Quotes & Sayings About White Trash

If I'd been talking about black trash, I might be lynched. If I was talking about white trash, I'd merely be another torchbearer in an ongoing national lynching. — Jim Goad

You were playing the song we like..."
"That was the song?" A smile lit his face.
"Yes. What was it?" I asked
"Bob Dylan."
"What?!" I wailed. "I thought it was going to be Beethoven or something. Now I know I'm white trash."
Wilson bopped me on the head with his bow. "It's called 'Make You Feel my Love.' It's one of my favorite songs. I embellish it a bit, but it's all Dylan, definitely not Mozart. The lyrics are brilliant. Listen." Wilson sang softly as he played. His voice was as rich as the moaning cello .
"Of course," I said sourly.
"What?" Wilson stopped, startled.
"You can sing. You have a beautiful voice. I can't even pretend that you suck. Why can't you suck at something? It's so unfair."
"You clearly haven't seen me try to carve something intricate and beautiful out of a tree stump," Wilson said dryly, and started playing again. — Amy Harmon

Still,I knew when I was being lied to. And I was never taking the trash out for that ratty gnome again. — Kiersten White

Lot a folks think if you talk back to you husband, you crossed the line. And that justifies punishment. You believe that line?"
I scowl down at the table. "You know I ain't studying no line like that."
"Cause that line ain't there. Except in Leroy's head. Lines between black and white ain't there either. Some folks just made those up, long time ago. And that go for the white trash and society ladies too. — Kathryn Stockett

Dr. Clair looked at Layton. The mancala pieces were still in her hand.
If Angela Ashforth ever says anything like that to you again, you tell her that just because she's insecure about being a little girl in a society that puts an inordinate amount of pressure on little girls to live up to certain physical, emotional and ideological standards
many of which are improper, unhealthy and self-perpetuating
doesn't mean she has to take her misplaced self-loathing out on a nice boy like you. You may be inherently a part of the problem but that doesn't mean you aren't a nice boy with nice manners and it certainly doesn't mean you have AIDS."
I'm not sure I can remember all that," Layton said.
Well then, tell Angela that her mother is a white trash drunk from Butte. — Reif Larsen

This is why Paine was careful to downplay the distinction between the rich and the poor. He wanted his American readers to focus on distant kings, not local grandees. He wanted them to break with the Crown, not to disturb the class order. — Nancy Isenberg

Hail, Columbia! Home of the six inch cockroach and the stadium-sized lecture hall. A reservation for rich white people guarded by poor brown people in a sea of urban decay. Where nobody on the faculty has ever spent ten minutes in the freshman dorm, but everybody talks about humanism and compassion. They teach you that military people are scum, trash, the lowest of the low
and then they assign Homer's ILIAD just to develop your sense of irony. Where else can you see three suicides a month dismissed as slightly above average, but better than Smith or Brown? — Ted Rall

You really romanticize the white-trash period of your life,' Rain once said to me, which I thought was a little hurtful but perhaps true. — Dan Chaon

Oral Roberts is a greed-crazed white-trash lunatic who should have been hung upside down from a telephone pole on the outskirts of Tulsa 44 years ago, before he somehow transmogrified into the money-sucking animal that he became when he discovered television. — Hunter S. Thompson

Among these odd folk, who correspond exactly to the decadent element of "white trash" in the South, law and morals are non-existent; and their general mental status is probably below that of any other section of the native American people. — H.P. Lovecraft

I used to be a good fighter." She looks out along the boxwoods, wipes off her sweat with her palm. "If you'd known me ten years ago..."
She's got no goo on her face, her hair's not sprayed, her nightgown's like an old prairie dress. She takes a deep breath through her nose and I see it. I see the white-trash girl she was ten years ago. She was strong. She didn't take no shit from nobody. — Kathryn Stockett

I always wanted this - to come to restaurants that raise their own cows and mortgage bottles of wine. But, it makes me feel insecure - reminds me that I'm really just poor, white trash with a good job. — Tarryn Fisher

Do you remember when everyone thought Bush (sr) had a mistress too"" he asks in the course of a Clinton era conversation. "But she was rumored to be someone wealthy and Waspy, of course ... The problem here is the goddamn Democrats, who sleep down, you see. They love that white trash ... And white trash loves publicity,so the Democrats are the ones who get into all the trouble. As opposed to the Republicans. They sleep up ... Up, where all is Episcopalian and quiet as death itself, and no one ever has to hear a thing about it — Sue Miller

Both the zombie mafia and the rebel zombie alliance could suck my white trash undead ass. — Diana Rowland

Great, I'm going to be white trash at my own wedding. — Monica Alexander

I am a greaser," Sodapop chanted. "I am a JD and a hood. I blacken the name of our fair city. I beat up people. I rob gas stations. I am a menace to society. Man, do I have fun!"
"Greaser ... greaser ... greaser ... "Steve singsonged. "O, victim of enviornment, underprivelaged, rotton no-count hood!"
Juvenile delinquent, you're no good!" Darry shouted.
Get thee hence, white trash," Two-Bit said in asnobbish voice. "I am a Soc. I am the privelaged and the well-dressed. I throw beer blasts, drive fancy cars, break windows at fancy parties."
And what do you do for fun?" I inquired in a serious, awed voice.
I jump greasers!" Two-Bit screamed, and did a cartwheel. — S.E. Hinton

I used to believe in em (lines). I don't anymore. They in our heads. Lines between black and white ain't there neither. Some folks just made those up, long time ago. And that go for the white trash and the so-ciety ladies too. — Kathryn Stockett

Cynthia didn't mind Confederate flags. She'd like to see a law that required every white trash hillbilly to have one tattooed on his or her forehead. You would see them coming that way. — Laura Lippman

Next day, as the Ferris wheel was being taken apart and the race horses were being loaded into vans and the entertainers were packing up their belongings and driving away in their trailers, Charlotte died. The Fair Grounds were soon deserted. The sheds and buildings were empty and forlorn. The infield was littered with bottles and trash. Nobody, of the hundreds of people that had visited the Fair, knew that a grey spider had played the most important part of all. No one was with her when she died. — E.B. White

The great bulk of the legal voters of the South were men who owned no slaves; their homes were generally in the hills and poor country; their facilities for educating their children, even up to the point of reading and writing, were very limited; their interest in the contest was very meagre
what there was, if they had been capable of seeing it, was with the North; they too needed emancipation. Under the old regime they were looked down upon by those who controlled all the affairs in the interest of slave-owners, as poor white trash who were allowed the ballot so long as they cast it according to direction. — Ulysses S. Grant

There were the Newport hills, far up the bay, marked now by a rim of lights. There was the water, a blue shimmer under the sun, a black mirror after dark, somehow alive, a living thing that tied it all together, the houses hugging the rim and the people in them, drawn there to be beside the bay. The water had been there in the beginning, the beautiful bay all alone; and now the houses had crowded about it, hemming it in a row of stucco and brick and white clapboard. Someday the bay would be alone again. When The Thing went off. When all of the houses would be blown away. There would be floating rubble, a border of broken trash for a little while. — Dolores Hitchens

First semester, I learned that Jack Rogers sandals, so revered in college, screamed, "My small liberal arts school will always be the center of the universe!" I'd found a new axis, so into the trash went my gold, silver, and white pairs. — Jessica Knoll

One teacher told me that my work belonged in the trash. That day I ran out of the classroom and ended up in the library, where there happened to be a black and white photography exhibition of Robert Rauschenberg's photographs of the streets of New York. The subject of his photos were exactly what I was painting about. — Jose Parla

The vagrant, the squatter, had been redrawn, yet qualitatively he/she remained the same: a piece of white trash on the margins of rural society. Observers recognized how the moving mass of undesirables in the constantly expanding West challenged democracy's central principle. California was a wake-up call. Anxious southerners focused attention not only on their slave society and slave economy, but on the ever-growing numbers of poor whites who made the permanently unequal top-down social order perfectly obvious. Who really spoke of equality among whites anymore? No one of any note. Let us put it plainly: on the path to disunion, the roadside was strewn with white trash. — Nancy Isenberg

She buys "mixed salad greens" for seven dollars a bag, triple-washed with who knows what. And to get this stuff home, which is only two blocks away from the grocery store, Jennica throws all of it into plastic bags. There is a husk on her corn, corn that Jennica's store sells in April.. there is a rind on her grapefruit, grapefruit that gets flown in from Florida... but still, Jennica puts the corn and the citrus into plastic bags. Her supposedly organic red peppers, which cost six dollars a pound, come in a foam tray under shrink-wrap, but she puts them in a plastic bag. And then the checkout girl puts all of Jennica's little plastic parcels into two or three more big white plastic bags, and then Jennica walks the two blocks home, where she unpacks all the bags and then trows them in the same trash bin where her corn husks and citrus rinds go. — Rudolph Delson

Yes, she was the girl playing basketball with all the boys in the park, collecting cans by the side of the road, keeping secret pet kittens in an empty boxcar in the woods, walking alone at night through the rail yards, teaching her little sister how to kiss, reading out loud to herself, so absorbed by the story, singing sadly in the tub, building a fort from the junked cars out in the meadow, by herself in the front row at the black-and-white movies or in the alley, gazing at an eddy of cigarette stubs and trash and fall leaves, smoking her first cigarette at dusk by a pile of dead brush in the desert, then wishing at the stars
she was all of them, and she was so much more that just just her that I still didn't know. — Davy Rothbart

Listen, bitch, the only white trash in this room is the one who slept with a married man. An old married man at that. You call my man one more name and I will knock those ridiculously high heels out from under you. So back the hell off before you end up on your ass. -Eva — Abbi Glines

He had been humiliated and treated like the white trash he was. Under the bedsheet that hides the identity of every Ku Klux Klansman is a cretinous, vicious, and childlike human being whose last holdout is his whites-only restroom. — James Lee Burke

Libido, fascination, too much oral defecation. White trash get down on your knees, time for cake and sodomy. — Marilyn Manson

Processed pig is white trash meat. Some people call it Spam. — Scott Weiland

Any country that enjoys fighting and bitching as a recreation as much as America does will always be, in some way or another, walking along a knife's edge. We're a nation that spends its afternoons watching white trash throw chairs at each other on Jerry Springer, its drive time listening to the partisan rantings of this or that hysterical political demagogue, and its late-night hours composing feverish blog entries full of anonymous screeds and denunciations. All of this shit is harmless enough so long as the power comes on every morning, fresh milk makes it to the shelves, there's a dial tone, and your front yard isn't underwater. But it becomes a problem when the magic grid goes down and suddenly there's no more machinery between you and whomever you happen to get off on hating. — Matt Taibbi

If you look in the dictionary under 'white trash' there's a picture of my family."
from BREAKFAST WITH NERUDA, p 37 — Michael Flynn

Poor white trash quoting de Maistre and Carlyle and fancying themselves elite while they scrabbled to survive in a world where they were outstripped economically by the Chinese and intellectually by their own phones. — Ken MacLeod

There's nothing like white trash at the White House. — Dolly Parton

Like most scavengers, Sunil knew how he appeared to the people who frequented the airport: shoeless, unclean, pathetic. By winter's end, he had defended against this imagined contempt by developing a rangy, loose-hipped stride for exclusive use on Airport Road. It was the walk of a boy on his way to school, taking his time, eating air. His trash sack was empty on this first leg of his daily route, so it could be tucked under his arm or worn over his shoulders like a superhero cape. When Sister Paulette passed by in her chauffeured white van, it could be draped over his head. Sister Paulette-Toilet was how he thought of her now. He imagined her riding down Airport Road looking for children more promising than he. — Katherine Boo

Anything, Christa?" he said. "Anything? What you're asking me to do is a mockery. So you had best mean it. You would do anything to save this place. You'd marry that white trash. You'd marry me. — Heather Graham

Conservatives are routinely pilloried on television. A&E likely greenlit 'Duck Dynasty' in the first place because executives believed Americans would laugh at the redneck antics of the self-described 'white trash' family. — Ben Shapiro

When you are bred to be white trash, you do what you can to avoid the family trap. — Gayle Forman

Americans call them hillbillies, rednecks, or white trash. I call them neighbors, friends, and family. The — J.D. Vance

I know i don't get the happily ever after. My knight and shinning armor took the highway detour around this godforsaken shit hole. I've made peace with that. That doesn't mean i'm going to lie down like a doormat and let every cocky prick in the trailer have his way with me. - White Trash Beautiful — Teresa Mummert

I worked with these liberal elites for 28 years at CBS News, and they were always throwing around the term 'white trash,' by which they meant poor southerners who didn't go to Harvard. I'm not sure why that makes them trash. — Bernard Goldberg

DDP, when I look at you, I see white trash! When I look at the people in the crowd, I see white trash. So maybe you are the people's champion! — Scott Steiner

We Finches don't marry the children of rednecked white trash. — Harper Lee

I've tried the female thing. I was in a movie called Dinner for Schmucks a couple of years ago with Steve Carell and I created a female character for that movie. And after a few months of trying her out on the road it just didn't work. I mean, I can think like a terrorist, I can think like a white trash guy, I can even try and think like an African American, but I can't figure out how a woman. — Jeff Dunham

For most Americans of the eighteenth century, it was assumed impossible for a servant to shed his lowly origins; the meaner sort, as one newspaper insisted, could never "wash out the stain of servility." There were fears that the meaner sort were treading too close on the heels of those above them. — Nancy Isenberg

I never, with my eyes, saw the mistreatment of any black person. Not once. Where we lived was all farmers. The blacks worked for the farmers. I hoed cotton with them. I'm with the blacks, because we're white trash. — Phil Robertson

First known as "waste people," and later "white trash," marginalized Americans were stigmatized for their inability to be productive, to own property, or to produce healthy and upwardly mobile children - the sense of uplift on which the American dream is predicated. The American solution to poverty and social backwardness was not what we might expect. Well into the twentieth century, expulsion and even sterilization sounded rational to those who wished to reduce the burden of "loser" people on the larger economy. In — Nancy Isenberg

I was just thinking about how my grandparents, who raised me, would be considered "white trash," whatever that means - mostly for being racists, I'd say. And how, as a child, I wanted to be like them, and identified with them culturally. — Shane McCrae

Despite the proliferation of personal storytelling in recent years, and the shift in social conditions that has facilitated these stories being told and heard, there are still certain stories that cannot be told - either because we have no language with which to articulate them or because there is no interpretive community to hear and understand them. These stories become, instead, secrets and lies - stories that signal social isolation and disempowerment rather than connection and strength. One such story within contemporary culture, as the epigraphs from Dorothy Allison and Victoria Brownworth suggest, is the story of class - a story that often only becomes tellable as a lie, joke, or dirty secret. This is especially the case with the category of "white trash. — Annalee Newitz

... sometimes when I close my eyes as I'm being taken, I can pretend that I'm someone special to these men. In my head I can be someone, someone worthy of love, not that white trash kid who left home on foot five years prior. — Candi Kay

I have my cards read every time I pass a tarot-reader booth. I would be so embarrassed to have one of those 900 numbers appear on my phone bill, because I don't know how I would explain it to my business manager. It would almost be like saying, 'Okay, I'm white trash.' — Jennifer Tilly

My dad died, I write. almost a year ago. Car accident. My hand is shaking; my eyes sting and fill. I add Not his fault before pushing the notebook and pen back across the table, wiping a hand across my cheeks.
As he reads, my impulse is to reach out, grab the notebook, run outside, dump it in the trash, bury it in the snow, throw it under the wheels of a passing car - something, something, so I can go back fifteen seconds when this part ofme was still shut away and private. Then I look at Ravi's face again, and the normally white white whites of his eyes are pink. This causes major disruption to my ability to control the flow of my own tears. I see myself when I look at him right now: he's reflecting my sadness, my broken heart, back to me.
He takes the pe, writes, and slides it over. You'd think it's something epic from the way it levels my heart. It isn't.
I'm really sorry, Jill.
Four little words. — Sara Zarr

Fighting! Fighting like white-trash dumb monkey ...
-Park's mom — Rainbow Rowell

I was poor white trash, no glitter, no glamour, but I'm not ashamed of anything. — Eminem

You've got another problem. Like most white trash, you're disrespectful to your betters and proud of your stupidity and ignorance. — James Lee Burke

Sandy's was one of those places that made poor, white trash feel like high-class consumers. This was the kind of place you'd take your mistress to, but never your wife. Wives expected better. Mistresses were impressed by the blandness of the over-priced wine and the vast Italian menu options. — Alistair Cross

Tango, ever the gentleman, gave her a wink. I don't have anything in my blood but beer and poor white trash. Figure I gotta get in good with these leader types. — Lauren Gilley

You don't have to get out. I know how to let myself in," she said.
"I'll get you at the door and walk you to it when I return you. It's part of my job, woman," he said.
Her temper flared. "Don't you ever call me woman. I'm not backwoods white trash. I have a name and don't you forget it. — Carolyn Brown

The Mexicans have finally found a drug that white trash likes and can afford. And one thing you ain't never gonna run out of is white trash. — Don Winslow

I watched the scar starting to form on my knee. No matter how tan I got, it stayed white.
Gradually, the dreams stopped.
By late July, when I still hadn't heard from Columbia, I assumed that I'd gone from the waitlist to the trash can. Didn't bother me as much as I'd expected. I was in at Uconn and Trinity. I'd started to wonder if that was what I really wanted after all. — Joe Schreiber

White trash had a way of finding their graves. Along with wife beating and beer sucking, dying was probably their only core competency. — J.R. Ward

Bran was stripping her futon down to the bare mattress when she entered her apartment. It was sort of like watching the president mowing the White House lawn or taking out the trash. — Patricia Briggs

She takes a deep breath through her nose and I see it. I see the white-trash girl she was ten years ago. She was strong. She didn't take no shit from nobody. Miss — Kathryn Stockett

You can find yourself a decent,
honorable man, one to love you, respect you, cherish you. Someone with
morals, with a decent job and a good future. That's what you think you
want, isn't it? Not some white trash from Alabama. Not some ex-con
who's running the scam of a lifetime. You're so good and decent, the very
thought of me disgusts you, doesn't it?" His voice was low and seductive
as he pushed the words at her.
She met his gaze with what she hoped was a fearless one of her own.
"Yes," she said.
"Then tell me, Rachel," he said, letting his hand toy with the loose
neckline of her tunic, "why aren't you out somewhere, fucking your little
gentleman's brains out? Why are you here with me, quivering when I
touch you? — Anne Stuart

'Bonnie and Clyde,' while one of the best movies ever made, was far more interested in portraying Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker as romantic anti-establishment Robin Hoods than what they really were: white-trash spree killers. — Bryan Burrough

People actually were worried that I was going to get stereotyped as a monster after Freddy, but my God, I got stereotyped as white trash for years, the best friend for years, the redneck for years, the nerd for years and let me tell you ... it's better to be a monster than to be a nerd. — Robert Englund

That old if you 'need anything, let me know,' is a total crock. You hear people say it all the time, but you never see anyone actually call up the person who said it and say, "Hey, remember when you said to let you know if i needed anything? Well, I'm feeling really overwhelmed. Could you please come clean my kitchen, I'd feel like I had a bit of a head start." You will never hear someone say that, because then the person asking the other person to clean their kitchen is seen as a helpless, incompetent dick. -Diana Rowland (My life as a white trash zombie) — Diana Rowland

O.K., then, all right, they would adopt a white-trash dog. Ha ha. They could name it Zeke, buy it a little corncob pipe and a straw hat. She imagined the puppy, having crapped on the rug, looking up at her, going, Cain't hep it. But no. Had she come from a perfect place? Everything was transmutable. She imagined the puppy grown up, entertaining some friends, speaking to them in a British accent: My family of origin was, um, rather not, shall we say, of the most respectable ...
Ha ha, wow, the mind was amazing, always cranking out these - — George Saunders

For the first three months, I place each student at a table with a thousand pieces of white paper and a trash can underneath. Every day they have to sit at the table for several hours and write ideas. They put the ideas they like on the right side of the table; the ones they don't like, they put in the trash. But we don't throw out the trash. After three months, I only take the ideas from the trash can. I don't even look at the ideas they liked. Because the trash can is a treasure trove of things they're afraid to do. — Marina Abramovic

I'm poor white trash from the state of Washington. — Chuck Close

I'm really white trash. — George Clooney

Every era in the continent's vaunted developmental story had its own taxonomy of waste people-unwanted and unsalvageable. Each era had its own means of distancing its version of white trash from the mainstream ideal. — Nancy Isenberg

Even when it isn't going well, knitting can be deeply spiritual. Knitting sets goals that you can meet. Sometimes when I work on something complicated or difficult - ripping out my work and starting over, porong over tomes of knitting expertise, screeching "I don't get it!" white practically weeping with frusteation - my husband looks at me and says, "I don't know why you think you like knitting." I just stare at him. I don't like knitting. I LOVE knitting. I don't know what could have possible led him to think that I'm not enjoying myself. The cursing? The crying? The forteen sheets of shredded graph paper? Knittong is like a marriage (I tell him) and you don't just trash the whole thing because there are bad moments. — Stephanie Pearl-McPhee

As you grow older, you'll see white men cheat black men every day of your life, but let me tell you something and don't you forget it - whenever a white man does that to a black man, no matter who he is, how rich he is, or how fine a family he comes from, that white man is trash — Harper Lee

I might have been born just plain white trash / but Fancy was my name. — Reba McEntire

Ten minutes later the kid came out trailing his mother. She hurried out the door. He stuck out his tongue at me. Loser, I thought, until I saw the white pill sitting on his pink tongue. He coughed into his hand, then mouthed the word remember, tapping his cast, and tossed the pill into the trash can.
I watched him leave.

He wasn't glossy. He wasn't dreary, either. He was something else.

He was all there. — Angie Smibert

But all of my anger toward Scott and embarrassment at my own behavior were overshadowed by the conversation with Kaidan. Just thinking about it made my heart race all over again. I couldn't believe it. He was really like me. Which was what, exactly? He knew, of course. I wished I could have talked with him longer. I wondered how I could get hold of him.
I supposed I could attach my phone number to a pair of my undies and throw them onstage at his next show. The thought actually made me laugh out loud. He'd probably take one look at the white cotton panties and chuck them in the trash. — Wendy Higgins

The talk shows are stuffed full of sufferers who have regained their health
congressmen who suffered through a serious spell of boozing and skirt-chasing, White House aides who were stricken cruelly with overweening ambition, movie stars and baseball players who came down with acute cases of wanting to trash hotel rooms while under the influence of recreational drugs. Most of them have found God, or at least a publisher. — Calvin Trillin

I grew up in a mobile home, but it wasn't like white trash - it was a beautiful mobile home park, I had a loving mother, there were kids everywhere, there was a playground in the center, I just grew up in poverty. — Taryn Manning

You're not more than one generation from poor white trash, are you, Agent Starling? — Anthony Hopkins

I'm obsessed with trash TV. I love horrible TV. shows. It's the white trash in me, you know? — Elle King

I sometimes read about authors who say they require a perfectly silent room maintained at precisely 68 degrees, with trash bags taped over the windows and a white-noise machine in the corner to write, and I think, 'Who are these people, and do any of them have kids?' — Jennifer Weiner

I use to live on this street when I was a kid where there was an old person retirement home, and all of the old people would listen to that band Herman's Hermits, and they would wear white nursing shoes. And they would throw away stacks of VHS tapes, and I would go through the trash and take them. — Harmony Korine

Every time I work with real Southern actors ... we immediately go into white trash and we just get along really well within one night. — Lucas Till

If she'd spaced her children out and had eleven babies in eleven years, she would have been no better than her own mother and sisters: irresponsible, a welfare cheat, another bit of Sawdust Lane white trash. But as luck would have it, she'd had them all at once, and now she was, overnight, middle-class. And respectable. — Sheri Holman

Tell um de good Lawd dont keer whether he bright er not. Dont nobody but white trash keer dat. — William Faulkner

I also believe my home state is cursed by ignorance and poverty and racism, much of it deliberately inculcated to control a vulnerable electorate. And I believe many of the politicians in Louisiana are among the most stomach-churning examples of white trash and venality I have ever known. To me, the fact that large numbers of people find them humorously picaresque is mind numbing, on a level with telling fond tales of one's rapist. — James Lee Burke