Quotes & Sayings About Appalachia

I went to a large consolidated school in Appalachia. And I wrote the story when I was in the second grade and I took it up to the third floor to the school newspaper office that was written and edited by juniors and seniors. — Tom Robbins

I grew up in southwestern Virginia. I was born in South Carolina, but only because my parents had a vacation cabin or something there on the beach. I was like a summer baby. But I did grow up in the South. I grew up in serious, serious Appalachia, in a very small town. — William Gibson

In school, they tell us the Capitol was built in a place once called the Rockies. District 12 was in a region known as Appalachia. Even hundreds of years ago, they mined coal here. Which is why our miners have to dig so deep. — Suzanne Collins

Pizzerias in big cities benefit from Italian natives or descendants thereof, people who understand that real pizza comes from Naples where the crusts are thin and the toppings simple. Samantha's favorite was Lazio's, a hole-in-the-wall in Tribeca where the cooks yelled in Italian as they baked the crusts in brick ovens. Like most things in her life these days, Lazio's was far away. So was the pizza. The only place in Brady to get one to go was a sub shop in a cheap strip mall. Pizza Hut, along with most other national chains, had not penetrated deep into the small towns of Appalachia. — John Grisham

Appalachia was Appalachia, regardless of boundaries someone had set an eternity ago. A land of breathtaking beauty, of steep hills and rolling mountains — John Grisham

My parents were not affluent people and were not - didn't come from the extremities of education. My mother had a high school diploma. I often think I so wish she'd come out of the hills in Appalachia and been able to go on to college. I think she would have made a wonderful teacher. — Dwight Yoakam

Think of all the mesquite in Texas, the pinyon pines, the acorns in Appalachia, every place has the possibility of mass production. It's an infrastructural system so nestled in ecology, it's a more beautiful ecology. — Joel Salatin

Your own forefathers killed to have and hold the land where you were born, and sought to extinguish the memories and souls of those that were slain. What of those who prayed in the mountains of Appalachia for thousands of years? That to me is an abomination, although it is the way of men. — Bruce Lee Bond

It's not enough to celebrate the ideals that we're built on, liberty and justice and equality for all. Those just can't be words on paper, the work of every generation is to make those words mean something, concrete in the lives of our children. And we won't get there as long as kids in Baltimore or Ferguson or New York or Appalachia or the Mississippi delta or the Pine Ridge reservation believe that their lives are somehow worthless. — Barack Obama

Nothing else in the whole wide world matters as much as avenging your sister. — Jason Jack Miller

Deep Southerners assumed Appalachia would rally to the Confederacy because of a shared doctrine of white supremacy. Instead, Borderlanders did as they always had: they took up arms against whatever enemy they felt was the greatest threat, and fought ferociously against them. To the planters' shock, most Appalachian people regarded them as a greater threat to their liberty than the Yankees. — Colin Woodard

Historians will come to their own judgments about President Kennedy. Here is how I choose to remember him. He was an heir to wealth who felt the anguish of the poor. He was an orator of excellence who spoke for the voiceless. He was a son of Harvard who reached out to the sons and daughters of Appalachia. He was a man of special grace who had a special care for the retarded and handicapped. He was a hero of war who fought hardest for peace. He said and proved in word and deed that one man can make a difference. — Edward Kennedy

If it ran, a Bean would shoot it. If it fell, a Bean would eat it. — Carolyn Chute

We can decide that the presence of cancer-causing substances in our air, water, and food is too expensive. A 2009 study, for example, has found that coal miners in Appalachia costs the region five times more in premature deaths, including from cancer, than it provides to the region in jobs, taxes, and economic benefits. In California, the production and use of hazardous chemicals cost the state $2.6 billion in 2004 alone in lost wages and health-care expenses to treat workers and children with pollution-linked diseases. — Sandra Steingraber

There is extreme poverty in Appalachia, where I was, and increasingly poverty is not just an urban thing. — Shane Claiborne

The end of coal in Appalachia doesn't mean that America is running out of coal (there's plenty left in Wyoming). But it should end the fantasy that coal can be an engine of job creation - the big open pit mines in Wyoming employ a tiny fraction of the number of people in an underground mine in Appalachia. — Jeff Goodell

While traditionalism can thwart the planners and molders of industry, education, and society in general, fatalism can so stultify a people that passive resignation becomes the approved norm, and acceptance of undesirable conditions becomes the way of life. — Jack E. Weller

Her voice gave me the impression she was surprised I was capable of good ideas. It was the kind of tone city people used down here when they ordered a large coffee and called it a "Venti Americano." I milled this over, plus her earlier words about backwoods Appalachia, and came to the conclusion she thought I was a hick.

Now, I admit, we have our fair share of hicks in Green Valley, Tennessee. We have hicks, hillbillies, rednecks, bumpkins, and the occasional reclusive yokel. But I was none of these things — Penny Reid

For better or worse, the bulk of coal industry jobs are in Appalachia - and when that coal is gone, so are the jobs. — Jeff Goodell

As the economies of Kentucky and West Virginia lagged behind those of their neighbors, the mountains had only two products that the industrial economies of the North needed: coal and hill people. And Appalachia exported a lot of both. Precise — J.D. Vance

I am not only from Appalachia; I am of Appalachia. — Linda Scott Derosier

These were the hills of my blood, the land my father and all his fathers before him had worked and loved in, toiling in the coal mines, working the soil of their land, and falling in love with women who would give them proud Kentucky sons and daughters. For the first time since I'd been a little boy, I felt fierce with the love of home, of these mountains, of the people who lived here, trying, failing, trying again, hanging on by their fingernails to their God-given pride and their enduring love of Appalachia. — Mia Sheridan

Well, you know what they say."

"What's that?"

"If you can't keep it in your pants, keep it in the family."

His eyes bulged, and he choked on his astonishment, throwing me a shocked glance.

Poor adorable Ranger Jethro. He looked like he didn't know whether to laugh or shriek in horror. I'd shocked his delicate man-sensibilities.

He coughed out a strangled response, "I've never heard that before."

"Really? I would have thought - well, you know. Being up here, in the backwoods of Appalachia . . ."

Oh. Shit.

"Did I just say that out loud?" I groaned and shut my eyes.

"Yes. You certainly did. — Penny Reid

We're all Hitler inside. We're all Christ inside. I'm not keen on the idea, but it's true, isn't it? We've all got a little bit of the devil in us. — Jason Jack Miller

You can't have nine children and not be organized. Otherwise it just looks like Appalachia. — Danielle Steel

Considerable thought was given in early Congresses to the possibility of renaming the country. From the start, many people recognized that United States of America was unsatisfactory. For one thing, it allowed of no convenient adjectival form. A citizen would have to be either a United Statesian or some other such clumsy locution, or an American, thereby arrogating to ourselves a title that belonged equally to the inhabitants of some three dozen other nations on two continents. Several alternatives to America were actively considered -Columbia, Appalachia, Alleghania, Freedonia or Fredonia (whose denizens would be called Freeds or Fredes)- but none mustered sufficient support to displace the existing name. — Bill Bryson

What's popular in places considered ghettos - whether that's the inner city or Appalachia - is having a decent quality of life. — Majora Carter

Appalachia, my state, eastern Kentucky, has a large amount of poverty. — Rand Paul

It didn't help my career to be living in Appalachia. — Sally Mann

Despite its reputation, Appalachia - especially northern Alabama and Georgia to southern Ohio - has far lower church attendance than the Midwest, parts of the Mountain West, and much of the space between Michigan and Montana. Oddly enough, we think we attend church more than we actually do. In a recent Gallup poll, Southerners and Midwesterners reported the highest rates of church attendance in the country. Yet actual church attendance is much lower in the South. — J.D. Vance

If it ran, a Bean would eat it. If it fell, a Bean would eat it. — Carolyn Chute

It's Coke, my man. You really think I'm going to let you pour any more alcohol into your body tonight? — Jason Jack Miller

Preston Black couldn't sleep the whole night through, Preston Black couldn't sleep the whole night through. He'd lay in bed 'til the morning came, but the devil'd visit him just the same. Preston Black couldn't sleep the whole night through. — Jason Jack Miller

You are not a handgun. More like a pellet gun. Maybe even a slingshot. — Jason Jack Miller

Yeah, I spent my teen years in West Virginia, and when I was a kid, in Louisiana. I definitely have that exposure to two different sorts of rural: the South and Appalachia. — Sam Trammell

Yeah, but a hellbender never dies. You ever see a dead one? — Jason Jack Miller

But overall, Obama's record on the environment has been uninspired - and that's putting it kindly. He hasn't stopped coal companies from blowing up mountaintops and devastating large regions of Appalachia. — Jeff Goodell

What on earth would I do if four bears came into my camp? Why, I would die of course. Literally shit myself lifeless. — Bill Bryson

Music lets you write your own checks. Don't ever forget that. — Jason Jack Miller

I live in southern Appalachia, so I'm surrounded by people who work very hard for barely a living wage. It's particularly painful that people are working the farms their parents and grandparents worked but aren't living nearly as well. — Barbara Kingsolver

Maybe it was because I was raised in Appalachia, raised in faith and poverty and little else, but I believed in things like fate and destiny. I believed in angels, and I believed in God's ability to direct our paths, to guide us and move us in unseen ways, and I believed in miracles. Suddenly, Finn Clyde felt like a miracle, and I felt sure that Minnie had sent him to me. — Amy Harmon

The American woods have been unnerving people for 300 years. The inestimably priggish and tiresome Henry David Thoreau thought nature was splendid, splendid indeed, so long as he could stroll to town for cakes and barley wine, but when he experienced real wilderness, on a vist to Katahdin in 1846, he was unnerved to the cored. This wasn't the tame world of overgrown orchards and sun-dappled paths that passed for wilderness in suburban Concord, Massachusetts, but a forbiggind, oppressive, primeval country that was "grim and wild ... savage and dreary," fit only for "men nearer of kin to the rocks and wild animals than we." The experience left him, in the words of one biographer, "near hysterical. — Bill Bryson

Because they [Americans] want to be thought of as a rich nation, they are very ashamed of this place [Appalachia] that has come to represent poverty, even though poverty exists all over the country, and exists as much in urban areas as it does in rural, if not more. — Silas House

Asked. So far, in her brief time in Appalachia, she had become convinced that every five families had their own tiny church with a leaning white steeple. There were churches everywhere, all believing in the inerrancy of the Holy Scripture but evidently agreeing on little else. — Anonymous

They travel through the heartland, past cold factories and drifty towns, to the old, old mountains slumbering east of Tennessee. — Sarah Sullivan

Here's how I'll tell you what I think - if you see white smoke then you know I picked a new pope. And if I'm drinking a Snapple then you know I don't give a shit. — Jason Jack Miller

Appalachia is still, for American musicians, a kind of fountain of youth we always go back to, the old home place to a group of artists who represent the quintessence of American independence, fortitude, genius, and madness. — Paul Burch

It was still late summer elsewhere, but here, high in Appalachia, fall was coming; for the last three mornings, she'd been able to see her breath.
The woods, which started twenty feet back from her backdoor like a solid wall, showed only hints of the impending autumn. A few leaves near the treetops had turned, but most were full and green. Visible in the distance, the Widow's Tree towered above the forest. Its leaves were the most stubborn, tenaciously holding on sometimes until spring if the winter was mild. It was a transitional period, when the world changed its cycle and opened a window during which people might also change, if they had the inclination. — Alex Bledsoe