Home > Work > Mississippi Blood (Penn Cage, #6)
1 " I don’t really understand the world anymore. But maybe there’s some faint hope that the good people on both sides can come together. "
― Greg Iles , Mississippi Blood (Penn Cage, #6)
2 " ...yet he [Levon] somehow sings with the wounded humanity of a man without a tribe, a man who has known both love and grief and understands that one is the price of the other. "
3 " that right meant more than might; that being faithful and good meant more than being rich; that honor superseded all. "
4 " 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. "
5 " I’m a big believer in first lines. If a writer doesn’t grab you with their first sentence, even in a literary novel, they might need to think about another line of work. "
6 " Out country's messed up son. Mortally wounded. And I can't for the life of me se how we're going to heal it. Your generation can't do it. Even you're too old. The new ones coming along...that's where the hope lies, if there is any. We've got to acknowledge what we did to those people. But I don't think we ever will. People hate admitting guilt, but we can't blame it all on the Knoxes of the world. We're all guilty. Blacks are messed up, too...but how could they not be? White people fight this so hard because they know the truth in their bones. You know? You don't get that angry unless you know you're wrong. "
7 " Grief is the most solitary emotion; it makes islands of us all. "
8 " The question isn't who's going to let me; it's who's going to stop me. "
9 " Where good people stand against evil, sooner or later fate demands a reckoning. "
10 " A man who has known both love and grief and understands that one if the price of the other "
11 " In any battle, out of every hundred men, ten shouldn't be there. Eighty are just targets. Nine are good soldiers, and we're lucky to have them. But one, that one is a warrior, and will bring the others home. "
12 " Most had lived the first decade of their lives with big grins; too many had lived the remainder with a confused scowl and a diminishing sense of control over their futures. "
13 " Catfish actually liked white folks, especially the working people. He thought they'd been manipulated by the moneed class to resent blacks, but he reprected their honesty. Said he always knew where he stood with white Southerners, that they always lived up to their word. Uncle Catfish never trusted Yankees. "
14 " American history is punctuated by watershed moments, fulcrum points that separate one sense of ourselves (as a nation) from another. "
15 " Faulkner did the same thing in Absalom, Absalaom, demonstrating that no two people ever experience the same event, and that history is doomed ot only be a version of events. "
16 " How hard do we work to blind ourselves to things that we don't want to see? "
17 " I'm sorry you had to go through this in the dark," she says. "But you always were the strong one." "My mother's son. right? "
18 " My father was different. He couldn't live blindly amid the ruins of a gilded empire where the lost children of Africa worked with fake smiles among their former masters. "
19 " Right meant more than might; that being faithful and good meant more than being rich; that honor superseded all. "
20 " But now I understand something I did not before;: that the happiness of my childhood was bought with the pain of a black boy who had hurt no one. "
