Delta Region Quotes

New Orleans lives by the water and fights it, a sand castle set on a sponge nine feet below sea level, where people made music from heartache, named their drinks for hurricanes and joked that one day you'd be able to tour the city by gondola.

I took Bobby Kennedy through the delta and he cried like a baby.

I'm from the Mississippi delta originally.

What we did is we used NASA topography data to map out the landscape, very subtle changes. We started to be able to see where the Nile used to flow.

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.

I can remember when President Nixon basically said, 'All troops have been withdrawn from the delta.' And I said, 'Wait, I'm still here.'

I grew up in Kilmichael, Mississippi. It's a dot on the map 100 miles north of Jackson.

Arkansas is a curious and interesting community ... it is probably the most untouched and unawakened of all American states.

About fifteen miles above New Orleans the river goes very slowly. It has broadened out there until it is almost a sea and the water is yellow with the mud of half a continent. Where the sun strikes it, it is golden.

My idea of heaven is a place where the Tyne meets the Delta, where folk music meets the blues.

The blues style - moody or rollicking or boastful or bashful - developed in the Delta around 1900 and was, for a time, exclusively African-American. That isn't the case anymore.

I grew up in Mobile, Alabama - somebody's got to be from Mobile, right? - and Mobile sits at the confluence of five rivers, forming this beautiful delta. And the delta has alligators crawling in and out of rivers filled with fish and cypress trees dripping with snakes, birds of every flavor.

I feel like so much of what happened in the Delta over the decades since slavery was abolished seems much closer in the Delta, and maybe that's because sharecropping was a fairly recent phenomena. I feel like the past is closer and it bears even more heavily on the present there than it does in the rest of the state.