Things Southern Quotes & Sayings

Similar things are happening in Africa, here, and in Europe. The indignados in southern Europe and the Occupy movements here are in a sense similar, even if that are from different worlds. The protests are not against dictatorships but against the shredding of democratic systems and the consequences of the Western version of the neoliberal system, which has had structurally consistent effects for the past thirty years: a very narrow concentration of wealth in a fraction of 1 percent of the population, stagnation for a large part of the rest, deregulation, and repeated financial crises, each one harsher than the last. — Noam Chomsky

The saying of John Peale Bishop is worth recalling, that the South excelled in two things which the French deem essential to civilization: a code of manners and a native cuisine. Both are apt to suffer when life is regarded as a means to something else. Efficiency and charm are mortal enemies, and Southern charm indubitably derives from a carelessness about the efficient aspects of life. — Richard M. Weaver

Lots of people have expressed consternation that I haven't gotten rid of Southern accent, but I just never saw any reason to lose the flavor that I grew up with. I enjoy saying some things with a Southern accent. — Roy Blount Jr.

People were always saying how ugly Southern California was, especially when they came back from their summer vacations. They said it looked plastic or fake or whatever, and talked about all the cool things they saw in Ohio, where their grandparents lived. Or in Pennsylvania. The wall behind the arcade was made of giant sparkling white bricks, just like all the other buildings connected to it. There was graffiti on it, indecipherable gang writing. It was dark now and getting a little cold and then the super-bright lights they have behind stores to keep bums from sleeping by the dumpsters came on, and I thought, people who don't think Southern California is the most beautiful place in the world are idiots and I hope they choke on their tongues. — John Darnielle

The true Southern watermelon is a boon apart, and not to be mentioned with commoner things. It is chief of this world'd luxuries, king by grace of God over all the fruits of the earth. When one has tasted it, he knows what the angels eat. It was not a Southern watermelon that Eve took: we know it because she repented. — Mark Twain

Vidalia, open those eyes and look at me. As with all things, we do this together, Darlin'. — Julia Mills

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

My mom is very Southern and she in real life says things like, 'If you've got it, flaunt it.' — Cheryl Hines

While writing the first draft is an exercise in shutting down all of the things we think we know so that the story features come tumbling out, the revision is the end of the joy ride. We pull on the gloves and sort of poke around inside the body. Is that a tumor? Will that limb need amputation? I nearly second-guessed myself into heart failure while learning to self-edit. — Patricia Hickman

The confessional writer will treat her story like a wailing wall. She kneels, and her story spills out, messy, improper. It isn't a protest or even graffiti, but her story is an offering of things that she overlooked or notices that others have overlooked. She is in danger of exposure but she remembers when she lived in hiding and that was worse. She cannot turn back now because this is how life has spun out of her, part vexing passage and part prayer. — Patricia Hickman

These are all good things, I said. But no one knows where your country is or who you are. You don't have a familiar ethnic cuisine; your diaspora , from what I understand, is mostly in Southern California, three time zones removed from the national media in New York; and you don't have a recognizable, long-simmering conflict like the one between the Israelis and the Palestinians, where people in the richer nations can take sides and argue over at the dinner table. The best you can do is get the United Nations involved, as in East Timor. Maybe they'll send troops."
"We don't want the United Nations" Mr. Nanabragov said. "We don't want Sri Lankan troops patrolling our streets. We're better tan that. We want America. — Gary Shteyngart

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

Shut your eyes," said Miss Tanner.
"Oh no," said Miranda, "for then I see worse things ... — Katherine Anne Porter

The Yognul people of Australia thought the constellation represented a canoe. But as we move into the southern hemisphere, a marked change in the nature of the constellations becomes apparent. The southern constellations were named by explorers of the 16th and 17th centuries. Instead of great heroes and gods, we have the keels of ships, sextants, telescopes and the like, things that mattered most to the people of this era. What constellations would we put in the night sky today? Indeed, when human beings go out and colonise the stars, what constellations will they put up in their night skies? — Paul Abel

As a southern man, there's two things I'm definitely not scared of: bow ties and white pants. — Justin Townes Earle

Songs. Books. Poetry. Paintings. These things reveal truth. I believe lies and truth are tangled together. — Brenda Sutton Rose

Sweetened ice tea is one of the things I love about the South, right up there with homemade biscuits and cheese grits. — Emily Giffin

One of the first things a British visitor to Southern California discovers is that he must have a car. Freeways. Bad public transport. I took driving lessons. — Christopher Lee

If you've had good gin on a hot day in Southern California with the people you love, you forget Nebraska. The two things cannot coexist. The stronger, better of the two wins. — Ann Patchett

There are two things I am afraid of. One is dying young. The other is Johnny Monroe. — Susan Gabriel

I can endure many things, but cold and wet is my Achilles' heel. I could withstand the heat of the desert or the tropical forests described by travelers to the southern regions of America without incident, I think. But unrelenting rain and cold I simply cannot abide."

"How unfortunate that you should be born in England, then," Quill said with a laugh. — Manda Collins

How soon, indeed, are human things forgotten! As we meet here this morning, the Southern sun is shining on their place of burial, and the waves sparkling and the sea-gulls circling around Fort Wagner's ancient site. But the great earthworks and their thundering cannon, the commanders and their followers, the wild assault and repulse that for a brief space made night hideous on that far-off evening, have all sunk into the blue gulf of the past, and for the majority of this generation are hardly more than an abstract name, a picture, a tale that is told. Only when some yellow-bleached photograph of a soldier of the 'sixties comes into our hands, with that odd and vivid look of individuality due to the moment when it was taken, do we realize the concreteness of that by-gone history, and feel how interminable to the actors in them were those leaden-footed hours and years. — William James

I do mostly Southern landscapes. I do beautiful old barns that are falling down, and beautiful trees reflecting in the water. My lovely wife Dorothy and I travel quite a bit, so I take pictures of different things that inspire me to come home, when I come home here in North Carolina, into my art studio and paint these things. — James Best

I'm a foodie. I enjoy it a lot, and contrary to what it looks, I eat a lot. My comfort food, of all things, would be southern soul barbecue. — Zach Johnson

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

I'd better light the charcoal," Gennie said after a moment.
"I didn't ask before," Grant began as they started down the pier. "But do you know how to cook on one of those things?"
"My dear Mr. Campbell," Gennie said in a fluid drawl, "you appear to have several misconceptions about southern women.I can cook on a hot rock."
"And wash shirts in a fast stream."
"Every bit as well as you could," Gennie tossed back. "You might have some advantage on me in mechanical areas, but I'd say we're about even otherwise."
"A strike for the women's movement."
Gennie narrowed her eyes. "Are you about to say something snide and unintelligent? — Nora Roberts

I made a mental note to write starlings in my "Southern Speak" notebook. I'd already started the second page, thanks to Faye and Bobbie. One corner of his mouth turned up in a smile. "I try. So, Churchville. Let me see the map."
I followed his directions, asking questions, until he drew a big circle around the funeral home. "That's it right there, just off 42. Or Buffalo Gap Highway. But you might not see any road signs. Out there things are a little...well, less posted. People just sort of know where they are. So look for these things." He drew in some more notes and--I'm not making this up--something like bugs with stick legs.
"What are those?" I asked, not intending to sound rude. "Roaches?"
"Those are cows. There's a pasture here."
"Oh. — Jennifer Rogers Spinola

Magical realism is a blending of the unusual or supernatural into an otherwise ordinary setting. And, to me, this perfectly describes the South. 'The Sugar Queen' involves a lot of magical happenings, but in a very down-home Southern setting. It's full of things that could almost be true. — Sarah Addison Allen

All over the world, I do business. I make great deals. I've made hundreds of millions of dollars against China. All over the world I make money and I build great things. Who's going to build a wall like me on the southern border? I built a great company. — Donald Trump

Are you still working on that bucket list of yours?"
Amelia nodded.
"As I remember, you mentioned a few things for Ireland." He smiled with humor lacing his eyes as he said, "Like kissing the Blarney Stone at Blarney Castle."
She laughed as she opened her brochure of things to do in southern Ireland. "You've got a good memory." Amelia pointed to a picture of a beautiful garden full of flowers. "I want to visit the Blarney Gardens, too."
He pointed to another picture and said, "How about the Blarney dungeons? That looks awesome to explore."
She looked up at him and smiled. "Yeah. I've also been interested in listening to a live Irish concert. — Linda Weaver Clarke

My wife is a terrific Southern cook. My favorite of all the great things she cooks is 'trash potatoes.' That's mashed potatoes with sour cream, bacon, cheddar cheese, and horseradish. It's a total gut bomb. — Mike Vogel

People look at things differently. Imagine going to a village in Southern Sudan and try to explain to someone there the concept of life insurance or retirement. Go to Vietnam and say retirement. Retirement in another country is your body is too racked with pain and your hands are too arthritic from the life in the rice patty fields, so you can't work anymore. So you move in with your son and his new wife takes care of you because that's how families work there. — Henry Rollins

Civil disobedience, as I put it to the audience, was not the problem, despite the warnings of some that it threatened social stability, that it led to anarchy. The greatest danger, I argued, was civil obedience, the submission of individual conscience to governmental authority. Such obedience led to the horrors we saw in totalitarian states, and in liberal states it led to the public's acceptance of war whenever the so-called democratic government decided on it ...
In such a world, the rule of law maintains things as they are. Therefore, to begin the process of change, to stop a war, to establish justice, it may be necessary to break the law, to commit acts of civil disobedience, as Southern black did, as antiwar protesters did. — Howard Zinn

She wrote the names of the day's cakes on the board: traditional Southern red velvet cake and peach pound cake, but also green tea and honey macaroons and cranberry doughnuts. She knew the more unusual things would sell out first. It had taken nearly a year, but she'd won over her regulars with her skill with what they already knew, so now they would try anything she made. — Sarah Addison Allen

Certainly people have said a lot of deeply unfortunate and stupid things in Southern accents, but that doesn't mean there's anything wrong with the accent itself. — Roy Blount Jr.

What I do onstage, there's maybe .0001 percent of the population that acts like that. I talk like that because it makes me laugh, and because I know a couple of people that talk like that. They're really that Southern. And they do funny things. I love 'em; they're awesome. They're good people. — Larry The Cable Guy

MY ACT IS 'NOTHING BUT COMEDY. I TALK SOUTHERN BECAUSE I PICKED IT UP WHEN I MOVED TO THE SOUTH. IM NOT TRYING TO MAKE ANY SOCIAL POLITICAL POINT, NOR AM I TRYING TO MAKE FUN OF REDNECKS. I GREW UP A COUNTRY KID AND WILL ALWAYS BE ONE. I GREW UP WITH PEOPLE THAT SAID CERTAIN THINGS FUNNY AND I PREFORM USING THE SAME LANGUAGE BECAUSE I FIND IT HYSTERICLE. THATS IT. ITS A COMEDY SHOW THAT IS FUNNY AND THATS IT. — Larry The Cable Guy

I would be annoyed if I were any more in tune with modern sensibilities. I was shaped differently. The world in which I grew up was Texan and Southern, and it had many, many failings. I think I've gotten rid of most of the bad things in myself from that earlier age, but I don't adjust to the way things are progressing now. — John Graves

If there is such a things as "race", there is only the Human one. — Tim Heaton

Well, I'll tell you, one of things I'm proud of is for someone from Southern California, who didn't grow up around coal mines, I learned a lot that tragic day we lost twenty-nine miners at Upper Big Branch coal mine. — Hilda Solis

If you threw Elvis and a scarecrow in a blender, topped the whole thing off with Seagram's 7 and pressed dice, you would make my dad. He's got tar black hair and shoulder blades that cut through his undershirt like clipped wings. He looks like a gray-skinned, skinny-rat cowboy and I would be lying if I didn't say that I am, maybe sorta kinda, keep it secret, in love with him.
And you would be, too, you would, if you met him before drink number five or six. Just meet him then. Get lost before things get ugly. — Andrea Portes

I decided to deflect her attitude by giving a long, Southern answer. I come from people who know how to draw things out. Annoy a Southerner, and we will drain away the moments of your life with our slow, detailed replies until you are nothing but a husk of your former self and that much closer to death. — Maureen Johnson

When I'm standing in the middle of the salt flats, where you swear that the pupils of your eyes have turned white because of the searing heat that is rising from the desert, I think of my childhood, I think of my mother, my father, my grandparents; I think of the history that we hold there and it is beautiful to me. But it is both a blessing and a burden to be rooted in place. It's recognizing the pattern of things, almost feeling a place before you even see it. In Southern Utah, on the Colorado plateau where canyon walls rise upward like praying hands, that is a holy place to me. — Terry Tempest Williams

Oh, my, yes. I was raised in this Southern culture where if a guy was sarcastic, that just meant he didn't know how to show his love - but secretly he cared! I completely bought that. The men I chased and the things I put up with - it was criminal. — Ginnifer Goodwin

I used to make all my clothes when I was in Southern Death Cult [the first incarnation of The Cult]. I still make things to wear on stage and I am involved with sketching, choosing fabric, cutting. — Ian Astbury

They wanted to make her less rural, less of a cartoon. Not that Southern woman are cartoonish - they're the strongest women in this country, but with Val they wanted to take the stereotypical things out. — Joan Van Ark

There are three things you need to know about me before we go any farther. I'm the heiress to the Fitzsimmons' Vidalia onion empire and as southern as the day is long. (Now, you get the name, right?) I'll be thirty in less than two months, my curves have curves, I'm in love with the man of my dreams, and I have great hair (not conceited, just honest. Put away the claws.). And... I'm a vampire. (Not the biting kind. The cursed kind.) Any questions? — Julia Mills

It's simply a national acknowledgement that in any kind of priority, the needs of human beings must come first. Poverty is here and now. Hunger is here and now. Racial tension is here and now. Pollution is here and now. These are the things that scream for a response. And if we don't listen to that scream - and if we don't respond to it - we may well wind up sitting amidst our own rubble, looking for the truck that hit us - or the bomb that pulverized us. Get the license number of whatever it was that destroyed the dream. And I think we will find that the vehicle was registered in our own name.
[from a Commencement Address at the University of Southern California; March 17, 1970] — Rod Serling

It was May before my
attention came
to spring and
my word I said
to the southern slopes
I've
missed it, it
came and went before
I got right to see:
don't worry, said the mountain,
try the later northern slopes
or if
you can climb, climb
into spring: but
said the mountain
it's not that way
with all things, some
that go are gone — A.R. Ammons

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

I don't know why, but I always feel a kind of necessity to write things that are beyond acceptance, that are too offensive or something. For people to read them and say, Ha-ha-ha, very funny. No, we can't print that. — Terry Southern

There were two things Southerners hated to see knocking on their door. Jehovah Witnesses, because the majority of us were Baptist, and the undertaker. It was understandable that when Terk Rhinehammer opened the door, his face turned white as all the blood was drained from it after he looked past me and saw my hearse.
"What's wrong?" He used his hands to pat down his chest. "I'm not dead, am I? — Tonya Kappes

I do have rules, and etiquette things. I think it's a southern thing too, to an extent. I'll hold the door for someone, but if they don't say, "Thank you," it pisses me off. I say, "Yes, ma'am," and, "Yes, sir." Stuff that is maybe archaic in a lot of ways, but that's how I was raised, and I don't think there's really any harm in that. — Chris Black

Things have changed," Mother answered, her gaze drawn to the southern horizon. "So we change with them. — Mindy McGinnis

The weeping of the guitar
begins.
The goblets of dawn
are smashed.
The weeping of the guitar
begins.
Useless
to silence it.
Impossible
to silence it.
It weeps monotonously
as water weeps
as the wind weeps
over snowfields.
Impossible
to silence it.
It weeps for distant
things.
Hot southern sands
yearning for white camellias.
Weeps arrow without target
evening without morning
and the first dead bird
on the branch.
Oh, guitar!
Heart mortally wounded
by five swords. — Federico Garcia Lorca

Children all over the world do ridiculous, borderline dangerous things, and no one around them questions it, because it's ingrained in their culture. So it was with child acting in Southern California. — Mara Wilson

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

Strange and fantastic things really happen. During a rainstorm in Australia, fish fall from the sky; several Southern states consider legislation that would make the licking of toads illegal; Lisa Presley marries Michael Jackson. You read these things and you think to yourself that realism may not be the best medium through which to express the real world. — Karen Joy Fowler

Ever since I could remember reading, I was a fan of Horror Novels, then just an Avid reader of all things dark and deeply written or off the cuff styles and not so bland and sterile as if the grammar police forensically wrote it to be safe, then re-edited it to be even more annoyingly not from an emotion but from a text book, I love dark dark fiction that's why i write it. Some of my favorite writers are Anne Rice, Hunter S. Thompson and Clive Barker, perhaps you can sense this in my writing. — Liesalette

Beside the sleeping Max, who was curled up like a little boy, knees tucked into his chest, mouth pursed into a surprised pout, lay Sanary's Southern Lights. Perdu picked up the slim volume. Max had underlined certain sentences in pencil and jotted some questions in the margins; he had read the book as a book ought to be read. Reading - an endless journey; a long, indeed never-ending journey that made one more temperate as well as more loving and kind. Max had set out on that journey. With each book he would absorb more of the world, things and people. — Nina George

If you want to be fully convinced of the abominations of slavery, go on a southern plantation, and call yourself a negro trader. Then there will be no concealment; and you will see and hear things that will seem to you impossible among human beings with immortal souls. — Harriet Ann Jacobs

When I came home after my statutory term as surgeon general, I just resumed my life here in southern Arizona. Teaching at the university; my law enforcement career. Sitting on some boards. All the things I did before. — Richard Carmona

I haven't lived in Sweden since I was a teenager. We lived in southern Sweden, about two hours north of Copenhagen, where my family's home base has been since 1970. Our parents bought a schoolhouse in preparation for self-sufficient living. They wanted to create a place to do all the things they believed in. — Neneh Cherry

There are a number of things that set Southern artists apart from anyone else. Their obsession with place and their obsession with family. — Sally Mann

No, I'm saying those Yankees are messing things up again. No respectable Southern woman would ever say a girl was Rosewell's 'power mower.' For heaven's sake. That's ridiculous. But those Yankees have tin ears. On language alone we should have won the war." She looked at us. "The woman called that floozy his paramour. But some Yankee messed it up. Paramour. Power mower. You hear the difference?" Wally glanced at me. She was — Sibella Giorello