Louisiana
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Louisiana (French: Louisiane; Spanish: Luisiana; Louisiana Creole: Lwizyàn) is a state in the Deep South and South Central regions of the United States. It borders Texas to the west, Arkansas to the north, and Mississippi to the east. Of the 50 U.S. states, it ranks 20th in land area and the 25th in population, with roughly 4.6 million residents. Reflecting its French heritage, Louisiana is the only U.S. state with political subdivisions termed parishes, which are equivalent to counties, making it one of only two U.S. states not subdivided into counties (the other being Alaska and its boroughs). Baton Rouge is the state's capital, and New Orleans, a French Louisiana region, is its largest city with a population of about 383,000 people. Louisiana has a coastline with the Gulf of Mexico to the south; a large part of its eastern boundary is demarcated by the Mississippi River.
Quotes
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the biggest shrimp and sugar cane,
the finest oysters
and sweet strawberries
from Toledo Bend to New Orleans.
- Louisiana is a fresh-air mental asylum.
- James Lee Burke, Pegasus Descending (2006)
- So we pour it [P.G.] in a Pernod bottle and start for New Orleans past iridescent lakes and orange gas flares, and swamps and garbage heaps, alligators crawling around in broken bottles and tin cans, neon arabesques of motels, marooned pimps scream obscenities at passing cars from islands of rubbish ... New Orleans is a dead museum.
- William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch (1959), ch. 1
- Louisiana my Louisiana
the place where I was borne.
White fields of cotton —
green fields of clover,
the best fishing
and long tall corn;
Crawfish gumbo and jambalaya
the biggest shrimp and sugar cane,
the finest oysters
and sweet strawberries
from Toledo Bend to New Orleans.- Jimmie Davis and Charles Mitchell, "You Are My Sunshine" (1940) [1]
- Give me Louisiana,
The state where I was born
The state of snowy cotton,
The best I've ever known;
A state of sweet magnolias
And creole melodies. - A state of old tradition,
Of old plantation days
Makes good old Louisiana
The sweetest of all states.- Doralice Fontane, "Give Me Louisiana" (1970)
- Louisiana was as close to south Asia as the United States could get: it had spicy food, humidity, giant cockroaches and a corrupt government.
- Sal Khan, The One World Schoolhouse (2012), as quoted in Richard Adams, "Sal Khan: the man who tutored his cousin – and started a revolution", The Guardian (April 23, 2013) online
- There is a New Orleans city accent... associated with downtown New Orleans, particularly with the German and Irish Third Ward, that is hard to distinguish from the accent of Hoboken, Jersey City, and Astoria, Long Island, where the Al Smith inflection, extinct in Manhattan, has taken refuge. The reason, as you might expect, is that the same stocks that brought the accent to Manhattan imposed it on New Orleans. “You’re right on that. We’re Mediterranean. I’ve never been to Greece or Italy, but I’m sure I’d be at home there as soon as I landed.” He would, too, I thought. New Orleans resembles Genoa or Marseilles, or Beirut or the Egyptian Alexandria more than it does New York, although all seaports resemble one another more than they can resemble any place in the interior. Like Havana and Port-au-Prince, New Orleans is within the orbit of a Hellenistic world that never touched the North Atlantic. The Mediterranean, Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico form a homogeneous, though interrupted, sea.
- A. J. Liebling, The Earl of Louisiana (1960)
- Concede that the new government of Louisiana is only to what it should be as the egg is to the fowl, we shall sooner have the fowl by hatching the egg than by smashing it.
- Abraham Lincoln, Last public address, delivered in Washington, D.C. (April 11, 1865)
- One of these days the people of Louisiana are going to get good government — and they aren’t going to like it.
- Huey Long, attributed in Ned Sherrin (ed.) The Oxford Dictionary of Humorous Quotations (1995)
- Louisiana in September was like an obscene phone call from nature. The air – moist, sultry, secretive, and far from fresh – felt as if it were being exhaled into one's face. Sometimes it even sounded like heavy breathing. Honeysuckle, swamp flowers, magnolia, and the mystery smell of the river scented the atmosphere, amplifying the intrusion of organic sleaze. It was aphrodisiac and repressive, soft and violent at the same time. In New Orleans, in the French Quarter, miles from the barking lungs of alligators, the air maintained this quality of breath, although here it acquired a tinge of metallic halitosis, due to fumes expelled by tourist buses, trucks delivering Dixie beer, and, on Decatur Street, a mass-transit motor coach named Desire.
- Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume (1984)
- "Oh, Miss Inez," Mrs. Reilly called in that accent that occurs south of New Jersey only in New Orleans, that Hoboken near the Gulf of Mexico. "Over here, babe."
- John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces (wr. 1960s; pub. 1980)
- There may be a few costumes. That’s what’s so wonderful about New Orleans. You can masquerade and Mardi Gras all year round if you want to. Really, sometimes the Quarter is like one big costume ball.
- John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces
