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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.” . . .

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

There is a popular saying, “More rare than pine is the smell of pining”—which is rare indeed, for there are few pine trees in this part of the Ozarks.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I took up duck farming in The Ozarks in 2020. I guess I did it mainly because the YMCA Aquatic Center in Orlando was operating at full occupancy with a geriatric aerobics class, and the instructor wouldn't let me ride my unicycle in the pool.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

In all, it killed fewer people than the coal industry, it caused less unhealthy pollution than the asbestos industry, and it cannot be blamed for global warming.280

Nuclear rockets capable of sending a fully equipped colony to Mars in one shot were designed.

it is correct to remind them of the British Blue Peacock nuclear weapon, in which the batteries were kept warm by two chickens living in the electronics module aft of the warhead.

For a human, the lethal dose is about a tenth of a gram.

An arsenic compound is still used to treat promyelocytic leukemia, and the isotope arsenic-74 is used as a radioactive tracer to find tumors.

male workers were thought incapable of sitting still for hours at a time to do anything useful.

Isotopes of radium, the first nuclear radiation sources to be commercially exploited, are probably the worst examples out of thousands of radioactive isotopes.

In general, nuclear workers are allowed to absorb 5 rem per year, and civilians are allowed 0.5 rem per year.

Shitfire!

We had therefore invented the perfect weapon for blowing up an entire sky full of multi-engine aircraft in one swat, so we could have defeated ourselves two wars back.

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.

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.

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.

The utter wildness of the nineteen-fifties, a decade in which 100 new religions were formed, psychedelic drug experimentation was on an industrial scale, and vast scientific experiments outstripped science fiction, makes the sixties a wind-down.

However, in very low doses strychnine can act as a nerve stimulant, and I can see how Bailey, and most likely others, saw it as a clever treatment for erectile disorder. Known for both its poisonous and medicinal uses in ancient China and India,

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?

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.

Care was supposedly taken in the building’s design to ensure that no enriched uranium would ever be in a critical-sized or -shaped container, so no criticality alarms were called for in the license. An accidental criticality of any kind in this facility, run by highly disciplined Japanese laborers, was not a credible scenario.182

Ivan Pulyui, a college professor at the University of Vienna from the Ukraine, is sometimes credited with having sold the first x-ray tubes, before the x-ray was discovered. The claim is semi-true. His Pulyui Lamp was available perhaps as early as 1882, but it was sold as a light bulb, and Pulyui did not realize that it was streaming x-rays along with a blue glow until he read Röntgen’s paper in 1895. Pulyui immediately saw the medical diagnostic use of x-rays, and his lamps became quite useful.

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.

from a distance of 50 miles, were brought down in 10 seconds by demolition explosives, and that was that. The fuel-reprocessing industry in the UK has reported only one criticality accident in which fissile material managed to come together accidentally in a supercritical configuration. Just about every other country that has tried to separate plutonium from uranium in spent reactor fuel has experienced at least one such excursion, and this was Britain’s. This incident at the Windscale Works on August 24, 1970, is described by the criticality review committee at

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?

Seeing the value of publication shown by Röntgen’s disclosure, he wrote three articles for the Electrical Review in 1896 describing what it felt like to stick your head in an x-ray beam. The effects were odd. “For instance,” he first wrote, “I find there is a tendency to sleep and I find that time seems to pass quickly.” He speculated that he had discovered an electrical sleep aid, much safer than narcotics. In his next article for 1896, after having spent a lot of time being x-rayed, he observed “painful irritation of the skin, inflammation, and the appearance of blisters … , and in some spots there were open wounds.” In his final article of 1896, published on December 1, he advised staying away from x-rays, “… so it may not happen to somebody else. There are real dangers of Röntgen radiation.