Southern Landscape Quotes & Sayings

When you look at the planet from low orbit, the impact of the Himalayas on Earth's climate seems obvious. It creates the rain shadow to beat all rain shadows, standing athwart the latitude of the trade winds and squeezing all the rain out of them before they head southwest, thus supplying eight of the Earth's mightiest rivers, but also parching not only the Gobi to the immediate north, but also everything to the southwest, including Pakistan and Iran, Mesopotamia, Saudi Arabia, even North Africa and southern Europe. The dry belt runs more than halfway across the Eurasia-African landmass - a burnt rock landscape, home to the fiery religions that then spread out and torched the rest of the world. Coincidence? — Kim Stanley Robinson

[New Orleans.] Katrina changed everything. Life here is different, every face altered. Yet we feel and sense the landscape not only in its hurricane-leveled, sodden depressions but - perhaps even more so now in the strangely comforting depths of our shared history. Even in the worst hit areas, not all is dissipated. Dense intricate attachments burrow too deep to underestimate or overlook. This is no featureless town to be rubbed off the map and cast aside. Here the band plays on.

Our kindred colors speak to the values of justice, faith and power; to curious combinations of passion, openness, irreverence and loyalty, to the values of individuality, sharing and compassion. Not least, we still enjoy the sounds of music and respond to succulent foods, to the magnificent flowering gardens, to the elements of grace and dreamy escape, and to the languid Southern charm typical of faded days gone by. — T.J. Fisher

Southern California is a landscape of edges and contradictions set upon by a variegated human population that at times seems hell bent to leave its destructive footprints from desert to ocean, mountain to flat coastal plain. I have discovered that the sharp divisions and false syntheses of this place reflect the inconsistencies and unexplored edges in my personality, and that as much as I might have longed to live quietly in some less densely populated place, this would never do...When I settled in Malibu I discovered the strong pull of place and began to incorporate landscape as a dominant character in my writing. — Penelope Grenoble

Been to some interesting places, Emme, baby, and that has always been with me. I — Kristen Ashley

Graves aren't for the dead. They're for the loved ones the dead leave behind them. Once those loved ones have gone, once all the lives that have touched the occupant of any given grave had ended, then the grave's purpose was fulfilled and ended. I suppose if you looked at it that way, one might as well decorate one's grave with an enormous statue or a giant temple. It gave people something to talk about, at least. Although, following that logic, I would need to have a roller coaster, or maybe a Tilt-A-Whirl constructed over my own grave when I died. Then even after my loved ones had moved on, people could keep having fun for years and years. Of course, I'd need a slightly larger plot. — Jim Butcher

He takes a draw on a cigarette, blows out a smoky ghost. I reach to catch the phantom in my hands, but it eludes me. I've been trying to catch a ghost for as long as I can remember. — Brenda Sutton Rose

I love to run. When the weather's bad, I should get on the treadmill in the basement gym of my apartment building, but I lack the motivation. — Tom Riley

In the midst of this scoured landscape, on a suburban street, I saw the church steeple, and Lucille slowed down and pointed, and waved me on. As I passed her to enter the parking lot, I thanked her, and she gave me a wonderful smile, and just before she drove on she said, "Be blessed." That seemed to be the theme in the Deep South: kindness, generosity, a welcome. I had found it often in my traveling life in the wider world, but I found so much more of it here that I kept going, because the good will was like an embrace. Yes, there is a haunted substratum of darkness in Southern life, and though it pulses through many interactions, it takes a long while to perceive it, and even longer to understand. — Paul Theroux

A reasonable estimate of economic organisation must allow for the fact that, unless industry is to be paralysed by recurrent revolts on the part of outraged human nature, it must satisfy criteria which are not purely economic. — R. H. Tawney

Closed. Plenty of time to see it later, remember? He leads me into the courtyard, and I take the opportunity to admire his backside. Callipygian. There is something better than Notre-Dame. — Stephanie Perkins

Durzo gazed into the frothy brown ale as if it held answers. It didn't, — Brent Weeks

With every word the mist which had enveloped them, making them seem unreal to each other, since the previous afternoon melted a little further, and their contact became more and more natural. Up through the sultry southern landscape they saw the world they knew appear clearer and more vividly than it had ever appeared before. — Virginia Woolf

I can only tell where I feel most at home, which is in the erosional landscape of the red rock desert of southern Utah, where the Colorado River cuts through sandstone and the geologic history of the Earth is exposed: our home in Castle Valley. — Terry Tempest Williams

Transferring in haste, I felt a curious breathlessness as the cars rumbled on through the early afternoon sunlight into territories I had always read of but had never before visited. I knew I was entering an altogether older-fashioned and more primitive New England than the mechanised, urbanised coastal and southern areas where all my life had been spent; an unspoiled, ancestral New England without the foreigners and factory-smoke, billboards and concrete roads, of the sections which modernity has touched. There would be odd survivals of that continuous native life whose deep roots make it the one authentic outgrowth of the landscape - -the continuous native life which keeps alive strange ancient memories, and fertilises the soil for shadowy, marvellous, and seldom-mentioned beliefs. — H.P. Lovecraft

Our disappointments are God's appointments. — Cherie Hill

I've dated people where we traveled horribly together, and if one thing went wrong, it was horrible for them. Then I've been fortunate enough to have great traveling experiences where everything lined up and even when things went wrong, you just laughed about it. You learn so much about yourself when you're traveling with someone. — Candice Accola

Busy with the expensive success we forget the free beauty. — Dejan Stojanovic

It was there that I wanted, out there somewhere, when I sat elbow-to-elbow with my giggling friends and let my thoughts swirl up and away from the three-mile radius of our small town lives. In my head, I careened out of town and across state lines, until the landscape became strange and unfamiliar. I wanted to see all of it. Everything. The vast expanses of the flat Midwest, miles of horizontal earth with the curving horizon at its end. Strange, stunted trees and driftwood skeletons on the lonely windswept beaches of the farthest coasts. Towering oaks hung thick with the gray lace of Spanish moss, looming like hovering parents over shaded southern dirt. The California sun, dipping and disappearing into the ocean, tipping the waves with orange light. — Kat Rosenfield

While writing 'Cold Mountain,' I held maps of two geographies, two worlds, in my mind as I wrote. One was an early map of North Carolina. Overlaying it, though, was an imagined map of the landscape Jack travels in the southern Appalachian folktales. He's much the same Jack who climbs the beanstalk, vulnerable and clever and opportunistic. — Charles Frazier

God may forgive sins, he said, but awkwardness has no forgiveness in heaven or earth. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

The Dog-star and Aldebaran, pointing to the restless Pleiades, were half-way up the Southern sky, and between them hung Orion, which gorgeous constellation never burnt more vividly than now, as it soared forth above the rim of the landscape. Castor and Pollux with their quiet shine were almost on the meridian: the barren and gloomy Square of Pegasus was creeping round to the north-west; far away through the plantation Vega sparkled like a lamp suspended amid the leafless trees, and Cassiopeia's chair stood daintily poised on the uppermost boughs. "One o'clock," said Gabriel. — Thomas Hardy

Anytime somebody tells me they saw 'Safety Not Guaranteed' in the theater, my answer is, 'That was you?' — Colin Trevorrow

Long after their associates have gone southward, they linger like the last leaves on the tree. It is indeed "good-bye to summer" when the bluebirds withdraw their touch of brightness from the dreary November landscape at the north to whirl through the southern woods and feed on the waxy berries of the mistletoe. — Neltje Blanchan

Anybody who claims to read the entire paper every day is either the world's fastest reader or the world's biggest liar. — Arthur Ochs Sulzberger

I definitely learned never to fall in love in high school because it just takes over your brain. — Daren Kagasoff