One story recounts that a Tennessean, after a single day in the then almost impenetrable tangle of cypress, briars, and canebreaks, pestered by myriads of mosquitoes, and bogged in the heavy gumbo mud, declared: “Arkansas is not part of the world for which Jesus Christ died—I want none of it.”
—Administration in the State of Arka, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
The annals of this voracious beach! who could write them, unless it were a shipwrecked sailor? How many who have seen it have seen it only in the midst of danger and distress, the last strip of earth which their mortal eyes beheld. Think of the amount of suffering which a single strand had witnessed! The ancients would have represented it as a sea-monster with open jaws, more terrible than Scylla and Charybdis.
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
Oh, the army. Well I planted twenty-four gardens the first ten years of our marriage. Never stayed long enough to see a single bloom.
—Frank S. Nugent (1908–1965)