Southern Quotes

My voice falls into Southern drawl when I am tired, drunk, or in trouble. Too often, my accent is attacked by all three of these realities.

Jennifer Harrison

Quick," I hissed. "Tell me what you know about this place."The ghost frowned. His face appeared sweaty and his hair was a mess, like he'd been running his fingers through it. "How about, 'hey, Frankie. How you doing, Frankie? I see you're missing both your legs, Frankie.

Angie Fox

I shook my head. "You know I ain't never going to be good enough for her. She can't fall in love with me, you know as well as I do that nothing good is going to come of her staying with me.""Then why do you stay with her? Why, if you seem to think that this is a bad idea, do you stay with her?"I raked my fingers through my hair. "I don't know! Maybe I'm stupid? A glutton for punishment."Jackson pointed his beer at me. "Or maybe you love her too and that scares the shit out of you.

Magan Vernon

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

Tim Heaton

The curtains were not yet drawn and with the moonlight spreading across the room, I could see clearly. I undressed and slipped a soft cotton gown over my naked body. I pulled the blanket off the foot of my bed, covered my shoulders and wa...lked out on the balcony. The cool night air blowing through my hair served as a reminder that only a hint of summer remained in this year of 1860.

Nancy B. Brewer

Sea and land may lie between us, but my heart is always there with you.

Nancy B. Brewer

First memory: a man at the back door is saying, I have real bad news, sweat is dripping off his face, Garbert's been shot, noise from my mother, I run to her room behind her, I'm jumping on the canopied bed while she cries, she's pulling out drawers looking for a handkerchief, Now, he's all right, the man say, they think, patting her shoulder, I'm jumping higher, I'm not allowed, they think he saved old man Mayes, the bed slats dislodge and the mattress collapses. My mother lunges for me.Many traveled to Reidsville for the event, but my family did not witness Willis Barnes's electrocution, From kindergarten through high school, Donette, the murderer's daughter, was in my class. We played together at recess. Sometimes she'd spit on me.

Frances Mayes

Sometimes you have to travel back in time, skirting the obstacles, in order to love someone.

Frances Mayes

You said you left Mississippi in 1854," Ron says. He turns to Mamuwalde and asks "Were you a runaway slave?" "Not at all," Cindy Lou answers. "Daddy freed him." Ron's jaw almost hits the floor. His wine glass does.

Daven Anderson

He shook his head. "No, we do. I may be a little buzzed and really fucking horny, but I also need you to know that I love you. I should have said it the first time months ago, and I will keep saying it every damn day. I love you more than every single star in the Louisiana sky above us.

Magan Vernon

Whenever a group of people who are designed to primarily unite around one thing try to unite around something else, the result is devastating for all.

Rob Tims

Kay yawned and rested her forehead against the windowpane, her fingers idly strumming the guitar: the strings sang a hollow, lulling tune, as monotonously soothing as the Southern landscape, smudged in darkness, flowing past the window. An icy winter moon rolled above the train across the night sky like a thin white wheel.

Truman Capote

As a child, I ate up the image Carl strived to portray: An inspirational rags-to-riches tale of a go-getter emerging the hell of his sulfur-scented, Podunk Texas upbringing. With a community college dropout education, Carl managed to reach six figures as a mobile home lot manager when the trailer park industry boomed in the early nineties. He decorated his accomplishments with a large house, yachts, and weekly morale shindigs for his salesmen bursting with open bars and filet mignon. However, my mother was by far his prettiest accessory.

Magda Young

Every town has ‘THAT house’: the one that once held dark secrets. You know the house… the one no one will purchase? The one whose walls have seen blood? The one that even birds avoid, and the darkened windows resemble empty eye sockets? There are furtive, yet insistent, whispers about ‘that’ house, murmurs that perhaps the house is best left alone, lest the dark stain left upon that abode’s history seep into our own present-day.

James Caskey

Many people, after spending a long weekend being stealthily seduced by this grand dame of the South, mistakenly think that they have gotten to know her: they believe (in error) that after a long stroll amongst the rustling palmettoes and gas lamps, a couple of sumptuous meals, and a tour or two, that they have discovered everything there is to know about this seemingly genteel, elegant city. But like any great seductress, Charleston presents a careful veneer of half-truths and outright fabrications, and it lets you, the intended conquest, fill in many of the blanks. Seduction, after all, is not true love, nor is it a gentle act. She whispers stories spun from sugar about pirates and patriots and rebels, about plantations and traditions and manners and yes, even ghosts; but the entire time she is guarded about the real story. Few tourists ever hear the truth, because at the dark heart of Charleston is a winding tale of violence, tragedy and, most of all, sin.

James Caskey

I began to doubt that I would ever know the truth of what transpired, or who those people really were. But all that changed one rainy August afternoon, when I was surprised by a dead man who had answers.

James Caskey

My career still strikes me as miraculous. That a boy raised on Marine bases in the South, taught by Roman Catholic nuns in backwater Southern towns that loathed Catholics, and completed his education with an immersion into The Citadel—the whole story sounds fabricated, impossible even to me. Maybe especially to me.

Pat Conroy

I'm always sketchy of people who don't like grits.

Jaycee Ford

I know what it feels like to miss everything about him--the way he smells, the way his mouth curls up when he laughs, his voice.

Travis Neighbor Ward

True, beneath the human façade, I was an interloper, an alien whose ship had crashed beyond hope of repair in the backwoods of Southern Appalachia—but at least I’d learned to walk and talk enough like the locals to be rejected as one of their own.

Sol Luckman

It's summer and time for wandering...

Kellie Elmore

It occurred to me almost constantly in the South that had I lived there I would have been an eccentric and full of anger, and I wondered what form the anger would have taken. Would I have taken up causes, or would I have simply knifed somebody?

Joan Didion

Is it possible to make a sharp distinction between the content and the the form, between the personality of the Texas auctioneer and the language that he uses? Are not our attitudes toward people and events in great part shaped by the very language in which we describe them? When we try to describe one person to another or to a group, what do we say? Not usually how or what that person ate, rarely what he wore, only occasionally how he managed his job -- no, what we tell is what he said and, if we are good mimics, how he said it. We apparently consider a person's spoken words the true essence of his being.

Cleanth Brooks

There was a time when a new deputy tried to teach Mr. Fruit about the difference between a red and a green light, but Mr. Fruit had resisted all efforts to reorder what he had been doing perfectly well for many years. He had not only monitored the comings and goings of the town, his presence softened the ingrained evil that flourished along the invisible margins of the town’s consciousness. Any community can be judged in its humanity or corruption by how it manages to accommodate the Mr. Fruits of the world. Colleton simply adjusted itself to Mr. Fruit’s harmonies and ordinations. He did whatever he felt was needed and he did it with style. “That’s the Southern way” my grandmother said. “That’s the nice way.

Pat Conroy

She went to the window. A fine sheen of sugary frost covered everything in sight, and white smoke rose from chimneys in the valley below the resort town. The window opened to a rush of sharp early November air that would have the town in a flurry of activity, anticipating the tourists the colder weather always brought to the high mountains of North Carolina. She stuck her head out and took a deep breath. If she could eat the cold air, she would. She thought cold snaps were like cookies, like gingersnaps. In her mind they were made with white chocolate chunks and had a cool, brittle vanilla frosting. They melted like snow in her mouth, turning creamy and warm.

Sarah Addison Allen

Snow flurries began to fall and they swirled around people's legs like house cats. It was magical, this snow globe world.

Sarah Addison Allen

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

Children are often like hostages under the care of authority, with spankings and groundings nudging them like guns pointed at their skulls, threatening to shoot if the wrong words are uttered.

Maggie Georgiana Young

It wasn’t really a loud-mouthed, hyperactive little pig-tailed blonde that made Carl cringe. It was what I represented. While his upbringing was battered humiliation, I was spoiled, doted on, and spoon-fed by the world. I don’t think he was even aware of his intentions to reduce that child to his own state of self-loathing, but he was truly brilliant at it.

Maggie Georgiana Young

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

My parents won’t let me have a motorcycle, but they give me all the guns I want. I asked them for a motorcycle last Christmas and they told me I’d only kill myself. They got me this twelve-gauge instead.

Scott Thompson

Ocean people are different from land people. The ocean never stops saying and asking into ears, which don’t sleep like eyes. Those who live by the sea examine the driftwood and glass balls that float from foreign ships. They let scores of invisible imps loose out of found bottles. In a scoop of salt water, they revive the dead blobs that have been beached in storms and tides: fins, whiskers, and gills unfold; mouths, eyes, and colors bloom and spread. Sometimes ocean people are given to understand the newness and oldness of the world; then all morning they try to keep that boundless joy like a little sun inside their chests. The ocean also makes its people know immensity.

Maxine Hong Kingston

No amount of me trying to explain myself was doing any good. I didn't even know what was going on inside of me, so how could I have explained it to them?

Sierra D. Waters

It is not a single crime when a child is photographed while sexually assaulted (raped.) It is a life time crime that should have life time punishments attached to it. If the surviving child is, more often than not, going to suffer for life for the crime(s) committed against them, shouldn't the pedophiles suffer just as long? If it often takes decades for survivors to come to terms with exactly how much damage was caused to them, why are there time limits for prosecution?

Sierra D. Waters

The story of my birth that my mother told me went like this: "When you were coming out I wasn't ready yet and neither was the nurse. The nurse tried to push you back in, but I shit on the table and when you came out, you landed in my shit."If there ever was a way to sum things up, the story of my birth was it.

Sierra D. Waters

Intimidated, old traumas triggered, and fearing for my safety, I did what I felt I needed to do.

Sierra D. Waters

John was still making comments regarding violent things that he shouldn't, but I hoped he was just being a big mouth. Nobody was going to listen to me anyway.

Sierra D. Waters

He told me that if I hung up, he'd do it. He would commit suicide. He told me that if I called the cops he would kill every single one of them and I knew that he had the potential and the means to do it

Sierra D. Waters

Southern hospitality and Amish cooking - Ya'll Come Back, Danki.

Karen Harper

He was wearing a little bag of “Mojo” around his neck.

Nancy B. Brewer

I can never do justice to the great feeling of amazement and encouragement I felt when, perhaps for the first time in American history, white citizens of a Southern state banded together to come to Selma and show their indignation about the injustices against the African-Americans.

Amelia Boynton Robinson

But no one could say he hadn't gotten even. He could not count the field women whom he had sexually degraded and demoralized and in whom he had left his seed so their bastard children would be a daily visual reminder of what a plantation white man could do to a plantation black woman whenever he wanted, nor could he count the black men whom he had made fear his blackjack as they would fear Satan himself, making each of them a lifetime enemy of all white people.

James Lee Burke

Sing me a love song in a slow, southern drawl to the tune of sunny days...

Kellie Elmore

You'd think that a redheaded boy with glasses who was named Howard and had an up-down walk would have a lot more to wish for than being friends with me. But I admit I felt a smile on my face and hope in my heart, 'cause maybe wishes really do come true. Maybe some wishes just take longer than others.

Barbara O'Connor

She turned her painted blue eyes toward the assistant and said something in French before she left.

Nancy B. Brewer

{Summertime she speaks of winter, she eats ham, but speaks of beef, got a good man but, flirts with another. She might as well go to hell, cause she ain't gonna be happy in heaven either!}

Nancy B. Brewer

Today I wore a pair of faded old jeans and a plain grey baggy shirt. I hadn't even taken a shower, and I did not put on an ounce of makeup. I grabbed a worn out black oversized jacket to cover myself with even though it is warm outside. I have made conscious decisions lately to look like less of what I felt a male would want to see. I want to disappear.

Sierra D. Waters

Total non-retention has kept my education from being a burden to me.

Flannery O'Connor

Southern Quotes

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