““East Texas is red dirt – not red, in sober truth, but the orange of rust, which it basically is, ferrous oxide – and magnolias and azaleas and dogwoods, old fields long since cottoned-out, far from the Mississippi River bottomlands that were ‘rich as six feet up a bull’s ass’: a land of hogs and hominy, and a tangled, grim past of slavery and segregation. It could as easily be the country as far eastwards of the Mississippi as it is west: it would fit all too readily into the area between Brandon and Meridian, Mississippi, hard by the Bienville National Forest.””
![“... in 1912, although he, more even than other members of the Senate and the House, thought himself presidential timber (a delusion from which vanishingly few senators and representatives are wholly free when they gaze enraptured into their mirrors of a morning), Senator [William Alden] Smith…” quote by Markham Shaw Pyle](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/d6b/markham-shaw-pyle-22408_congress_in-1912-although-he-more-even-than-other_191616.jpg)
![“Show me you care about our common tongue. Bring to your [writing] passion, deeply informed by knowledge of your subject. Stay me, not with apples and flagons, but with wit and grace, humor and intense caring about your discipline. Don't slack, don't give it a lick and a promise, don't make it…” quote by Markham Shaw Pyle](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/9ec/markham-shaw-pyle-22408_authors_show-me-you-care-about-our-common-tongue_515202.jpg)
