Oklahoma Quotes

“Oklahoma is very beautiful, and Eric loves beauty, but he already has that in you.”
― Charlaine Harris, Dead Reckoning

“There are certain men who are sacrosanct in history; you touch on the truth of them at your peril. These are such men as Socrates and Plato, Pericles and Alexander, Caesar and Augustus, Marcus Aurelius and Trajan, Martel and Charlemagne, Edward the Confessor and William of Falaise, St. Louis and Richard and Tancred, Erasmus and Bacon, Galileo and Newton, Voltaire and Rousseau, Harvey and Darwin, Nelson and Wellington. In America, Penn and Franklin, Jefferson and Jackson and Lee. There are men better than these who are not sacrosanct, who may be challenged freely. But these men may not be. Albert Pike has been elevated to this sacrosanct company, though of course to a minor rank. To challenge his rank is to be overwhelmed by a torrent of abuse, and we challenge him completely.

Looks are important to these elevated. Albert Pike looked like Michelangelo's Moses in contrived frontier costume. Who could distrust that big man with the great beard and flowing hair and godly glance?
If you dislike the man and the type, then he was pompous, empty, provincial and temporal, dishonest, and murderous. But if you like the man and the type, then he was impressive, untrammeled, a man of the right place and moment, flexible or sophisticated, and firm.
These are the two sides of the same handful of coins.
He stole (diverted) Indian funds and used them to bribe doubtful Indian leaders. He ordered massacres of women and children (exemplary punitive operations). He lied like a trooper (he was a trooper). He effected assassinations (removal of semi-military obstructions). He forged names to treaties (astute frontier politics). He was part of a weird plot by men of both the North and South to extinguish the Indians whoever should win the war (devotion to the ideal of national growth ) . He personally arranged twelve separate civil wars among the Indians (the removal of the unfit) . After all, those were war years; and he did look like Moses, and perhaps he sounded like him.”
― R.A. Lafferty, Okla Hannali

“I came to the state twenty years ago from the South, the gothic South. I’ve heard it called that, haven’t you, Mister Morgan? ‘Thought I was gettin’ away from all that. You know, the Tennessee Williams’ decadence, the Huey Long corruption, the brewin’ and simmerin’ violence. I actually found that I kind of missed it. Then, I found out it was all here, too, but without the charm.”
― Jackson Burnett, The Past Never Ends

“You know you're down and out when Okies laugh at you,' she said. With our garbage bag taped window, our tied down hood, and art supplies strapped to the roof, we'd out-Okied the Okies.”
― Jeannette Walls, The Glass Castle

“Honestly, I'd rather be anywhere else. Even home, where my dad begins almost every conversation with, "You should lose the black clothes and wear something with color." Puh-lease. Like I want to look like every Barbie clone in Hell High, a.k.a. Oklahoma's insignificant Haloway High School. Ironically, Dad doesn't appreciate the bright blue streaks in my originally blond/now-dyed-black hair. Go figure. That's color, right?”
― Gena Showwalter

“Anything can have happened in Oklahoma. Practically everything has.”
― Edna Ferber, Cimarron

“We’ve measured the wingspan at twenty-five feet,” the crime tech concluded.
“Well, that’s no scissor-tailed flycatcher,” Shane scoffed. “What could they possibly belong to?”
Ramon shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine. Nothin’ natural that size lives around here, that’s for sure.”
― Tabi Slick, Tompkin's School For The Dearly Departed

“I come to Oklahoma, thinking that it’ll be hard to write about the dead, but it has proven harder to write about the living, about those who’ll have to read themselves through my eyes.”
― Jax Miller, Hell in the Heartland: Murder, Meth, and the Case of Two Missing Girls

“Given the pandemic and remote schooling, children are now being expected to perform at a higher pace and with greater productivity. The demands not only affect the children, but the demands are overflowing onto their parental caregivers.”
― Asa Don Brown

“She missed the evenings most of all: the grapefruit sun hovering above the prairie, dismissing the day with unpredictable strokes of cantaloupe, fuchsia, and violet.”
― Emily Habeck, Shark Heart

“Another white man, when asked what he did for a living, said by way of an answer that he’d married an Osage woman, and everyone who listened understood what that meant.”
― Linda Hogan, Mean Spirit

“How many of you were born in Oklahoma? Yeah, never raise your hand to a question like that again. We’re the mecca of beer-drinkin’ rednecks.”
― Bryant A. Loney, To Hear The Ocean Sigh

“Will" Rogers, known as "Oklahoma's Favorite Son,” was born on November 4, 1879, in what was then considered Indian Territory. His career included being a cowboy, writer, vaudeville performer, movie star and political wit. He poked fun at politicians, government programs, gangsters and current events, in a home spun and folksy way, making him one of the most idolized people in America. He became the highest paid Hollywood movie star at the time.
Will Rogers died on August 15, 1935 with his friend and pilot Wiley Post, when their small airplane crashed in Alaska. He once said that he wanted his tombstone to read "I joked about every prominent man of my time, but I never met a man I didn’t like.”
― Captain Hank Bracker

“If we can skillfully create something out of nothing and emotionally touch readers, we have done our JOB as #writers and #authors ~ Jodi Lea Stewart”
― Jodi Lea Stewart

“Ev'rythin's up to date in Kansas City
They've gone about as fur as they c'n go.”
― Rodgers & Hammerstein

“I scoffed. Everything in Oklahoma, other than a few buffalo wallows, is at most 130 years old.”
― Jeff Provine, Campus Ghosts of Norman, Oklahoma

“Though Oklahoma is known in African American history circles for its all-Black spaces, like the famed ‘Black Wall Street’ of Tulsa’s Greenwood District, the first Black inhabitants of Indian Territory were those who came as enslaved people with their Native owners. In arguing for their claim to Indian Territory land, these Indian freedpeople utilized the strategies of the first wave of Indian Territory settlers, the members of the Indian nations in which they’d lived.”
― Alaina E. Roberts, I've Been Here All the While: Black Freedom on Native Land

“Apart from Cherokee freedpeople, Cherokee citizens also spoke out against the present of African Americans from the United States. In 1894, the editor of the Cherokee Advocate incited his fellow tribesmen to resist both Black and white migration, telling them to ‘Be men, and fight off the barnacles that now infest our country in the shape of non-citizens, free Arkansas ni—ers, and traitors.’

Anti-Black sentiment like this encouraged Native peoples to ignore Indian freedpeople’s shared histories with their nations and to inaccurately associate them with Black interlopers from the United States. Indian freedpeople fought this attitude by attempting to differentiate themselves. When Mary Grayson was interviewed in 1937 as part of the Works Progress Administration Slave Narrative project, she illustrated this dichotomy, saying ‘I am what we colored people call a ‘native.’ That means I didn’t come into the Indian country from somewhere in the Old South, after the War, like so many Negroes did, but I was born here in the Old Creek Nation and my master was a Creek Indian. Mary felt that her experiences of enslavement were better than those of Black Americans, arguing that ‘I have had people who were slaves of white folks tell me that they had to work awfully hard and their masters were cruel to them, but all the Negroes I knew who belonged to Creeks always had plenty of clothes and lots to eat and we all lived in good log cabins we built.’ Mary clearly demarcated her history and circumstances from those of African Americans from the United States. Mary’s assertion of her identity as a ‘native’ rather than a newcomer (like other Blacks in the West) is reflective of a key component of the settler colonial process—strategic differentiation.”
― Alaina E. Roberts, I've Been Here All the While: Black Freedom on Native Land

“After the move, Chai began losing weight again, like she did during her time at the Dickerson Park Zoo, ultimately losing over 1,000 pounds. The Oklahoma Zoo had trained her to perform for the crowds, and during one of these performances Bamboo attacked her, knocking her into a fence.

On January 30, 2016, Chai was found dead in her cage. The cause of death was determined to be sever fat loss and a systemic blood infection.”
― Emma Marris, Wild Souls: Freedom and Flourishing in the Non-Human World

“Is it like a place? Where is Tarnation?"

O'Malley said, "Think it's in Oklahoma, Bill.”
― Allie Ray, Holler

“Maybe it was because of the speed and danger. Or the psychedelic disco ball and the Beatles. Or the 'Suicide' fountain drinks and the crowded boys bathroom. But Skateland on Lindsey Street was absolutely the place to be in the Sixties.”
― Bill Moore, MORE Memories of an Okie Boomer: Growing up in Norman in the 60s and 70s

“Grampa pulled off his lucky hat and sank into the recliner. Before long, he was snoring like a rusty hymn. 'Zzzzzz . . .'
Uncle Leonard tossed Ray over one shoulder and hauled him into the kitchen, where the smell of frying bacon filled the air.
'Any fish today?” Aunt Wilhelmina asked.
'Yes, ma’am,” Ray said, 'but that’s not all we caught.'
Uncle Leonard sat Ray down. 'What else was there?”
'Something bigger' is all that Ray would say.”
― Cynthia Leitich Smith, Indian Shoes

“Sometimes the lethal power is in the form of the simplest elements of all, air and water, and occasionally in a lifetime it two, we witness grand and theatrical performances by Mother Nature.”
― Sara Niles, The Ice Storm: Nonfiction Short Story

“Sometimes the lethal power is in the form of the simplest elements of all, air and water”
― Sara Niles, The Ice Storm: Nonfiction Short Story

“Another white man, when asked what he did for a living, said by way of an answer that he’d married an Osage woman, and everyone who listened understood what. that meant”
― Linda Hogan, Mean Spirit

“Be so good they can't ignore you. (Steve Martin)

Direction is so much more important than speed.”
― Janelle Meraz Hooper, Geronimo's Laptop: A Historical Fantasy