Quotes & Sayings About Being Southern

Being raised a Jew in southern California in the 1950s and 1960s, my religious training emphasized learning the Hebrew language and Jewish festivals, history, and culture. We also remembered the Holocaust and supported the newly formed Jewish state of Israel. — Rick Strassman

What, in nature," Kit asked, "is the most beautiful thing you've seen? Or the most terrible?"
"The Dismals," Giles answered promptly. "A beautiful aberration in the lay of the land
North Alabama. A section mysteriously lowered, strewn with boulders, ferny, mossy, cooler
the vegetation, they say, typical of Canada. There the creek runs clear, but all other Alabama rivers and waterways are muddy with sediment. I even like the name
the Dismals. An eternal place, disjunct with the climate, the time, and its location."
"You think being dismal is an attractive association with eternity?" I asked.
"It is a cool Eden in the Southern summer heat. What's yours, Una?"
"The Kentucky hills in spring. Layers of pink and white
redbud and dogwood."
"And you?" Giles asked Kit.
"Stars," he said. That was all. — Sena Jeter Naslund

I think that's what's great about being an actress is you get to learn so many different things like that, like learning a little bit of Tibetan here, learning a Southern accent there. — Jaime King

She was happy to be alive and breathing, when her whole being seemed to be one with the sunlight, the color, the odors, the luxuriant warmth of some perfect Southern day. — Kate Chopin

The epithet Sindhusthan besides being Vedic had also a curious advantage which could only be called lucky and yet is too substantial to be ignored. The word Sindhu in Sanskrit does not only mean the Indus but also the Sea-which girdles the southern peninsula - so that this one word Sindhu points out almost all frontiers of the land at a single stroke. Even if we do not accept the tradition that the river Brahmaputra is only a branch of the Sindhu which falls into flowing streams on the eastern and western slopes of the Himalayas and thus constitutes both our eastern as well as western frontiers. still it is indisputably true that it circumscribes our northern and western extremities in its sweep and so the epithet Sindhusthan calls up the image of our whole Motherland : the land that lies between Sindhu and Sindhu - from the Indus to the Seas. — Anonymous

Being Southern isn't talking with an accent...or rocking on a porch while drinking sweet tea, or knowing how to tell a good story. It's how you're brought up -- with Southerners, family (blood kin or not) is sacred; you respect others and are polite nearly to a fault; you always know your place but are fierce about your beliefs. And food along with college football -- is darn near a religion. — Jan Norris

It was true what they said about an American woman's southern drawl being able to melt a man. — Lyla Dune

Writing is an act of faith. One must believe and see people who are invisible to others and be faithful to tell half formed stories. It's like being on the trail of an apparition who's repeatedly just out of reach.
K. Youngblood — Katherine Imogene Youngblood

I am obliged to confess that I do not regard the abolition of slavery as a means of warding off the struggle of the two races in the Southern states. The Negroes may long remain slaves without complaining; but if they are once raised to the level of freemen, they will soon revolt at being deprived of almost all their civil rights; and as they cannot become the equals of the whites, they will speedily show themselves as enemies. — Alexis De Tocqueville

It is of no use mincing the matter; Dr John Marsh, after being regarded by his friends at home as hopelessly unimpressible - in short, an absolute woman-hater - had found his fate on a desolate isle of the Southern seas, he had fallen - nay, let us be just - had jumped over head and ears in love with Pauline Rigonda! Dr Marsh was no sentimental die-away noodle who, half-ashamed, half-proud of his condition, displays it to the semi-contemptuous world. No; after disbelieving for many years in the power of woman to subdue him, he suddenly and manfully gave in - sprang up high into the air, spiritually, and so to speak, turning a sharp somersault, went headlong down deep into the flood, without the slightest intention of ever again returning to the surface. — R.M. Ballantyne

This might be one of the few basements in Southern California, but it was clearly being used the way Juan's family used the garage. — Vernor Vinge

He tried to kiss me. One of the few things that had impressed me in college was a Southern girl's account o how she avoided being kissed on the doorstep of her house once by wearing a flower in her hair and sticking it in her mouth when she said good night. Only I had no flower. — Elaine Dundy

In 1984, I starred in 'Greystoke: The Legend Of Tarzan,' my first movie. My lines ended up being dubbed by Glenn Close, supposedly because my accent was 'too southern'. It was completely humiliating at the time. I became a laughing stock. I'm amazed that I managed to pick myself up and dust myself off. — Andie MacDowell

In addition to being the most beautiful score I have ever sung, 'Piazza' gave me the opportunity to honor the matriarchs of my Southern family. — Victoria Clark

Southern Mamas are known for being subtle, like a freight train. — Shellie Rushing Tomlinson

I am a planter - a cotton planter. I am a Southern man and a slaveholder - a kind and a merciful one, I trust - and none the worse for being a slaveholder. — John C. Calhoun

Country music is basically one-third a part of Southern blood, the other two being church and sweet tea. — Eve Jagger

I went to boarding school Southern, religious, and straight, and I left boarding school not being at all religious and not being straight. — Chris Hughes

This must surely be one of the most astounding documents ever presented to an Ally when engaged in a life and death struggle. For it imposed what was really a veto on the best opportunity of cutting the common enemy's life-line and of protecting our own." By acquiescing to such an outrage, Liddell Hart contended, the British General Staff were essentially "accessories to the crime," that crime being that the British in Egypt had now been given no alternative but to await another assault on the Suez Canal, and to then launch their own attack against the very strongest point of the Turkish line - the narrow front of southern Palestine - an approach that was to ultimately cost them fifty thousand more casualties. — Scott Anderson

You'd think that a redheaded boy with glasses who was named Howard and had an up-down walk would have a lot more to wish for than being friends with me. But I admit I felt a smile on my face and hope in my heart, 'cause maybe wishes really do come true. Maybe some wishes just take longer than others. — Barbara O'Connor

In December 1935, Louie graduated from high school; a few weeks later, he rang in 1936 with his thoughts full of Berlin. The Olympic trials track finals would be held in New York in July, and the Olympic committee would base its selection of competitors on a series of qualifying races. Louie had seven months to run himself onto the team. In the meantime, he also had to figure out what to do about the numerous college scholarships being offered to him. Pete had won a scholarship to the University of Southern California, where he had become one of the nation's top ten college milers. He urged Louie to accept USC's offer but delay entry until the fall, so he could train full-time. So Louie moved into Pete's frat house and, with Pete coaching him, trained obsessively. All day, every day, he lived and breathed the 1,500 meters and Berlin. — Laura Hillenbrand

But the Constitution was made not only for southern and northern states, but for states neither northern nor southern, namely, the western states, their coming in being foreseen and provided for. — William H. Seward

There's nothing worse, I guess, than being black in an all-white church or being southern and being a liberal. — Lee Hazlewood

My daddy wanted me to be a farmer; feel the smoothness of Alabama clay and become one of the first blacks in my town to own land. But, I was worried about my history being caked with that southern clay, and I subscribed to a different kind of teaching and learning in my bones and in my spirit. — John Henrik Clarke

How could you,' Mackey asked, 'how could you, a mathematician, a man devoted to reason and logical proof. . . how could you believe that extra terrestrials are sending you messages? How could you believe that you are being recruited by aliens from outer space to save the world? How could you . . .?' "Nash looked up at last and fixed Mackey with an unblinking stare as cool and dispassionate as that of any bird or snake. 'Because,' Nash said slowly in his soft, reasonable southern drawl, as if talking to himself,'the ideas I had about supernatural beings came to me the same way that my mathematical ideas did. So I took them seriously. — Sylvia Nasar

Meditation turns from its purgatory role to recognize in self-knowledge and in the mind's images of the external world the general essences in which all things have their being. — R.W. Southern

Until 2008 the mosquitoes on Cape Hatteras were the worst I'd ever experienced. That would all change once we stepped foot into Sky Lakes Wilderness in southern Oregon during my second thru-hike of the PCT. The Oregon snowpack during the previous winter had been well above average, which left lingering snow in the high country that summer. P.O.D. and I had been on a faster pace than I had in 2004 on the PCT and we ended up being in Sky Lakes Wilderness about 3 weeks earlier which was theoretically about six weeks earlier considering the timeframe of the snow melt. Long story short, we showed up during the peak of the mosquito season. The mosquitoes in Sky Lakes made those in Cape Hatteras look like lazy houseflies. It was beyond brutal. We were lucky to escape without requiring a transfusion. — Lawton Grinter

This was not a simple case of taking an otherwise normal, well-balanced, rational human being, putting him in a bad situation, and suddenly he turns bad," he said. "I faked it." He explained. The first night was boring. Everyone was just sitting around. "I thought, Someone is spending a lot of money to put this thing on and they're not getting any results. So I thought I'd get some action going." He had just seen the Paul Newman prison movie Cool Hand Luke, in which a sadistic southern prison warden played by Strother Martin persecutes the inmates. So Dave decided to channel him. — Jon Ronson

In the molten fire where he lay he could watch the slow machinations of eternity, the cosmic miracle of each second being born, eggshaped, silverplated, phallic, time thrusting itself gleaming through the worn and worthless husk of the microsecond previous, halting, beginning to show the slow and infinitesimal accreations of decay in the clocking away of life in a mechanism encoded at the moment of conception, withering, shunted aside by time's next orgasmic thrust, and all to the beating of some galactic heart, to voices, a madman's mutterings from a snare in the web of the world. — William Gay

I love that there's this tradition of being able to discuss the heaviest topics and the gnarliest stuff that goes down in people's lives in traditional Southern American music. — Gillian Welch

If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat. It is an unnecessary insult. — Maya Angelou

Sewers are necessary to guarantee the wholesomeness of palaces, according to the Fathers of the Church. And it has often been remarked that the necessity exists of sacrificing one part of the female sex in order to save the other and prevent worse troubles. One of the arguments in support of slavery, advanced by the American supporters of the institution, was that the Southern whites, being all freed from servile duties, could maintain the most democratic and refined relations among themselves; in the same way, a caste of 'shameless women' allows the 'honest woman' to be treated with the most chivalrous respect. The prostitute is a scapegoat; man vents his turpitude upon her, and he rejects her. Whether she is put legally under police supervision or works illegally in secret, she is in any case treated as a pariah. — Simone De Beauvoir

My childhood wasn't very happy. It's a long, grim story about being a Jew in a small southern town. — Stanley Donen

I began telling stories as a volunteer in my daughters' school. But I grew up hearing stories from Cuban and Southern storytellers, and I learned a great deal by just being quiet and listening. — Carmen Agra Deedy

It had been a fix-up, a blind date set up by a well-meaning skinny coworker who had no clue that most men in Southern California placed overweight women in the same category as serial killers and believed them worthy of the same punishment - the death penalty. I finally had given in to her assurances that this man and I had a lot in common. Which, sadly, we did. But I saw the look of disappointment on his face when he entered the restaurant and realized that I was his date. I had seen that look before. It was unmistakable disgust encased in civility. Like a dead fish wrapped in clean white butcher paper, the covering kept your hands from being soiled but could not stop the stink. — Sue Ann Jaffarian

Is it possible to make a sharp distinction between the content and the the form, between the personality of the Texas auctioneer and the language that he uses? Are not our attitudes toward people and events in great part shaped by the very language in which we describe them? When we try to describe one person to another or to a group, what do we say? Not usually how or what that person ate, rarely what he wore, only occasionally how he managed his job
no, what we tell is what he said and, if we are good mimics, how he said it. We apparently consider a person's spoken words the true essence of his being. — Cleanth Brooks

I remember, when I went away to college at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, my aunt sent me a book with the rules of being a Southern Belle. One of the rules was to never wear white after Labor Day. Fashion has a lot to do with confidence and making up your own rules. — Kourtney Kardashian

As Gloria Steinem said about Ginger Rogers: She was doing everything Fred Astaire was doing, just doing it backwards in high heels. Well, Southern women are doing and enduring what other women have to do and endure, but (at least until recently) they had to do it in heels and hats and white gloves and makeup and a sweet smile, with maybe a glass of bourbon and a cigarette to get them through the magnolia part of being a steel magnolia. — Michael Malone

I am a meat-loving Southern girl. Add in being a writer, and that means I drink more than I should, too. — Sarah Lacy

There's no such thing as being too Southern. — Lewis Grizzard

Sex and racism have always been tied together. Look at the thousands of black men who got lynched and castrated. The reason the Klan came into being was to protect white southern women. — Spike Lee

He perceived then, at a glance, that this woman was young and beautiful; and her style of beauty struck him more forcibly from its being totally different from that of the southern countries in which d'Artagnan had hitherto resided. She was pale and fair, with long curls falling in profusion over her shoulders, had large, blue, languishing eyes, rosy lips, and hands of alabaster. — Alexandre Dumas

She had abruptly flipped from the southern belle and was now putting on the extremely businesslike air of those perfectionist women who'd only worked in the professional world for two or three years before stopping to have children and were now terrified of not being taken seriously. — Rebecca Makkai

I just like being on my own on trains, traveling. I spent all my pocket money travelling the London Underground and Southern Railway, what used to be the Western region, and in Europe as much as I could afford it. My parents used to think I was going places, but I wasn't, I was just travelling the trains. — Tony Judt

In Southern West Virginia we live in a war zone. Three and one-half million pounds of explosives are being used every day to blow up the mountains. Blasting our communities, blasting our homes, poisoning us, trying to intimidate us. I don't mind being poor. I mind being blasted and poisoned. There ARE no jobs on a dead planet. — Judy Bonds

Total non-retention has kept my education from being a burden to me. — Flannery O'Connor

None of the people's wars of the sixties did very well, including the one in Vietnam. Vo Nguyen Giap himself has admitted a loss of 600,000 men between 1965 and 1968 ... Moreover, by about 1970 at least 80% of the day-to-day combat in South Vietnam was being carried on by regular NVA troops ... Genuine black-pajama southern guerrillas had been decimated and amounted to no more than 20% of the communist fighting forces. — Chalmers Johnson

In me was shaping a yearning for a kind of consciousness, a mode of being that the way of life about me had said could not be, must not be, and upon which the penalty of death had been placed. Somewhere in the dead of the southern night my life had switched onto the wrong track and without my knowing it, the locomotive of my heart was rushing down a dangerously steep slope, heading for a collision, heedless of the warning red lights that blinked all about me, the sirens and the ells and the screams that filled the air. — Richard Wright

Jane: Missy was not so subtly reminding me that she had done something nice for me and here i was being rude when all she was asking me to do was attend a nice party. This was the way southern women worked all peaches & cream laced with arsenic. — Molly Harper

Yeah his being Sumerian to this group would go over like an Ozzy Osbourne/Marilyn Manson duet at the Southern Baptist Convention's annual meeting. He might as well be wearing a shit that said "Kibbles and Bits," with a heavy emphasis on the "bits" part ... — Sherrilyn Kenyon

So, we went from being an Athens band to being a Georgia band to being a Southern band to being an American band from the East Coast to being an American band and now we're kind of an international phenomenon. — Michael Stipe

I think we Southerners have talked a fair amount of malarkey about the mystique of being Southern. — Reynolds Price

It ended up being a great quarter across the country. The national trend was more on the IT (information technology) side of things. When you look at Southern California and San Diego specifically, it's driven largely by the life sciences and biotech side of things. — Don Williams

The collective psychology is something very close to being sacred - we can do it but we don't do it. We should understand that the Holocaust in the European conscience is reaching a point which is very close to what is sacred for people in the Southern countries, whether they are Muslims or not. Because of that we need to try to have intellectual empathy. — Tariq Ramadan

It was the large number of outrages on women and the ever-present fear for the safety of their wives and daughters that drove Southern men to cold and trembling fury and caused the Ku Klux Klan to spring up overnight. And it was against this nocturnal organization that the newspapers of the North cried out most loudly, never realizing the tragic necessity that brought it into being. The North wanted every member of the Ku Klux hunted down and hanged, because they had dared take the punishment of crime into their own hands at a time when the ordinary processes of law and order had been overthrown by the invaders. — Margaret Mitchell

Being a black rapper is like being a Southern, socialite woman: You're always worried about appearances. — Killer Mike

When I was being moved, a deputy U.S. Marshal with a Southern accent so thick it sounded like he was doing a bad parody of a Good Ol' Boy sheriff laughed and said, "You're the only prisoner we ever had that got booted out of jail! — Kevin D. Mitnick

There were days when she was very happy without knowing why. She was happy to be alive and breathing, when her whole being seemed to be one with the sunlight, the color, the odors, the luxuriant warmth of some perfect Southern day. She liked then to wander alone into strange and unfamiliar places. She discovered many a sunny, sleepy corner, fashioned to dream in. And she found it good to dream and to be alone and unmolested. There were days when she was unhappy, she did not know why, - when it did not seem worth while to be glad or sorry, to be alive or dead; when life appeared to her like a grotesque pandemonium and humanity like worms struggling blindly toward inevitable annihilation. She could not work on such a day, nor weave fancies to stir her pulses and warm her blood. — Kate Chopin

Many people, after spending a long weekend being stealthily seduced by this grand dame of the South, mistakenly think that they have gotten to know her: they believe (in error) that after a long stroll amongst the rustling palmettoes and gas lamps, a couple of sumptuous meals, and a tour or two, that they have discovered everything there is to know about this seemingly genteel, elegant city. But like any great seductress, Charleston presents a careful veneer of half-truths and outright fabrications, and it lets you, the intended conquest, fill in many of the blanks. Seduction, after all, is not true love, nor is it a gentle act. She whispers stories spun from sugar about pirates and patriots and rebels, about plantations and traditions and manners and yes, even ghosts; but the entire time she is guarded about the real story. Few tourists ever hear the truth, because at the dark heart of Charleston is a winding tale of violence, tragedy and, most of all, sin. — James Caskey

Laughing,I poked him for his embarrassingly accurate imitation of my southern accent.
He continued in my voice, "Then one day my boyfriend was being an ass and I challenged him to a comp.I had to do a front 1080 off a jump just to show him up,and the rest is history."
"I hope so."
"I know so." He kissed my cheek.
I reached back to run my fingers through his long hair. "Right now I want to lie low,have a normal life,and hang out with my boyfriend. I'll meet you in People in a few years."
He chuckled, making my insides sparkle with anticipation. "It's a date. — Jennifer Echols

Growing up in Fitzgerald, I lived in an intense microcosm, where your neighbor knows what you're going to do even before you do, where you can recognize a family gene pool by the lift of an eyebrow, or the length of a neck, or a way of walking. What is said, what is left to the imagination, what is denied, withheld, exaggerated-all these secretive, inverted things informed my childhood. Writing the stories that I found in the box, I remember being particularly fascinated by secrets kept in order to protect someone from who you are. That protection, sharpest knife in the drawer, I absorbed as naturally as a southern accent. At that time, I was curious to hold up to the light glimpses of the family that I had so efficiently fled. We were remote-back behind nowhere-when I was growing up, but even so, enormous social change was about to crumble foundations. Who were we, way far South? "We're south of everywhere," my mother used to lament. — Frances Mayes

Well, I know a guy, he's from far far away
He's a songwriter, he got something to say
He says, "People in this city are too busy to hang out
This town's so spread out, no one would hear you if you shout"
Everyone's got a script to sell and someplace else they want to be
There's always a lock that would open if you could just find the key"
(It Ain't Easy Being Green) — Shannon McNally

There are two qualities that make fiction. One is the sense of mystery and the other is the sense of manners. You get the manners from the texture of existence that surrounds you. The great advantage of being a Southern writer is that we don't have to go anywhere to look for manners; bad or good, we've got them in abundance. We in the South live in a society that is rich in contradiction, rich in irony, rich in contrast, and particularly rich in its speech — Flannery O'Connor

When I was little, I thought it was terribly romantic, being half stardust, half Southern magnolia. — Suzanne Palmieri

Being a Southern person and a blonde, it's not a good combination. Immediately, when people meet you, they think of you as not being smart. — Reese Witherspoon

By the 1850s enslavers had their eyes on expansion into Cuba in order to expand Southern political power. Here we see an idyllic image of a Cuba tobacco plantation, plus the idea of "Southern rights" being used to sell cigars. "Southerner rights segars. Expressly manufactured for Georgia & Alabama by Salomon Brothers. Fabrica de tabacos, de superior calidad de la vuelta-abajo," Broadside, 1859. — Edward E. Baptist

And he [Franklin Roosevelt] got the votes of every southern white voting state in the country and wouldn't have been elected president once, let alone four times, if he hadn't. Now, at the same time he acquired over the years a reputation for being sympathetic to blacks, and he got their votes, heaven knows. — William A. Rusher

Being Southern and being the guy I've been all my life, I've lived more on the lighter side of life. I have a dark side, but that's not where I come from. A lot of artists like to come from that. — Josh Holloway

If we allow ourselves contemplative time in nature-whether it's gardening, going for a walk with the dog, or being in the heart of the southern Utah wilderness-then we can hear the voice of our conscience. If we listen to that voice, it asks us to be conscious. And if we become conscious we choose to live lives of consequence. — Terry Tempest Williams

Slim is queer and though Nelson isn't supposed to mind that he does. He also minds that there are a couple of slick blacks making it at the party and that one little white girl with that grayish kind of sharp-chinned Polack face from the south side of Brewer took off her shirt while dancing even though she has no tits to speak of and now sits in the kitchen with still bare tits getting herself sick on Southern Comfort and Pepsi. At these parties someone is always in the bathroom being sick or giving themselves a hit or a snort and Nelson minds this too. He doesn't mind any of it very much, he's just tired of being young. There's so much wasted energy to it. — John Updike

The great thing about not being American is that you don't assume you know what a Southern accent sounds like, so you have to be specific. — Cate Blanchett

Barry Crump wrote a lot of books and they were really special. They were kind of the quintessential, mild for the most part, kind of southern man, kind of the true heart of what it meant to be a Kiwi kind of farmer; very kind of outdoor man living off the land. That kind of thing, you don't see so much anymore these days with everyone being metrosexual and lattes and laptops. — Rhys Darby

Years later I was in the Sudan on a conservation project when I heard an incredible story on good authority that sounded similar to my own. During the twenty-year war between northern and southern Sudan elephants were being slaughtered both for ivory and meat and so large numbers migrated to Kenya for safety. Within days of the final ceasefire being signed, the elephants left their adopted residence en masse and trekked the hundreds of miles back home to Sudan. How they knew that their home range was now safe is just another indication of the incredible abilities of these amazing creatures. — Lawrence Anthony