Ozark Quotes

The true way to live is to enjoy every moment as it passes, and surely it is in the everyday things around us that the beauty of life lies.

It isn't a club," I said calmly. "It's a walking stick." "Six feet long." "It's traditional Ozark folk art." "With dents and nicks all over it." I thought about it for a second. "I'm insecure?" "Get a blanket." He held out his hand. I signed and passed my staff over to him. "Do I get a receipt?" He took a notepad from his pocket and wrote on it. Then he passed it over to me. It read: Received, one six foot tall traditional Ozark walking club from Mr. Smart-Ass.

Everything was going along just fine until Mama caught me cutting out of the circles of tin with her scissors. I always swore she could find the biggest switches of any woman in the Ozarks.

It (a singer's voice) sounds as if it was aged in a whiskey cask, cured in an Ozarks smokehouse, dropped down a stone well, pulled out damp, and kept moist in the palm of a wicked woman's hand.

Sir," said the guard from behind me. "I'd appreciate it if you left your club here." I paused and looked over my shoulder, He had a gun. His hand wasn't exactly resting on it, but he'd tucked his thumb into his belt about half an inch away. "It isn't a club," I said calmly. "It's a walking stick." "Six feet long." "It's traditional Ozark folk art." "With dents and nicks all over it." I thought about it for a second. "I'm insecure?" "Get a blanket.

I am the Mister Rogers Bannister of swimming coaches for ducks. My services are available in underwater vending machines in ponds all across The Ozarks.

Sunsets and mirrors are great for looking back, but our love belongs to the sunrise. Let the orange glow over The Ozarks fade into the deep blue mystery that is our romance.

A big grinning Ozark moon crawled up out of nowhere and seemed to say, “Hi, neighbor! I’ve been looking for you. It gets kind of lonesome out here. Welcome to the land of the Cherokee!

Nothing hurts like a hostile farewell.

I have never been back to the Ozarks. All I have left are my dreams and memories, but if God is willing, some day I’d like to go back—back to those beautiful hills. I’d like to walk again on trails I walked in my boyhood days. Once again I’d like to face a mountain breeze and smell the wonderful scent of the redbuds, and papaws, and the dogwoods. With my hands I’d like to caress the cool white bark of a sycamore. I’d like to take a walk far back in the flinty hills and search for a souvenir, an old double-bitted ax stuck deep in the side of a white oak tree. I know the handle has long since rotted away with time. Perhaps the rusty frame of a coal-oil lantern still hangs there on the blade. I’d like to see the old home place, the barn and the rail fences. I’d like to pause under the beautiful red oaks where my sisters and I played in our childhood. I’d like to walk up the hillside to the graves of my dogs. I’m sure the red fern has grown and has completely covered the two little mounds. I know it is still there, hiding its secret beneath those long, red leaves, but it wouldn’t be hidden from me for part of my life is buried there, too. Yes, I know it is still there, for in my heart I believe the legend of the sacred red fern.

Accepting the world’s realities, even when you didn’t understand them, was a basic necessity of existence in Ozark life.

Time is fluid, like the wide sky that fades into bright orange in a sunset in The Ozarks. Here on my duck farm, every moment is meant to be sipped and savored like a slow mimosa.

My ducks and I survived The Great Ozarks Cloudy Day With Scattered Rain of 6/6/22. Thank you for all your prayers. I should make a T-shirt commemorating the whole ordeal.

There is no romance if there is no fog. When everything is clear, there's no element of mystery. In The Ozarks, mystique is ubiquitous.

Thump Milton loomed over Ree, a fabled man, his face a monument of Ozark stone, with juts and angles and cold shaded parts the sun never touched.

Stay More' is synonymous with 'Status Quo' in fact, there are people who believe, or who like to believe, that the name of the town was intended as an entreaty, beseeching the past to remain present.

Our home was in a beautiful valley far back in the rugged Ozarks. The country was new and sparsely settled. The land we lived on was Cherokee land, allotted to my mother because of the Cherokee blood that flowed in her veins. It lay in a strip from the foothills of the mountains to the banks of the Illinois River in northeastern Oklahoma.

WILSON RAWLS was born on a small farm in the Oklahoma Ozarks. He spent his youth in the heart of the Cherokee nation, prowling the hills and river bottoms with his only companion, an old bluetick hound. Rawls’s first writing was done with his fingers in the dust of the country roads and in the sands along the river, and his earliest stories were told to his dog. Not until Rawls’s family moved to Muskogee and he could attend high school did he encounter books. Where the Red Fern Grows has become a modern classic and has been made into a widely acclaimed motion picture.

The days never have been long enough to do the things I would like to do. Every year has held more of interest than the year before.” . . .

I like my morning coffee so strong it will wake up the neighbors. And if that doesn't work, I'll start playing my tuba.

I was still a boy when I left the Ozarks, only sixteen years old. Since that day, I’ve left my footprints in many lands: the frozen wastelands of the Arctic, the bush country of Old Mexico, and the steaming jungles of Yucatán. Throughout my life, I’ve been a lover of the great outdoors. I have built campfires in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, and hunted wild turkey in the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee and the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. I have climbed the Grand Tetons of Wyoming, and hunted bull elk in the primitive area of Idaho. I can truthfully say that, regardless of where I have roamed or wandered, I have always looked for the fairy ring. I have never found one, but I’ll keep looking and hoping. If the day ever comes that I walk up to that snow-white circle, I’ll step into the center of it, kneel down, and make one wish, for in my heart I believe in the legend of the rare fairy ring.

Yes, my buggy is outside and my horse has been acting up. I wondered if you could come rub its skull and tell me if it’s got a bad case of stubborn, or if it might be indigestion?

Every unmeasured system is assumed to be critical. It is the same as finding a pistol sitting on a table. Assume that it is cocked and loaded.

Sometimes the best gifts aren't convenient at the time.

I was born dead, in the dead of winter, still as a stone. Blue as the smoky haze that sometimes settles on the Ozark Mountains.

I admire the flow of your dancing moves, and I'd love to bottle them up and sell them as windshield wiper fluid. I only wish they came in Ozarks Rain Flavor.

Time is fluid, like the wide sky that fades into bright orange in a sunset in The Ozarks. Every moment is meant to be sipped and savored like a slow mimosa.

In the Arkansas section of The Ozarks, you’ll find water so blue it’s almost green. Around here, and anywhere people aren’t colorblind, we call that teal.

I describe The Ozarks as somewhere in the middle of enchanting and charming. I don't know where exactly, so let's call it encharming.

In The Ozarks, where there isn't rock, there is clay. That makes those who use backhoes and dozers to shape the land sculptors.

He’d been raised in the hills of the Ozarks, where making corn liquor was a time-honored tradition,

Are they Russian by way of the Ozarks?

On nights like this, I feel like Henry Rowe Schoolcraft as I venture into the wild. Henry made it his craft to school people about the area, becoming The Lewis and Clark of The Ozarks.

Whoever said Romance is dead needs to meet me at The Ozarks Cemetery and help me get this thing to a hospital. It's coughing and cold, but we can still save it. I'll bring Duck Noodle Soup.

How do you catch Ozarks fog in a net? It’s like fishing for silence. Teach a man to grow quiet, and he'll starve for the rest of his life. That's why I farm ducks, because trees have feelings, too.

Big Cedar is Jackson Hole of The Ozarks. The easiest way to tell the difference between a buffalo and a bison is one has wings and tastes great with hot sauce, and the other is a Wyoming hamburger.

There are no pink flamingos in my coffee, so it doesn't taste like a Florida sunset. But my java was made with aqua from The Ozarks, so it tastes like summer romance. Register to win a FREE duck farm tour.

Before the blue of night meets the pink of sunrise, there is a transition of lavender. It's a gradient of color that stretches its fade through time, and that gives each moment a unique and exquisite existence.

A lot of wisdom goes to waste because people speak it openly into the air during conversations, and it dissipates into the atmosphere without raining back down in the form of written text to be read in the future.

As long as nuclear engineering can strive for new innovations and learn from its history of accidents and mistakes, the benefits that nuclear power can yield for our economy, society, and yes, environment, will come.

Betsy was impulsive in every area save one. Where men were concerned, she'd never ventured anything. Let others wear their hearts on their sleeves; let others chase after masculine attention. Betsy had more interesting pursuits.

Dance critics all over the world have called my body moves, “Sculpturesque,” “As full of motion as a Rodin statue,” and “Like watching Helen Keller eat Jell-O with her elbows.” My dancing is so still and silent that it belongs to a foggy Ozarks morning.

Then I’m going to pray that God sends a conundrum your way that you must solve and that you can only solve with His help.” Miranda straightened. “That’s not very chivalrous.” His eyes were kind but firm. “I admire the woman I’ve come to know here, and while I can’t promise I’ll ever see her again, I refuse to let her disappear off the face of the earth. You have to keep her alive.

I mean, really ponder what God gave you breath for. Most of our suffering means nothing. What are we striving for? To make ourselves more comfortable? To add prestige or honor to our reputation? Buth then you find something - a cause, a person - worth dying for, and you realize that's the best gift God can give you, because until you know what you'd die for, you don't know what you're living for.

I've always found the thousand dollar dinners more unsettling than the twenty-five-thousand dollar ones --- if someone pays the Republican National Committee twenty-five thousand dollars (or, more likely, fifty per couple) to breathe the same air as Charlie for an hour or two, then it's clear the person has money to spare. What breaks my heart is when it's apparent through their accent or attire that a person isn't well off but has scrimped to attend an event with us. We're not worth it! I want to say. You should have paid off your credit-card bill, invested in your grandchild's college fund, taken a vacation to the Ozarks. Instead, in a few weeks, they receive in the mail a photo with one or both of us, signed by an autopen, which they can frame so that we might grin out into their living room for years to come.

The Ozarks are a fixture in my mindscape, but I didn't stay local in every respect. I always think of Miles Davis, "People who don't change end up like folk musicians playing in museums, local as a motherfucker." I wouldn't describe my attachment to home as ghostly, but long-distanced. My ear has been licked by many other tongues.

Ree Dolly stood at the break of day on her cold front steps and smelled coming flurries and saw meat. Meat hung from trees across the creek. Carcasses hung pale of flesh with fatty gleam from low limbs of saplings in the side yards. Three halt haggard houses formed a kneeling rank on the far creekside and each had two or more skinned torsos dangling by rope from sagged limbs, venison left to the weather for two nights and three days so the early blossoming of decay might round the flavor, sweeten that meat to the bone.

It does not so matter what happens. It is what one does when it happens that really counts. -Laura Ingalls Wilder: Get the Habit of Being Ready, October 20, 1917

The real character of men and women comes to the surface under stress. --Laura Ingalls Wilder: What Would You Do?April 5, 1918

How easy and delightful life might be if we could do this, if when we had attained the position we wished we might rest on our oars and watch the ripples on the stream of life.

Life is more romantic with soft piano music. I just wish those particular instruments were more portable, so my back wouldn't be so sore.

Turn the music down, and when you hit zero decibels—turn it down even more. Negative volume produces the most beautiful dancing.

The truth is that the truth isn’t hiding. It’s out in the open—it’s the people that are hiding from the truth.

All my failures as a human being I blame on my father. Life is about accepting responsibility, and it’s time my father started being held accountable for my deficiencies.

Can we go back to the way things were, before life got so complicated with the wheel and then the three other wheels?

No matter which end of a hotdog you take your first bite from, I’ll tell you you’re eating it backwards. I’m serious, I think you may be dyslexic.

I should design door handles made of flowing water. To open, pull like salmon swim.

This is the Los Angeles Lakers of sunsets. Purple and yellow, it reminds me of Larry Bird.

Yesterday I played a round of golf. I just kept hitting the ball in circles, but never getting it in the circles they call holes.

Cash rich is future poor. Back in 1913, I could have almost bought a mansion for the price of a cup of coffee today.

Where two are, loneliness isn't. And with loneliness left out, loneliness is lonely.

The Red Hot Chili Peppers have a great song about a bridge. And I can relate, because I love spicy food.

In high school, I was on the carpentry team, but I got benched. It was awkward sitting on it while my teammates built it.

First Artificial Intelligence stole all the jobs. Then it snatched up all the people off the streets at night, and now I'm left alone, playing my saxophone at the moon.

M.C. Escher called. He wanted to sell me some upside-down stairs. I said I already have a few, and then I got him to buy an upwalking slinky.

Airplanes are white, like Pekin ducks. And when they are on flat ground, that possibility of flight fills the air.

Today is the one that introduces Yesterday to Tomorrow. If it weren't for Today, Nostalgia would never meet Hope.

Add some mystery to your morning coffee and stir in some mist. Or go full fog for that #MissMarpleFlavor. Then solve it sip by sip.

Of all the sports, golf is certainly one of them. Well, almost certainly, and I think that’s what I love most about it.

Love makes the world go round. Too bad love doesn’t make the world go other shapes, like Table Rock Lake.

Francis Bacon has the most delicious last name ever, followed closely by Johnny Scrambledeggs. I golf like those two guys make breakfast out of family reunions.

Only Bob Dylan knows which of his songs belong in the trash and which belong in the garbage. I’m so ignorant, I’d say either one works.

By 2030 I won't need to carry any Portable Communication Device, because by then I will have mastered the art of telepathy. I've been practicing in the mirror.

I once saw a waterfall walk up a flight of stairs, when it could have easily taken the escalator. That's what I would have done, if I were composed of 40% more H2O.

Play your saxophone like a quacking duck. An electric guitar full of lightning doesn't even have that energy.

The song’s advice said, “Play that funky music, white boy.” So, I took up the xylophone.

I’ve got no bone to pick with science, but first off I’m a man of faith. If you’re using science to put limits on what God can accomplish with a person, that’s where we part ways.

Shitfire!

What right does it have, death? When I meet it, I’ll give it the finger. Best I can do.

Coffee, it's the original energy drink. After I chug this I'll feel like I could run a marathon, but I won't, because I have two Rubik's Cubes for knees, and they still need to be solved.

I like mini-golf. For me, it’s like long-billiards, where the green has contours, and the table is the floor. This putt-putt course is dilapidated, but that just makes it more challenging.

You might be asking yourself, "Jarod, why did you write something that maybe one person is going to read?" The answer is easy: Because that gives me a larger audience than The Washington Post.

The internet liquefied physical borders faster than they were already doing on their own. For all that, there are only regional writers. There are no "internet writers," like there used to be "paperback writers." Every tweet comes from somewhere, and that "somewhere" goes into the "somewhere" where you're reading it in. You read Nietzsche in the Ozarks for a while, let's say, then you get up and sweep the leaves from your porch for a longer while. Place wins on time spent every time, unless you're demented enough to put out your eyes on screens longer than you sweep. We are in a state of "transitional regionalism," a place where regions are instantly transmitted to other regions, but they don't universalize them, they only make them more provincial, by framing them with the local.

People always ask me, they say, “Jarod, what do you do with your money?” Well, I base my financial decisions on the annual migratory patterns of Bigfoot, because maps are the new charts, as taught by the esteemed Ponce de Leon School of Youth, Wealth, and Duck Farming. Next time you’re in St. Augustine, Fl, or here in The Ozarks, you should stop on by and learn to become your own cartographer.

The only difference between your average man and a hero is that the hero figures out what to do before it's too late,' He nudged her aside and, with a few pulls, filled her bucket. 'Then he has the nerve to go on and do it.' Betsy leaned back as if she was trying to get a complete view of him from head to toe. 'Is that all it takes to make a good hero?' 'One more thing. A hero always comes back for his lady.

Water doesn’t shape like clay when you move it with your hands. I've spent a lot of time swimming, and none of my motion art stayed in place. All my aqua sculpting rippled into the future, never to be seen again.

Major: you have the honor to report that the numbers of men now under your command qualifies you for promotion to colonel. But you ask me to believe that your regiments assaulted Rebel forces in a pitched battle of over two hours duration, all the while steadily employing the heavy field pieces recently shipped to you, without one single battle death on either side. Sir, that is not warfare. That is fraternization with the enemy!

In a Lake of Clouds, there's only one thing you can fish for: Dreams. Mostly I catch mine, but sometimes I catch yours, and I must say I am flattered to always see myself as the co-star in your subconscious fantasies.

I haven't written poetry in a long time but I read it and I miss it. It is so hard to write. So hard to finish, so hard to find the exact word to make it shine. In honor of my youth I will write a poem to finish this essay. It is spring in the Ozark Mountains. The yellow flowers are blooming and the birds wake me at dawn and last night five planets lined up by the moon in the western sky. If that doesn't inspire me to poetry what will?

To blame me in the past is a very future me thing to do. But what am I supposed to do, scapegoat someone else for my mistakes? Somebody needs to be held accountable, and it certainly won’t be the version of me in that moment.

Nothing is ever gained by allowing anger to have sway. When under its influence we lose the ability to think clearly and the forceful power that is in calmness. -Laura Ingalls Wilder: As A Farm Woman Thinks (3)(November 15, 1921).

The only grown-up other than Jacob who ever came into his schoolroom was Eli Willard. School was in session one day when the Connecticut itinerant reappeared after long absence, bringing Jacob's glass and other merchandise. Jacob seized him and presented him to the class. 'Boys and girls, this specimen here is a Peddler. You don't see them very often. They migrate, like the geese flying over. This one comes maybe once a year, like Christmas. But he ain't dependable, like Christmas. He's dependable like rainfall. A Peddler is a feller who has got things you ain't got, and he'll give 'em to ye, and then after you're glad you got 'em he'll tell ye how much cash money you owe him fer 'em. If you ain't got cash money, he'll give credit, and collect the next time he comes 'round, and meantime you work hard to git the money someway so's ye kin pay him off. Look at his eyes. Notice how they are kinder shiftly-like. Now, class, the first question is: why is this feller's eyes shiftly-like?

Ain't nothin' to a flat country nohow. A man jes naturally wear hisself plumb out a walkin' on a level 'thout ary downhill t' spell him. An' then look how much more there is of hit! Take forty acres o' flat now an' hit's jest a forty, but you take forty acres o' this here Ozark country an' God 'lmighty only knows how much 'twould be if hit war rolled out flat. 'Taint no wonder 't all, God rested when he made these here hills; he jes naturally had t' quit, fer he done his beatenest an' war plumb gin out.

But Wyatt, the humiliation. Why? Why would God let him do this? It’s a cruel turn when he’s been so good his whole life. Why would God destroy his reputation for wisdom and good sense now?” “I don’t pretend to know God’s purpose, but just look at how dealing with him has made you stronger. Look how you’ve changed. If he hadn’t needed help, you would have never come to Missouri. You would’ve stayed in Boston and lived the life you’d always lived, and I would’ve never met you.” He cupped the back of her head and held her against him. “God is still at work. He hasn’t forgotten you, or your grandpa.

Was life measured by the trouble you avoided, or by the obstacles you overcame? God had made her for trouble, equipped her for hardship. She'd do her share and then some. Most of all, she'd buttress the man who faced the dangers for all of them. He wouldn't do it alone. Not while she had blood pumping in her veins.

You may suppose that perhaps this Walter T. Wallace found his destiny in food and passed down to his progeny a legacy like that of the great Colonel Sanders. The folks here in Wallace County would love to be able to tell you this is so. But no, like their granddaddy, the Wallace men were thievin’ crooks, always with a scheme ready to separate the weak from their hard-earned money.

Wilderness by Carl Sandburg There is a wolf in me . . . fangs pointed for tearing gashes . . . a red tongue for raw meat . . . and the hot lapping of blood—I keep this wolf because the wilderness gave it to me and the wilderness will not let it go. There is a fox in me . . . a silver-gray fox . . . I sniff and guess . . . I pick things out of the wind and air . . . I nose in the dark night and take sleepers and eat them and hide the feathers . . . I circle and loop and double-cross. There is a hog in me . . . a snout and a belly . . . a machinery for eating and grunting . . . a machinery for sleeping satisfied in the sun—I got this too from the wilderness and the wilderness will not let it go. There is a fish in me . . . I know I came from salt-blue water-gates . . . I scurried with shoals of herring . . . I blew waterspouts with porpoises . . . before land was . . . before the water went down . . . before Noah . . . before the first chapter of Genesis. There is a baboon in me . . . clambering-clawed . . . dog-faced . . . yawping a galoot’s hunger . . . hairy under the armpits . . . here are the hawk-eyed hankering men . . . here are the blonde and blue-eyed women . . . here they hide curled asleep waiting . . . ready to snarl and kill . . . ready to sing and give milk . . . waiting—I keep the baboon because the wilderness says so. There is an eagle in me and a mockingbird . . . and the eagle flies among the Rocky Mountains of my dreams and fights among the Sierra crags of what I want . . . and the mockingbird warbles in the early forenoon before the dew is gone, warbles in the underbrush of my Chattanoogas of hope, gushes over the blue Ozark foothills of my wishes—And I got the eagle and the mockingbird from the wilderness. O, I got a zoo, I got a menagerie, inside my ribs, under my bony head, under my red-valve heart—and I got something else: it is a man-child heart, a woman-child heart: it is a father and mother and lover: it came from God-Knows-Where: it is going to God-Knows-Where—For I am the keeper of the zoo: I say yes and no: I sing and kill and work: I am a pal of the world: I came from the wilderness.

Eli Willard just looked at her for a long moment, and then he announced, 'Lady of the Lake strikes iceberg in mid-Atlantic; 215 drown. New York City fire destroys 700 buildings. Japanese earthquake kills 12,000. Worldwide cholera epidemic kills millions. Wages rise, but prices rise faster. Financial crash occurs on Van Buren's 36th day in office. Nation begins first great depression. Bank failures and closings spread like plague. 200,000 are unemployed. Business bankrupt; only pawnbrokers prosper. Van Buren declares ten-hour days on all federal jobs. There. Does that make you feel any better?

Jacob realized that if she kept on going like that he might very well cry out himself. But just then a voice outside the wagon called "JAKE! AIR YE IN THAR?" and he knew it was Sarah. "ANSWER ME!" she requested, so he did. "Yeah, I'm in here, but I'll be right out." He was bucking beneath the weight of Virdie in an effort to finish. "WHAT'RE YE DOIN IN THAR, JAKE?" Sarah wanted to know. "I'm havin words-" he panted "-with this here Rebel foe." He was nearly there, although he realized that the wagon must be visibly shaking. Virdie suddenly stuffed her dress into her mouth, but it was not enough to keep another one of her long groans from coming out. "JAKE!" Sarah hollered. "YOU AINT A-HURTING HER, AIR YE?" "Jist a little," he answered, "to teach her a lesson." And then he got there, rapturously, reflecting, Godalmighty, if I could git this reg'lar, maybe I'd jine the Rebels after all.

Inside McClintic Sphere was swinging his ass off. His skin was hard, as if it were part of the skull: every vein and whisker on that head stood out sharp and clear under the green baby spot: you could see the twin lines running down from either side of his lower lip, etched in by the force of his embouchure, looking like extensions of his mustache. He blew a hand-carved ivory alto saxophone with a 4 ½ reed and the sound was like nothing any of them had heard before. The usual divisions prevailed: collegians did not dig, and left after an average of 1 ½ sets. Personnel from other groups, either with a night off or taking a long break from somewhere crosstown or uptown, listened hard, trying to dig. 'I am still thinking,’ they would say if you asked. People at the bar all looked as if they did dig in the sense of understand, approve of, empathize with: but this was probably only because people who prefer to stand at the bar have, universally, an inscrutable look… …The group on the stand had no piano: it was bass, drums, McClintic and a boy he had found in the Ozarks who blew a natural horn in F. The drummer was a group man who avoided pyrotechnics, which may have irritated the college crowd. The bass was small and evil-looking and his eyes were yellow with pinpoints in the center. He talked to his instrument. It was taller than he was and didn’t seem to be listening. Horn and alto together favored sixths and minor fourths and when this happened it was like a knife fight or tug of war: the sound was consonant but as if cross-purposes were in the air. The solos of McClintic Sphere were something else. There were people around, mostly those who wrote for Downbeat magazine or the liners of LP records, who seemed to feel he played disregarding chord changes completely. They talked a great deal about soul and the anti-intellectual and the rising rhythms of African nationalism. It was a new conception, they said, and some of them said: Bird Lives. Since the soul of Charlie Parker had dissolved away into a hostile March wind nearly a year before, a great deal of nonsense had been spoken and written about him. Much more was to come, some is still being written today. He was the greatest alto on the postwar scene and when he left it some curious negative will–a reluctance and refusal to believe in the final, cold fact–possessed the lunatic fringe to scrawl in every subway station, on sidewalks, in pissoirs, the denial: Bird Lives. So that among the people in the V-Note that night were, at a conservative estimate, a dreamy 10 per cent who had not got the word, and saw in McClintic Sphere a kind of reincarnation.