I walked around feeling, in a sense, that people of color, we began at the bottom of a slave ship. We were enslaved; we picked cotton. There was Honest Abe, who wore a top hat and was taller than anyone and who said, 'Enough is enough; slavery must end.' And then, black people could stand up again. But after that, we didn't catch up.
Cotton Owens was leading and daddy was second. They came up on me and I moved over to let them pass. Cotton went on, but daddy bumped me in the rear and my car went right into the wall.
It was so fun to see my hair all brushed out - it looked like caramel-flavored cotton candy!
Thank God I have the seeing eye, that is to say, as I lie in bed I can walk step by step on the fells and rough land seeing every stone and flower and patch of bog and cotton pass where my old legs will never take me again.
Not a breath of air stirred over the free and open prairie; the clouds were like light piles of cotton; and where the blue sky was visible, it wore a hazy and languid aspect.
I loved to get all dusty and ride horses and plant potatoes and cotton.
Without U.S. independence, North America would have remained a rural, non-industrial breadbasket. Blessed as it was with natural resources, agrarian North America would have supplied cotton and beef and lumber to industrial Britain. America would thus be more like Australia - a nice enough place to live, but no kind of world power.
When I was starting, there were wool mills in the U.S. that could make you anything. The U.S. used to produce the most beautiful cotton denim in the world. Now all that is gone.
I wish they'd had electric guitars in cotton fields back in the good old days. A whole lot of things would've been straightened out.
The people among which I lived - and yet live, mainly - made their living from cotton, wheat, cattle, oil, with the usual percentage of business men and professional men.
My dad was a cotton buyer and cotton buyers always considered themselves superior to the rest of the world.
I started to work with cotton fabrics. I used cotton because it's easy to work with, to wash, to take care of, to wear if it's warm or cold. It's great. That was the start.
Cotton Mather is one of those classic figures of American history who can't be left out. One has to explain him or explain him away, redeem him or denounce him.
Bakers get excited over aprons. I love the soft cotton ones with pockets like my gramma and mom wore. They always kept a hankie tucked in one pocket, which wasn't sanitary, but was comforting to the child who needed a tear or nose wiped.
I went to the top of the Cotton Bowl by myself, sat down and cried.
People didn't just wear wedding dresses in the past. They also wore plain cotton shifts beneath them. As pretty as the dresses might be, and as lovely as they might look on display, if a museum doesn't hang the shifts beside them or acknowledge that the shifts existed, that exhibit's incomplete.
My mum was very conscious about fashion, and my dad was born into the tailoring tradition, so fashion has always been my life, although now, really, I wear the same thing - just in different weights - light and heavy cashmere in winter and cotton in summer. And jeans.
I was never very good at picking cotton, and then I only made fifty cents or $1 a day. People would work for $1 a day during the Depression. So we would get $2 for playing music and just having fun. I think that as a result of that it was not just the money, but we enjoyed doing it.
'High Cotton' is more conscious of class than 'Black Deutschland.'
The usual way of growing cotton is highly petrochemical-intensive, requiring 110 pounds of nitrogen fertilizer per acre. Some of the fertilizer is broken down by soil bacteria into nitrate, a toxic and highly soluble chemical that can leach into groundwater or get washed into lakes, creating oxygenless dead zones.
I am a huge fan of big cotton underpants; they're comfortable. I wear them every day.
I'll tell you, my dad played and sang, and it didn't take me long to figure out that playing a guitar was a whole lot better than getting ahold of a hoe handle or chopping cotton, man.
What was very interesting to me about Clementine Hunter's work is that she couldn't read or write, and she has recorded history of the plantation life and the southern part of the U.S. - the cotton harvests, pecan picking, washing clothes, funerals, marriages - in pictures.
Just because you want to wear organic cotton doesn't mean you have to spend an arm and a leg.
There's a catharsis in cutting down trees. But there's absolutely none of that in picking cotton. It's maddening! It's fiddly, and it pricks your fingers, and it's something that's a very hard skill if you have no alacrity for it.
I was born and grew up in Fitzgerald, way down in south Georgia. It was a mill town and my family ran the cotton mill. My grandfather was mayor many times and my family felt deeply rooted to that spot.
Just as much as the United States mattered to cotton, cotton mattered to the United States. Cotton reinvigorated slavery, established the young nation's place in the global economy, and eventually helped create the political and economic conflicts that resulted in civil war.
I'm not suggesting that microbial cellulose is going to be a replacement for cotton, leather or other textile materials. But I do think it could be quite a smart and sustainable addition to our increasingly precious natural resources.
Metro was really a star-builder, no doubt about that. You were wrapped in cotton wool.
I'd have to pick cotton for a year to make what I'd make in a week in L.A.
Cotton candy is the most amazing form of caramelization ever invented by man.
My grandmother, who picked cotton, and my mom, who picked cotton as a child - my grandmother had a work ethic. She had 13 children that she had to raise and ended up for a time moving into the projects, but because my grandmother had a work ethic, she didn't stay in the projects... that's not how she wanted to raise her children.
I grew up hard. I picked cotton and plowed with the mule and fixed the cars and played with the guitar and the piano.
Okra is the closest thing to nylon I've ever eaten. It's like they bred cotton with a green bean. Okra, tastes like snot. The more you cook it, the more it turns into string.
Thread count is actually a lie. Just because a thread count is 1,500 on a set of sheets doesn't mean that they're well-made sheets. Truly, the quality of the cotton and the quality of the way something is woven is much more important than thread count.
I was so glad to get out of the cotton patch and stop pickin' cotton, I wouldn't of cared who come by and said, 'I'll take you to Chicago.'