s death in New Orleans brought on unparalleled rejoicing throughout civilized America...bartenders throughout the country [are] giving free drinks with which to toast the end of four decades of racial hatred."

"The Senate’s effort to deny Bilbo his seat was clear evidence of change. The war against Nazi Germany, the unifying effect of World War II, and America’s new role as the leader of the Western world altered elite attitudes outside of the South toward public racism. By 1947, such extreme rhetoric had become unacceptable from a major public figure."

"Theodore G. Bilbo was perhaps the most controversial public figure on the national scene.... The extremism of his pronouncements on race relations had polarized much of the country... To the vast majority of southern whites, Bilbo had become the leading spokesman in the fight to preserve that section's structure of racial segregation from those who wanted to bring about racial equality. To liberal whites and blacks, on the other hand, Bilbo was America's most vicious race-baiter."

"Bilbo’s ejection was the official repudiation of the rotten southern political system based on racial hatred, the system that had kept southern congressmen in Washington for decades. Bilbo was a symbol of the past."

"Many southern politicians continued to use extreme language similar to Bilbo’s. Major southern figures such as James Eastland, Richard Russell, Strom Thurmond, and George Wallace played the race card and supported Jim Crow with all their energies well into the 1960s. But they usually avoided the kind of overt racism, anti-Semitism, and anti-Italian remarks that Bilbo consistently expressed. Instead they employed code words; these legislators talked of the need to protect the South from “outside agitators” and the necessity of defending “state’s rights,” but rarely used the terms niggers or kikes."

"Over the postwar years, we have granted to the elite and secret police within our system vast new powers over the lives and liberties of the people. At the request of the trusted and respected heads of those forces, and their appeal to the necessities of national security, we have exempted those grants of power from due accounting and strict surveillance."

"[FBI Director J. Edgar] Hoover lied his eyes out to the [Warren] Commission – on Oswald, on Ruby, on their friends, the bullets, the gun, you name it."

"You can call it a miracle or a legend or whatever you want to. I just know that on that day, Brett Favre was larger than life."

"Yip cabbage on three!"

"I'd like to think, eight years ago, I was pretty humble and modest. But I think, with each year, you get more modest, more humble, more appreciative. The off the field tragedies put things in better perspective, but life happens to everybody, and I think we all just try to do the best we can."

"I'm pretty boring really."

"With each game I play, with each season I play, I'm running out of chances... you're never guaranteed next year. You're never guaranteed the next game. You have to seize the opportunity when it's there in front of you."

"I know I can still play, but it's like I told my wife, I'm just tired mentally. I'm just tired."

"It's fun leading this offense. I don't think we've hit our peak."

"I really believe this team has a lot of potential — whether it's this year or in years to come, I don't know."

"(Why have there been so few really great women writers?) EW: Well, I think there have been not a few great women writers, of course, Jane Austen. I don't see how anyone could have a greater scope in knowledge of human nature and reveal more of human nature than Jane Austen. Consider Virginia Woolf. The Brontës. Well, you know as many as I do: great women writers. (1972)"

"I think Flannery O'Connor was absolutely and literally right in what she says: that the fact that something is comic does not detract from its seriousness, because the comic and the serious are not opposites. You might as well say satire is not serious, and it's probably the most deadly serious of any form of writing, even though it makes you laugh. No, I think comedy is able to tackle the most serious matters that there are. (1972)"

"You can't avoid dealing with moral matters, because that's what life is about. But I think it is wrong when somebody like Steinbeck crusades in his fiction. That's why Steinbeck bores me so. The real crusader doesn't need to crusade; he writes about human beings in the sense Chekhov did. He tries to see a human being whole with all his wrong-headedness and all his right-headedness. To blind yourself to one thing for the sake of your prejudice is limiting. I think it is a mistake. There's so much room in the world for crusading, but it is for the editorial writer, the speech-maker, the politician, and the man in public life to do, not for the writer of fiction. (1978)"

"The novel's outside world, if well enough created, does live on, when you look at the world of Jane Austen, Flaubert, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Proust! They're indelible. War and Peace is not only real to today's reader, it will outlast him too. (1981)"

"Each day the storm clouds were opening like great purple flowers and pouring out their dark thunder. Each nightfall, the storm was laid down on their houses like a burden the day had carried. ("At The Landing")"

"Whatever happened, it happened in extraordinary times, in a season of dreams and in Natchez it was the bitterest winter of them all. (beginning of "First Love ")"

"It was in a bar, a quiet little hole in the wall. It was four o'clock in the afternoon. Beyond the open door the rain fell, the heavy color of the sea, in air where the sunlight was still suspended. Its watery reflection lighted the room, as a room might have lighted a mousehole. It was in New Orleans. (beginning of "The Purple Hat ")"

"Laurel could not see her face but only the back of her neck, the most vulnerable part of anybody, and she thought: Is there any sleeping person you can be entirely sure you have not misjudged?"

"It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass. Yet regardless of where they came from, I cannot remember a time when I was not in love with them -- with the books themselves, cover and binding and the paper they were printed on, with their smell and their weight and with their possession in my arms, captured and carried off to myself."

"All experience is an enrichment rather than an impoverishment."

"Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them. I suppose it’s an early form of participation in what goes on. Listening children know stories are there. When their elders sit and begin, children are just waiting and hoping for one to come out, like a mouse from its hole."

"Every writer, like everybody else, thinks he's living through the crisis of the ages. To write honestly and with all our powers is the least we can do, and the most."

"Great fiction shows us not how to conduct our behavior but how to feel. Eventually, it may show us how to face our feelings and face our actions and to have new inklings about what they mean. A good novel of any year can initiate us into our own new experience."

"The novelist works neither to correct nor to condone, not at all to comfort, but to make what's told alive."

"The first act of insight is throw away the labels. In fiction, while we do not necessarily write about ourselves, we write out of ourselves, using ourselves; what we learn from, what we are sensitive to, what we feel strongly about--these become our characters and go to make our plots. Characters in fiction are conceived from within, and they have, accordingly, their own interior life; they are individuals every time."

"Since we must and do write each our own way, we may during actual writing get more lasting instruction not from another's work, whatever its blessings, however better it is than ours, but from our own poor scratched-over pages. For these we can hold up to life. That is, we are born with a mind and heart to hold each page up to, and to ask: is it valid? ("Words Into Fiction")"

"What can place not give? Theme. It can present theme, show it to the last detail — but place is forever illustrative: it is a picture of what man has done and imagined, it is his visible past, result. Human life is fiction’s only theme. ("Place in Fiction")"

"Making reality real is art's responsibility. It is a practical assignment, then, a self-assignment: to achieve, by a cultivated sensitivity for observing life, a capacity for receiving impressions, a lonely, unremitting, unaided, unaidable vision, and transferring this vision without distortion to it onto the pages of a novel, where, if the reader is so persuaded, it will turn into the reader's illusion. ("Place in Fiction")"