Quotes & Sayings About The Smokies

I remember something that my granny told me once about these misty mountains of ours they call the Smokies. Granny said God hung that haze on purpose, to hide these hills from the folks up in Heaven who was raised here, so they wouldn't look down and be homesick. — Vicki Lane

An analysis of nutritional and metabolic data by Jon Pangborn, Ph.D., a well-known nutritional biochemist affiliated with the Great Smokies Diagnostic Laboratories in Asheville, North Carolina, found that the metabolism of methionine is the "most frequently impaired or disordered amino acid" among 1,500 individuals with food and chemical intolerances, degenerative diseases, neuromuscular dysfunction, and mental diseases. — Stanley W. Jacob

More than nine million people a year come to the Smokies, many of them to picnic. So bears have learned to associate people with food. Indeed, to them people are overweight creatures in baseball caps who spread lots and lots of food out on picnic tables and then shriek a little and waddle off to get their video cameras when old Mr. Bear comes along and climbs onto the table and starts devouring their potato salad and chocolate cake. Since the bear doesn't mind being filmed and indeed seems indifferent to his audience, pretty generally some fool will come up to it and try to stroke it or feed it a cupcake or something. There is one recorded instance of a woman smearing honey on her toddler's fingers so that the bear would lick it off for the video camera. Failing to understand this, the bear ate the baby's hand. — Bill Bryson