Southern Literature Quotes & Sayings

Although I wasn't there to bear witness, I imagine Lot's wife scanned the masses for her children. Perhaps she sought out the curves of their mouths and the shapes of their faces, trying to memorize her children, grown now. She looked back as I and any strong, loving mother would have done. — Brenda Sutton Rose

The world will be for the common people, and the sounds of Happiness will reach even the deepest springs. — Karl Marx

My mama steps out of her dress
and drops it, an inheritance falling to my feet.
She stands alone: bathed, blooming,
burdened with nothing of this world.
Her body is naked and beautiful,
her wings gray and scorched,
her brown eyes piercing the brown of mine.
I watch her departure, her flapping wings:
She doesn't look back, not even once,
not even to whisper my name — Brenda Sutton Rose

It is impossible to fully comprehend the evil that would have conjured up such a cowardly and depraved assault upon thousands of innocent people. — Jean Chretien

There's no good story without romance. — Stephenie Meyer

The child came to a stop beside her mother and stared up at her face as if she had never seen it before. It was the face of the new misery she felt, but on her mother it looked old and it looked as if it might have belonged to anybody, a Negro or a European or to Powell himself. The child turned her head quickly, and past the Negroe's ambling figures she could see the column of smoke rising and widening unchecked inside the granite line of trees. She stood taut, listening, and could just catch in the distance a few wild high shrieks of joy as if the prophets were dancing in the fiery furnace, in the circle the angel had cleared for them. — Flannery O'Connor

Go on your knees before God. Bring all your idols; bring self-will, and pride, and every evil lust before Him, and give them up. Devote yourself, heart and soul, to His will; and see if you do not know of the doctrine. — Henry Ward Beecher

Gravity is why there are suns and planets in the first place. It is practically God. — Mary Roach

Slavery destroys, or vitiates, or pollutes, whatever it touches. No interest of society escapes the influence of its clinging curse. It makes Southern religion a stench in the nostrils of Christendom; it makes Southern politics a libel upon all the principles of republicanism; it makes Southern literature a travesty upon the honorable profession of letters. — Hinton Rowan Helper

I look at what the president [Barack Obama] it doing, it adds up to me. We just have to keep - try to get more support for those people on the ground in Syria and Iraq who have to actually physically take the territory back. — Hillary Clinton

My mother, Southern to the bone, once told me, "All Southern literature can be summed up in these words: 'On the night the hogs ate Willie, Mama died when she heard what Daddy did to Sister.'" She raised me up to be a Southern writer, but it wasn't easy. — Pat Conroy

Always begin with the end in mind. — Ellen Muth

Seasons didn't come behind the nicotine-stained walls of Mountain City's prison, so Harm always imagined it spring--the locust trees clustered with shaggy white blooms, the wet woods flecked with bloodroot, and wild roses and honeysuckle flashing white among the chestnuts on the mountainsides... — Sharyn McCrumb

This town of churches and dreams; this town I thought I would lose myself in, with its backward ways and winding roads leading to nowhere; but, I found myself instead. -Magic in the Backyard (excerpt from American Honey) — Kellie Elmore

In Andrew Jackson's administration, collaborated with the South to keep abolitionist literature out of the mails in the southern states. It was the Supreme Court of the United States that declared in 1857 that the slave Dred Scott could not sue for his freedom because he was not a person, but property. — Howard Zinn

Like Richard Price and the late, great Elmore Leonard, Matt Burgess is one of those cool, quick and funny writers who can turn a seemingly routine crime caper into something special. — Carl Hiaasen

Scarlett O'Hara wasn't pretty. — Margaret Mitchell

One of the problems you have when you read with kids is that once they like something they want you to read it a hundred times. — Norton Juster

There was a feeling I wanted to feel that I did not feel. — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Serving time doesn't make you fit to do anything but serve more time. — Donald Hays

At 2:00 sharp on the afternoon of his internment, with his body resting in a casket in the front room of his home, the pallbearers--all bridge players--stuck a deck of cards in Mr. Hampton's cold hands, shut the lid over his head, and played bridge. — Brenda Sutton Rose

Potential enemies make the best friends and lovers. Many a blessed union begins in adversity. — Randy Thornhorn

Wild steep mountains floating in a haze of cloud...a sea of green trees swallowing the hills and valleys, and curling around the trails and rivers, with the wind in the leaves as its tide. — Sharyn McCrumb

We are good at stories. We hoard them, like an old woman in a room full of boxes, but now and then we pull out our best, and spread them out. We talk of the bad years when the cotton didn't open, and the day my cousin Wanda was washed in the Blood. We buff our beloved ancestors until they are smooth of sin, and give our scoundrels a hard shake, although sometimes we can't remember exactly which is who. — Rick Bragg

When she started to fill the entire glass, he jerked the bottle out of her hand. She swirled on him, staring at him hatefully. "How dare you! You're not my brother, my father, my husband - " "That's right, Christa, I'm no one but a filthy Yank. And you're going to turn into a southern lush if you're not careful! — Heather Graham

Christians are the salt of the earth ... Nothing grows where they've been. — Donald Hays

The woods are full of regional writers, and it is the great horror of every serious Southern writer that he will become one of them. — Flannery O'Connor

Maybe these dreams of ours just floats away. Here we go again ... changin' face. — Randolph Randy Camp

With red clay between my toes,
and the sun setting over my head,
the ghost of my mother blows in,
riding on a honeysuckle breeze, oh lord,
riding on a honeysuckle breeze. — Brenda Sutton Rose

Flannery O'Connor, in a note to the editor of "Wise Blood" that pertained to changes he wanted to make, wrote "Perhaps I am prematurely arrogant ... — Flannery O'Connor

If John Grisham, Harper Lee, and Larry the Cable Guy were penned up in a remote cabin for a weekend with nothing but good bourbon, fine wine, and a couple of cases of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer, something like Common Pleas (A Tale of Whoa!) might result... — J. Randolph Cresenzo

People may think of Southern humor in terms of missing teeth and outhouse accidents, but the best of it is a rich vein running through the best of Southern literature. — Roy Blount Jr.

If you read a label and just look up the ingredients, you'll be able to figure out really easily what's good for you and what's bad. — Blake Griffin

A song rises up from the belly of my past
and rocks me in the bosom of buried memories. — Brenda Sutton Rose