Best 193 quotes in «southern quotes» category

Lydia had devoted herself- and her husband's money- toward making their home a "destination." She fancied herself floating through a household of the East Coast elite, dazzling them with continental cuisine, priceless art and antiques, and a perfectly stocked wine cellar. They would tour her gardens and marvel at her ability to create such a cultural oasis in the southern desert. In reality, every evening Lydia watched her guests meander across her yard to the Belles', where they delighted in such southern delicacies as moonshine in Mason jars, bawdy conversation, and shoofly pie.

Magic of Southern expressions? Similes and metaphorical allusions. They are the yellow highlighter of conversation.

Many of the people who left the South never exactly sat their children down to tell them these things, tell them what happened and why they left and how they and all this blood kin came to be in this northern city or western suburb or why they speak like melted butter and their children speak like footsteps on pavement, prim and proper or clipped and fast, like the New World itself.

Marriage was a good cause, thought Ross. On a given day chances were one of you might be human.

Obelisks don't grow from the soil, and stone men and iron horses are never built without purpose.

Make their exits as gentle and loving as possible...Tell them how good it will be, even if you don't believe it yourself. You're southern, you know how to do that.

Puttin’ on a cowboy hat & a pair of boots doesn’t make you country; Like puttin’ on a ball gown & glass heels won’t make me Cinderella.

OJ, milk, butter, eggs, half a roll of country sausage, a cantaloupe, Kroger's whole-grain bread, a can of French Market chicory coffee, some blackberry preserves- just the right makings of a good Southern breakfast for just my kind of man. No matter that breakfast has always been my favorite meal and that this would be another major test of my willpower. 'Bout the time I'd started frying a big patty of sausage for him, I noticed a few red potatoes in a basket, peeled and cut one up, and tossed the cubes in the same large cast-iron skillet for hashed browns. At first I'd thought of doing soft-scrambled eggs for us both, but while I was beating four eggs with a little milk as quietly as possible, I remembered seeing a package of Jack cheese in the door of the fridge, as well as a couple of jalapeños on the windowsill, and suddenly decided to make my guy a spicy cheese omelette to really impress him.

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.

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

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.

So that I might face my past, I dug these words from the richest southern soil and held them in my hands like seeds waiting for rain.

Sweetling, I'm not going anywhere except upstairs, where I'm going to make love to you till you pass out happy.

That's one thing I like about you, Sarah Booth. You put your own personal style on a room. I'd call this boudoir pigsty. Yes sir, any man would find this an enticin' little love nest, if he didn't break his neck tryin' to get to the bed.

That's the measure of friendship, isn't it? Knowing people who will jar your secret and store it in a dark cellar forever. People who know it's never about the secret itself, but the keeping of it.

That was me. Reliable. The good southern guy. Boy next door. Except I wasn’t. Not really.

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.

The escape from industrialism is not in socialism or in Sovietism. The answer lies in a return to a society where agriculture is practiced by most of the people. It is in fact impossible for any culture to be sound and healthy without a proper regard for the soil, no matter how many urban dwellers think that their food comes from grocers and delicatessens, or their milk from tin cans. This ignorance does not release them from a final dependence upon the farm and that most incorrigible of beings, the farmer.

The Memphis Finley and I landed in was my mother’s Memphis. It was magnolia-lined and manicured, black-tailed and bow-tied. It glittered in illusory gold and tinkled in sing-song voices. It was cloistered, segregated, and well-appointed, the kind of place where everyone monogrammed their initials on everything from hand towels to silver because nothing mattered more than one’s family and to whom they were connected by lineage that traced through the fertile fields of the Mississippi Delta.

One of the most ambitious men to exploit the timber trade was Hugh F. McDanield, a railroad builder and tie contractor who had come to Fayetteville along with the Frisco. He bought thousands of acres of land within hauling distance of the railroad and sent out teams of men to cut the timber. By the mid-1880s, after a frenzy of cutting in south Washington County, he turned his gaze to the untapped fortune of timber on the steep hillsides of southeast Washington County and southern Madison County, territory most readily accessed along a wide valley long since leveled by the east fork of White River. Mr. McDanield gathered a group of backers and the state granted a charter September 4, 1886, giving authority to issue capital stock valued at $1.5 million, which was the estimated cost to build a rail line through St. Paul and on to Lewisburg, which was a riverboat town on the Arkansas River near Morrilton. McDanield began surveys while local businessman J. F. Mayes worked with property owners to secure rights of way. “On December 4, 1886, a switch was installed in the Frisco main line about a mile south of Fayetteville, and the spot was named Fayette Junction.” Within six months, 25 miles of track had been laid east by southeast through Baldwin, Harris, Elkins, Durham, Thompson, Crosses, Delaney, Patrick, Combs, and finally St. Paul. Soon after, in 1887, the Frisco bought the so-called “Fayetteville and Little Rock” line from McDanield. It was estimated that in the first year McDanield and partners shipped out more than $2,000,000 worth of hand-hacked white oak railroad ties at an approximate value of twenty-five cents each. Mills ran day and night as people arrived “by train, wagon, on horseback, even afoot” to get a piece of the action along the new track, commonly referred to as the “St. Paul line.” Saloons, hotels, banks, stores, and services from smithing to tailoring sprang up in rail stop communities.

The fact that there were more adults than children at her party didn't seem to faze Dixie. "That child is like a dandelion," Lettie said. "She could grow through concrete." Dixie's birthday party had a combination Mardi Gras/funeral wake feel to it. Mr. Bennett and Digger looped and twirled pink crepe paper streamers all around the white graveside tent until it looked like a candy-cane castle. Leo Stinson scrubbed one of his ponies and gave pony rides. Red McHenry, the florist's son, made a unicorn's horn out of flower foam wrapped with gold foil, and strapped it to the horse's head. "Had no idea that horse was white," Leo said, as they stood back and admired their work. Angela, wearing an old, satin, off-the-shoulder hoop gown she'd found in the attic, greeted each guest with strings of beads, while Dixie, wearing peach-colored fairy wings, passed out velvet jester hats. Charlotte, who never quite grasped the concept of eating while sitting on the ground, had her driver bring a rocking chair from the front porch. Mr. Nalls set the chair beside Eli's statue where Charlotte barked orders like a general. "Don't put the food table under the oak tree!" she commanded, waving her arm. "We'll have acorns in the potato salad!" Lettie kept the glasses full and between KyAnn Merriweather and Dot Wyatt there was enough food to have fed Eli's entire regiment. Potato salad, coleslaw, deviled eggs, bread and butter pickles, green beans, fried corn, spiced pears, apple dumplings, and one of every animal species, pork barbecue, fried chicken, beef ribs, and cold country ham as far as the eye could see.

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.

The Sweets rarely set foot on the avenues. They'd always lived on the street-side of town, where duct tape held everything together and WD-40 stopped the squeaks.

The time warp: the Civil War was yesterday, but 1960 is spoken of as if it were about three hundred years ago.

To identify a person as a Southerner suggests not only that her history is inescapable and formative but that it is also impossibly present. Southerners live uneasily at the nexus between myth and reality, watching the mishmash amalgam of sorrow, humility, honor, graciousness, and renegade defiance play out against a backdrop of profligate physical beauty.

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.

Whuppins were like kid taxes we paid with our behinds.

There is no city on Earth quite like Charleston. From the time I first came there in 1961, it’s held me in its enchanter’s power, the wordless articulation of its singularity, its withheld and magical beauty. Wandering through its streets can be dreamlike and otherworldly, its alleyways and shortcuts both fragrant and mysterious, yet as haunted as time turned in on itself.

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)

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.

West Virginia had the Hatfield and the McCoys. Shakespeare had the Capulets and the Montagues. Salvation had the Martins and the Sweets.

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.

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.

As much as I value an union of all the states, I would not admit the southern states into the union, unless they agreed to the discontinuance of this disgraceful trade, because it would bring weakness and not strength to the union.

All Southern women wished of their menfolk was simply to be 'like Paris handsome and like Hector brave'.

An auctioneer is such a uniquely American thing. I keep thinking in my head, perhaps it's not as American as I think, but it feels so Southern. It feels so American. Like, hundreds of years of American tradition is involved in it.

And then Earl Scruggs comes along and transforms the banjo into a virtuosic modern instrument. For the first time, the Southern banjo style becomes the identity of the banjo, and everything from before is wiped off of people's consciousness by the power of that explosion.

A new restaurant here in Southern California requires women to wear high heels. I'm outraged! This is sexist! Why just the women?

As the eldest son of an Alabama sharecropper family, I was constantly troubled by a collage of North American southern behaviors and notions in reference to the inhumanity of people. There were questions that I did not know how to ask but could, in my young, unsophisticated way, articulate a series of answers.

Canadians shouldn't come down to Southern California and take jobs away from Mexicans.

As weird as it is, as much as I love Southern California, the reality is I'm going to be somewhere else next season.

Cesky Krumlov, the little jewel box of a city in southern Bohemia.

Be careful about anybody who's running for president who's going to tell you that they're going to build a wall across the entire southern border. It's not going to happen. It is the wrong message to send. And it's not going to be effective.

Christianity has a built-in defense system: anything that questions a belief, no matter how logical the argument is, is the work of Satan by the very fact that it makes you question a belief. It's a very interesting defense mechanism and the only way to get by it -- and believe me, I was raised Southern Baptist -- is to take massive amounts of mushrooms, sit in a field, and just go, "Show me.".

Even in political considerations, now-a-days, you have stronger motives to feel interested in the fate of Europe than in the fate of the Central or Southern parts of America.

Does the government fear us? Or do we fear the government? When the people fear the government, tyranny has found victory. The federal government is our servant, not our master!

FedDev Ontario's investment in the Glanworth Branch Library has enhanced this unique landmark into an accessible learning hub for local community members. When we improve facilities, we are strengthening our communities and building a prosperous southern Ontario.

As for slavery, there is no need for me to speak of its bad aspects. The only thing requiring explanation is the good side of slavery. I do not mean indirect slavery, the slavery of proletariat; I mean direct slavery, the slavery of the Blacks in Surinam, in Brazil, in the southern regions of North America. Direct slavery is as much the pivot upon which our present-day industrialism turns as are machinery, credit, etc. … Slavery is therefore an economic category of paramount importance.

Every night I get many letters, and after every talk I get many questions from people who say, "I want to change things. What can I do?" I never hear these questions from peasants in southern Colombia or Kurds in southeastern Turkey under miserable repression or anybody who is suffering. They don't ask what they can do; they tell you what they're doing.

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