“IGNORANCE I didn’t know love would make me this crazy, with my eyes like the river Ceyhun carrying me in its rapids out to sea, where every bit of shattered boat sinks to the bottom. An alligator lifts its head and swallows the ocean, then the ocean floor becomes a desert covering the alligator in sand drifts. Changes do happen. I do not know how, or what remains of what has disappeared into the absolute. I hear so many stories and explanations, but I keep quiet, because I don’t know anything, and because something I swallowed in the ocean has made me completely content with ignorance.” – Rumi
“You’ve got forever; and somehow you can’t do much with it. You’ve got forever; and it’s a mile wide and an inch deep and full of alligators.” – Jim Thompson
“All the pictures on the walls, they all white as lilies and smiling like alligators.” – Charlaine Harris
“I’m also fascinated by the difference between terror and fear. Fear says, “Do not actually put your hand in the alligator,” while terror says, “Avoid Florida entirely because alligators exist.” – Mira Grant
“I dislike the word ’emerging artist.’ Emerging connotes to me an alligator coming up from the water. I consider all artists to be artists, not rising, emerging, amateur, beginning, but the real thing.” – Jack White
“Turn the goddam music up! My heart feels like an alligator!” – Hunter S. Thompson
“If I could rest anywhere, it would be in Arkansas, where the men are of the real half-horse, half-alligator breed such as grows nowhere else on the face of the universal earth.” – Davy Crockett
“Once when I was golfing in Georgia, I hooked the ball into the swamp. I went in after it and found an alligator wearing a shirt with a picture of a little golfer on it.” – Buddy Hackett
“Down in Louisiana where the alligators grow so mean, there lived a girl that I swear to the world made the alligators look tame.” – Tony Joe White
“Really, it was difficult to determine which I had most reason to fear—dogs, alligators or men!” – Solomon Northup
“Never insult an alligator until after you have crossed the river.” – Cordell Hull
“See you later, alligator. After a while, crocodile.” – Bill Haley
“The sensation of writing a book is the sensation of spinning, blinded by love and daring. It is the sensation of a stunt pilot’s turning barrel rolls, or an inchworm’s blind rearing from a stem in search of a route. At its worst, it feels like alligator wrestling, at the level of the sentence.” – Annie Dillard
“Nobody in the city of Los Angeles knows how to catch an alligator, … We have no experience in recreation and parks, the zoo or animal control.” – Janice Hahn
“Feed the alligators and you get bigger alligators.” – Helen Gurley Brown
“Writing fantasy lets me imagine a great deal more than, say, writing about alligators, and lets me write about places more distant than Florida, but I can tell you things about Florida and alligators, let you make the connection all on your own.” – Terry Brooks
“Maybe humans are just the pet alligators that God flushed down the toilet.” – Chuck Palahniuk
“Writing is the hardest way of earning a living, with the possible exception of wrestling alligators.” – Richard Miller
“It’s hard, when you’re up to your armpits in alligators, to remember you came here to drain the swamp.” – Ronald Reagan
“Besides alligators, the only animals to be feared are the poisonous serpents. These are certainly common enough in the forest, but no fatal accident happened during the whole time of my residence.” – Henry Walter Bates
“My father being an outdoors person, he used to take us on quite a few adventures thorugh the wild areas down there, introducing us to alligators and rattlesnakes and all the trees and plants.” – Jim Fowler
“If five years from now we solve the access problem, but what we’re hearing is all encrypted, I’ll probably, if I’m still here, be talking about that in a very different way: the objective is the same. The objective is for us to get those conversations whether they’re by an alligator clip or ones and zeros. Whoever they are, whatever they are, I need them.” – Louis J. Freeh
“I’ve wrestled with alligators, I’ve tussled with a whale. I done handcuffed lightning And throw thunder in jail. You know I’m bad. just last week, I murdered a rock, Injured a stone, Hospitalized a brick. I’m so mean, I make medicine sick.” – Muhammad Ali
“I spent most of my 20s with these alligator wrestlers in the swamps of South Florida.” – Karen Russell
“Alligator: The crocodile of America, superior in every detail to the crocodile of the effete monarchies of the Old World.” – Ambrose Bierce
“Alligators and crocodiles are some of the most aggressive creatures on the planet – they’ll take down a boat if you come up to their nest.” – Jack Hanna
“People wrestle alligators but not once has someone done it without an audience.” – Doug Stanhope
“A gun is not a weapon! It’s a tool, like a butcher’s knife, or a harpoon, or an alligator.” – Homer
“Au revoir, jewelled alligators and white hotels, hallucinatory forests, farewell.” – J. G. Ballard
“You know you’re old when someone compliments you on your alligator shoes, and you’re barefoot.” – Phyllis Diller
“I’m that same David Crockett, fresh from the backwoods, half-horse, half-alligator, a little touched with the snapping turtle; can wade the Mississippi, leap the Ohio, ride upon a streak of lightning, and slip without a scratch down a honey locust [tree].” – Davy Crockett
“If all I can say is I’m not in this swamp, I’m not in this swamp then there is not a rope in front of me and there is not an alligator behind me and there is not a girl sitting at the edge eating a hot dog and if I believe that, then dying would be the only answer because then Death couldn’t come and say Peachy to me anymore and after all she has a brother who believes in hope.” – Tori Amos
“Places like Hilton Head, with water adjacency and nice climates, are in high demand, and land values are insane. In the case of Hilton Head, which was developed in 1970 on what had been a mosquito- and alligator-infested swampy barrier island, land value has leaped from nearly zero to now unaffordable.” – Susan Orlean
