Best 193 quotes in «southern quotes» category

There are a few of the open-air spirits; the more domestic of their tribe gather within-doors, plentiful as swallows under southern eaves.

There are many ways of discarding [books]. You can give them to friends,--or enemies,--or to associations or to poor Southern libraries. But the surest way is to lend them. Then they never come back to bother you.

The remark has been made that in the Civil War the North reaped the victory and the South the glory.

There he got out the luncheon-basket and packed a simple meal, in which, remembering the stranger's origin and preferences, he took care to include a yard of long French bread, a sausage out of which the garlic sang, some cheese which lay down and cried, and a long-necked straw-covered flask wherein lay bottled sunshine shed and garnered on far Southern slopes.

There is no better protection against the euro crisis than successful structural reforms in southern Europe.

The secession of the Southern States, individually or in the aggregate, was the certain consequence of Mr. Lincoln's election.

There's an old Southern saying that if you're worried about your weight, clothes, or getting old, then you don't have any real problems.

The Sisters were Southern Baptist, and they went to church on Saturdays and Sundays, and most other days, too.

The Southern past, the Southern present, the Southern future, concentrated into Gertrude's voice, became one of red clay pine-barrens, of chain-gang camps, of housewives dressed in flour sacks who stare all day dully down into dirty sinks.

The Southern slave would obey God in respect to marriage, and also to the reading and studying of His word. But this, as we have seen, is forbidden him.

The time for compromise has now passed, and the South is determined to maintain her position, and make all who oppose her smell Southern powder and feel Southern steel.

Thus the American people were maneuvered into a Civil War which they neither envisioned nor desired. They were manipulated by Masonic Canaanite conspirators working together in the Northern and the Southern states.

They [Rappites] were moving from Southern Indiana to Pennsylvania, where they had originally settled when they came from Germany. They were looking for someone who wanted to buy a pre-built town, which wouldn't have been appropriate for any kind of normal settlement. That's when Robert Owen [Welsh industrialist and utopian socialist] buys the village and founds New Harmony.

Virginia was in fact a landowning aristocracy, without nobility or merchant class, or any considerable small peasant farming class; and the other Southern colonies, except North Carolina, were on the whole similar to Virginia in these respects.

To use a Southern euphemism, our space program has been snake-bit.

We are destined to be a barrier against the return of ignorance and barbarism. Old Europe will have to lean on our shoulders, and to hobble along by our side, under the monkish trammels of priests and kings, as she can. What a colossus shall we be when the southern continent comes up to our mark! What a stand will it seem as a ralliance for the reason and freedom of the globe!

When I personally feel like I belong to the world, it is because I am with people I love in places I love. So I decided that would be my solution. I set All the World in a place I love - the central coast region of Southern California - and populated it with people and things that I love. I stopped worrying that I wasn't representing every place, every person, every possible experience. And I hoped that through this personal expression of mine, others would find their own personal meanings as well.

We were growing up in West Virginia. Everybody was poor there in the southern part of the state. It was like growing up in the Great Depression from the stories I hear people tell. Everybody was poor and so we didnt know that we were any different from anybody else.

YANKEE, n. In Europe, an American. In the Northern States of our Union, a New Englander. In the Southern States the word is unknown.

When you're doing a deal with someone in the southern Sahara, it's a very different way of doing business than in London. You can't sign them in the usual way because they'd end up getting ripped off, which would defeat the object of setting up a label like this

When Ronald Reagan's career in show business came to an end, he was hired to impersonate, first, a California governor and then an American president who would reduce taxes for his employers, the Southern and Western New Rich, much of whose money came from the defence industries. There is nothing unusual about this arrangement. All recent presidents have had their price-tags.

While a strong presence on our southern border is imperative, the border cannot be secured unless we enforce our internal laws and stop ignoring the open complicity of U.S. companies and foreign nations to promote illegal activities.

While the foreign policy elite in Washington focuses on the 8,000 deaths in a conflict in Syria – half a world away from the United States – more than 47,000 people have died in drug-related violence since 2006 in Mexico. A deeply troubled state as well as a demographic and economic giant on the United States’ southern border, Mexico will affect America’s destiny in coming decades more than any state or combination of states in the Middle East.

Whoever had said that the hand rocked the cradle ruled the world must have has a Southern,born bred mother.

With Southern actors you always think you're from the same place. Even if one is from Texas, one is from Georgia, you're like, "oh, you're just down the street, man.

Yankees don't understand that the Southern way of talking is a language of nuance. What we can do in the South is we can take a word and change it just a little bit and make it mean something altogether different.

A barbeque in Jasper County does not mean hamburgers and chicken breasts on a fancy gas grill. Yankees call anything you cook outside "barbeque." The word 'barbeque' in Ray's neck of the woods is a 'noun,' not a verb, and it means a whole hog tied to a spit with chicken wire and rope and roasted in an outdoor oven, usually in someone's backyard or some parking lot. And the fixin's that must accompany it are baked beans, collard greens, white rolls, cole slaw, and rice topped with a sweet gravy made from the drippings and other unmentionables that the packs call hash. Jasper folks sort of take the "don't ask, don't tell" approach with the hash. 'We don't want to know what's in it,' Ray thinks, 'but it sure tastes good.

You can actually muck with history and think about what if, why not. What if there were dragons in the Incan Empire that allowed them to resist colonization? What if there were a massive dragon empire in the middle of the interior of southern Africa that decided to take objection to the slave trade?

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.

...and should I die in her care, I would leave smiling because, I will linger in the hills beside her...

Because the South can be a dangerous place, especially for those who don’t understand it.

...and yet again, I was beginning the long process of coming undone in the hundred vestibules of my own soul. Breakdowns were common to me by then, and I attributed them to that sour Irish gene. But I could cast plenty of blame on my washed in the blood of the lamb Southern roots also. Taken together, it looked like a wicked combination of destinies, Irish and Southern, forming a comfortable birthplace for lunatics, nutcases, borderlines, and psychos. I could not blame everything on a bar fight in Galway when I also had these smoldering fires of white lightning smoking in a copper coil...

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.

Every Wednesday Angela Belle came to town. And every Wednesday Dr. Montgomery "accidentally" ran into her. That Doc sat by the diner window for thirty minutes picking at a piece of pie until she rounded the corner did not go unnoticed. "Never seen a man so whupped," the Sheriff said, rolling a toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other. "Got him by the short hairs," Willie concurred. Naturally, every man in town thought Doc was getting some. Naturally, every woman in town knew better. "A dog don't dance for a bone he's already chewed," Dot said, sliding Ben Harrington's plate lunch in front of him. "Depends on the bone," the Sheriff said, as they watched Doc run across the street to catch up with Angela. "Depends on the dog," Dot countered, giving Willie a look that made his face burn.

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.

Don’t pack your bags just yet, stay awhile, Don't try to run away to higher ground, You're in my twisted clouds of sad misfortune, And you are such an entertaining crowd! (I’ve never had such cheerful toys to play with...) Forget I said that – just a little natural disaster Humour, Ha-ha-ha. Pull up a rusty lawn chair On the waterfront in New Orleans, And ignore the wind that howls, Things aren’t always as they seem. I can smell fear in the air, Fresh amidst the cornbread steam, Forgive me if I sound excited, (I’m going to be famous, you know!) And let me take your money, please! I’ll drown your family, hunt down your pets, I’ve got tricks that I’ve never even tried yet, And it’s so easy when I get the chance! (I’ll swipe your house in just one glance!) As the saying goes, it all comes out in the wash, But I’m the only wash that leaves no stone unturned, Financial devastation is my middle name, And social degradation is my third! You, little boy from the bayou bank, You used to fish for pointless fun (I can appreciate having fun), But after I go, you’ll find your parents poor, You’ll have eviction notices on your door, You’ll have to sell any fish you can catch, In a desperate grasp for money, Although I hate to break it to you, That bayou’s polluted, honey! I see nothing in your future but welfare cheques! And you there, little girl with the closet of toys, You were born well-off with a room of your own, You have dresses that look more like They’re from fairy-tales, Glittery lace on your schoolgirl gowns. Wait ‘till murky water licks those hems, And your family is bankrupt And you’re homeless with them! Accept what’s to come, won’t you please? I’m just a carousel of wild winds Who’ll bring you to your knees! Hell, yeah! Take a bow, take a bow, Take a bow before your god… I might just pardon you If you’ve got magic up your sleeve! If you’re swift and resourceful you could outrun me! I always love a challenge! I always love a game… The question on your mind Is in regards to my first name, Right? My name is Katrina, the witch of the skies, A sorceress whose debut dance makes everyone die, I know it’s not what you wanted! (But I’m selfish through and through), So, c’mon and make me happy! Whether you’re ready or not…

Explaining the myriad delights of a football Saturday in the South to anyone who has not enjoyed them may be impossible – like trying to describe the ocean to a blind man.

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.

Finally, we entered Chetaube County, my imaginary birthplace, where the names of the little winding roads and minuscule mountain communities never failed to inspire me: Yardscrabble, Big Log, Upper, Middle and Lower Pigsty, Chicken Scratch, Cooterville, Felchville, Dust Rag, Dough Bag, Uranus Ridge, Big Bottom, Hooter Holler, Quickskillet, Buck Wallow, Possum Strut ... We always say a picture speaks a thousand words, but isn’t the opposite equally true?

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.

His voice had this thick, Charleston accent, where every word had more syllables than ever intended, yet each word seemed as if it had been carefully chosen and presented in a way that only a man born and raised in the heart of the South could–distinguished and from a different time.

I don’t want to want you, and this doesn’t change anything. I still hate your guts.” “Liar.

I know that Southern redhead type,” Bruno said, poking at his apple pie.

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

If we weren’t running late already, I’d pull this truck onto a dirt road and show her just what she does to me.

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.

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.

I’ll have you know Southern isn’t a synonym for stupid.--soon-to-be-released novel, Cape Cursed.

In the Deep South, God is a cotton king, Trussed up in plantation whites and powdered over smooth with a little bit of talcum from Momma’s compact. He’s the Georgia dust that gets on everything, in everything, Caking the soles of bare feet sifting through cracks in church pews, and catching in your lover’s eyelashes. In the Deep South, the Devil is a beautiful boy who swears and cheats at billiards on Sunday. He is the one who reaches up your skirt, pulls out the prayers your were saving for someday and lights them on fire with his tongue. He will sing hymns while feasting on your forfeit heart, call you blessed while peeling away dignity like stockings, then drag you out in front of the church to be stoned. In the Deep South, the Holy Spirit is an old woman with hands brown and gnarled as the nuts she boils and a voice soft and dark as the Appalachian sky. She is the swamp kingdom matriarch children are sent to when sins need to be wished away like warts, the presence of whom straightens the spines of wayward souls and coaxes a “Yes Ma’am” from the devil’s own. In the Deep South, Jesus is a mixed-race child with drops of destiny mingled into his blood and the names of the saints tattooed along his spine. He has his mother’s bearing, one that wears suffering nobly, and baleful eyes that speak of the sins of his forefathers. The word of God flutters from his mouth like butterflies with bodies baptized in tears and wings dipped in steel. In the Deep South, angels drink too much. They sashay and guffaw and forget to return calls. They tell white lies and agonize over what to wear. In the Deep South, angels look very much like you and I, and they cling to each other with dustbowl desperation and replenish their failing reserves of grace with ritual in the hopes of remembering what they once were, what wonders they once were capable of performing

In the South, history clings to you like a wet blanket. Outside your door the past awaits in Indian mounds, plantation ruins, heaving sidewalks and homestead graveyards; each slowly reclaimed by the kudzu of time.