"Life on the Mississippi" Quotes

When I was a boy, there was but one permanent ambition among my comrades in our village on the west bank of the Mississippi River.

It is a remarkable river in this: that instead of widening toward its mouth, it grows narrower; grows narrower and deeper.

The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book—a book that was a dead language to the uneducated passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice.

The Mississippi River will always have its own way; no engineering skill can persuade it to do otherwise...

A pilot in those days was the only unfettered and entirely independent human being that lived in the earth.

The river was in the nature of a surprise to me.