Quotes About Cotton Fields

“There was a land of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields called the Old South. Here in this pretty world, Gallantry took its last bow. Here was the last ever to be seen of Knights and their Ladies Fair, of Master and of Slave. Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered, a Civilization gone with the wind ...”

— Ben Hecht

“But he was so young then that later he was only able to remember fragments of what happened next: the lull of the morning fields, the springy cotton flanks of the sheep, the suddenness of the tumble down the deep hole in which he would spend the night, alone, gazing up at the puzzled sheep, and hours later, Mother Vera's thoughtful, dawn-lit face hovering over the mouth of the hole.”

— Téa Obreht

“I wish they'd had electric guitars in cotton fields back in the good old days. A whole lot of things would've been straightened out.”

— Jimi Hendrix

“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”

— Stephen Jay Gould

“Let me also say I wanna make you sandwhiches,
And soup,
And peanut butter cookies,
Though, the truth is peanutbutter is actually really bad for you 'cause they grow peanuts in old cotton fields to clean the toxins out of the soil,
But hey, you like peanutbutter and I like you!”

— Andrea Gibson

“A resistless feeling of depression falls slowly upon us, despite the gaudy sunshine and the green cotton-fields. This, then, is the Cotton Kingdom
the shadow of a marvelous dream.”

— W.E.B. Du Bois

“As a kid, on the cotton fields, I had this tune in my head. I hummed it and sang it. It was the same melody as 'When A Man Loves A Woman.' I could never, ever forget it.”

— Percy Sledge

“I was a little boy singing sad songs, about 9 or 10 years old in the woods. I listened to my voice coming back to me. It was as high as you could go. I dreamed of being famous as a singer when I was on those cotton fields. I wanted to see the world and meet people.”

— Percy Sledge

“My childhood home backed onto wheat and cotton fields.”

— Robert B. Laughlin

“I had never, ever drunk beer in high school, and by the time I got to Tech we were having these parties out in the cotton fields and getting so drunk. I was the champion beer drinker; suddenly I was pouring it down my throat ... Insane! Insane!”

— Bob Livingston

“After all those days in the cotton fields, the dreams came true on a gold record on a piece of wood. It's in my den where I can look at it every day. I wear it out lookin' at it.”

— Carl Perkins

“He was staring off across the long broad fields, raising his eyes above the red clay soil to the horizon, looking across the fiery-red plains of Hell with its endless gauntlet of dead-brown imps
the cotton, the cotton, cotton, cotton
closing his eyes to them and seeing only the horizon and its towering ranks of derricks. Steel giants, snorting and chuckling amongst themselves; sneering wonderingly at the cotton and the bent-backed pigmies admist it. Huffing and puffing and belching up gold.”

— Jim Thompson

“I used to work in the cotton fields a lot when I was young. There were a lot of African Americans working out there. A lot of Mexicans - the blacks and the whites and the Mexicans, all out there singing, and it was like an opera in the cotton fields, and I can still hear it in the music that I write and play today.”

— Willie Nelson

“She walks barefoot into the humid night, moonlight on her freckled shoulders. Near a huge, live oak tree on the edge of her father's cotton fields, Sidda looks up into the sky. In the crook of the crescent moon sits the Holy Lady, with strong muscles and a merciful heart. She kicks her splendid legs like the moon is her swing and the sky, her front porch. She waves down at Sidda like she has just spotted an old buddy.
Sidda stands in the moonlight and lets the Blessed Mother love every hair on her six-year-old head. Tenderness flows down from the moon and up from the earth. For one fleeting, luminous moment, Sidda Walker knows there has never been a time when she has not been loved.”

— Rebecca Wells

“The South is full of memories and ghosts of the past. For me, it is the most inspiring place to write, from William Faulkner's haunted antebellum home to the banks of the Mississippi to the wind that whispers through the cotton fields.”

— Alexandra Adornetto

“The cotton was open and spilling into the fields; the very air smelled of it. In field after field as he passed along the pickers, arrested in stooping attitudes, seemed fixed amid the constant surf of bursting bolls like piles in surf, the long, partly-filled sacks streaming away behind them like rigid frozen flags. The air was hot, vivid and breathless
a final fierce concentration of the doomed and dying summer.”

— William Faulkner

“Negroes
Sweet and docile,
Meek, humble, and kind:
Beware the day
They change their minds!
Wind
In the cotton fields,
Gentle breeze:
Beware the hour
It uproots trees!”

— Langston Hughes

“I was influenced a lot by those around me - there was a lot of singing that went on in the cotton fields.”

— Willie Nelson

“I am a woman who came from the cotton fields of the South. From there I was promoted to the washtub. From there I was promoted to the cook kitchen. And from there I promoted myself into the business of manufacturing hair goods and preparations ... I have built my own factory on my own ground.”

— Madam C. J. Walker

“Every day before supper and before we went to services on Sundays my grandmother would read the Bible to me, and my grandfather would pray. We even had devotions before going to pick cotton
in the fields. Prayer and the Bible, became a part of my everyday thoughts and beliefs. I learned to put my trust in God and to seek Him as my strength”

— Rosa Parks

“Gone are the days when my heart was young and gay,
Gone are my friends from the cotton fields away,
Gone from the earth to a better land I know,
I hear their gentle voices calling Old Black Joe.”

— Stephen Foster

“African Americans were responsible for creating a lot of this beautiful and elaborate ironwork; we weren't just working in the cotton fields.”

— Philip Freelon

“I think most people when you say slavery tend to see a group of anonymous people pulling cotton sacks in great plantation fields, and that is largely true.”

— Alex Haley

“My mother told me to keep on singing, and that kept me working through the cotton fields. She said God has his hand on you. You'll be singing for the world someday.”

— Johnny Cash

“I started learning my lessons in Abbot Texas, where I was born in 1933. My sister Bobbie and I were raised by our grandparents [ ... ] We never had enough money, and Bobbie and I started working at an early age to help the family get by. That hard work included picking cotton. [ ... ] Picking cotton is hard and painful work, and the most lasting lesson I learned in the fields was that I didn't want to spend my life picking cotton.”

— Willie Nelson