The South Quotes

“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, The Sugar Queen

“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, The Sugar Queen

“There are no ideas in the South, just barbecue.”
― Pat Conroy, The Prince of Tides

“You learn to forgive (the South) for its narrow mind and growing pains because it has a huge heart. You forgive the stifling summers because the spring is lush and pastel sprinkled, because winter is merciful and brief, because corn bread and sweet tea and fried chicken are every bit as vital to a Sunday as getting dressed up for church, and because any southerner worth their salt says please and thank you. It's soft air and summer vines, pine woods and fat homegrown tomatoes. It's pulling the fruit right off a peach tree and letting the juice run down your chin. It's a closeted and profound appreciation for our neighbors in Alabama who bear the brunt of the Bubba jokes. The South gets in your blood and nose and skin bone-deep. I am less a part of the South than it is part of me. It's a romantic notion, being overcome by geography. But we are all a little starry-eyed down here. We're Rhett Butler and Scarlett O'Hara and Rosa Parks all at once.”
― Amanda Kyle Williams

“The food in the South is as important as food anywhere because it defines a person's culture.”
― Fannie Flagg

“Sing me a love song in a slow, southern drawl to the tune of sunny days...”
― Kellie Elmore, Magic in the Backyard

“The area was encompassed in a bubble of warm, fragrant steam from the funnel cake deep fryers. It smelled like sweet vanilla cake batter you licked off a spoon.”
― Sarah Addison Allen, The Sugar Queen

“There are turning points in everyone's life when we have to fight, even if we have to do it by ourselves and in public.”
― Junius Williams, Unfinished Agenda: Urban Politics in the Era of Black Power

“It occurred to him that no place was more confused about it's past or more terrified of the future than the South.”
― S. A. Cosby, All the Sinners Bleed

“I am often asked “Why do Southerners still care about the Civil War?”… Because it is unique in the American experience. Defeat was total, surrender unconditional and the land still occupied.”
― Tim Heaton

“There is a certain quality of light to be found only in midsummer in the South, as day, slipping into dusk, acquiesces to the filament, the bulb, the porch light; this seductive light is beautiful when it washes across dry cement, the sidewalk and stoop. The light spilling from the phone booth softens and cleanses all that it touches. It's a forgiving and almost protective light. The Minotaur is drawn to it from across the parking lot.”
― Steven Sherrill, The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break

“She had seen Southern men, soft voiced and dangerous in the days before the war, reckless and hard in the last despairing days of the fighting. But in the faces of the two men who stared at each other across the candle flame so short a while ago there had been something that was different, something that heartened her but frightened her — fury which could find no words, determination which would stop at nothing.
For the first time, she felt a kinship with the people about her, felt one with them in their fears, their bitterness, their determination. No, it wasn’t to be borne! The South was too beautiful a place to be let go without a struggle, too loved to be trampled by Yankees who hated Southerners enough to enjoy grinding them into the dirt, too dear a homeland to be turned over to ignorant people drunk with whisky and freedom.
As she thought of Tony’s sudden entrance and swift exit, she felt herself akin to him, for she remembered the old story how her father had left Ireland, left hastily and by night, after a murder which was no murder to him or to his family. Gerald’s blood was in her, violent blood. She remembered her hot joy in shooting the marauding Yankee. Violent blood was in them all, perilously close to the surface, lurking just beneath the kindly courteous exteriors. All of them, all the men she knew, even the drowsy-eyed Ashley and fidgety old Frank, were like that underneath — murderous, violent if the need arose. Even Rhett, conscienceless scamp that he was, had killed a man for being “uppity to a lady.”
― Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind

“Why had he gone, stepping off into the dark, into the war, into a Cause that was lost, into a world that was mad? Why had he gone, Rhett who loved the pleasures of women and liquor, the comfort of good food and soft beds, the feel of fine linen and good leather, who hated the South and jeered at the fools who fought for it? Now he had set his varnished boots upon a bitter road where hunger tramped with tireless stride and wounds and weariness and heartbreak ran like yelping wolves. And the end of the road was death. He need not have gone. He was safe, rich, comfortable. But he had gone, leaving her alone in a night as black as blindness, with the Yankee Army between her and home.”
― Margaret Mitchell, Gone With The Wind

“The myth of Main Street in the South has always been a chaste, puritanical fantasy. The reality is found on back roads and dirt lanes under a sky gone black, in the back seat of rust modeled Buicks and the beds of ramshackled trucks.”
― S. A. Cosby

“There can be no discredit to a conquered people for accepting the conditions offered by their conquerors. Nor is there any occasion for a feeling of humiliation. We have made an honest, and I hope that I may say, a creditable fight, but we have lost. Let us come forward, then, and accept the ends involved in the struggle....Let us accept the terms, as we are in duty bound to do. -- JAMES LONGSTREET, Letter to New Orleans Times, March 18, 1867.”
― Elizabeth Varon, Longstreet: The Confederate General Who Defied the South

“(Bless her heart's Southern for 'that bitch,' which Meryl was too polite to say out loud.)”
― Toni McGee Causey, The Saints of the Lost and Found

“I had lived too long in states where you could - for the space of one blink, one breath - pretend there was no difference between white and any other color. My mother said that this belief was more dangerous than the in-your-face racism of the South.”
― Claire O'Dell, A Study in Honor

“The southern states were demanding a break from the Union for the second time in the history of the country. They wanted fences and walls put up to keep the virus in the north. Some were calling it karma for the American Civil War and for the removal of certain historic statues depicting Confederate heroes of the south. To make matters worse, states in the west also wished to secede from the Union”
― Jason Medina, The Manhattanville Incident: An Undead Novel

“You might assume my father is a Republican because he's so old-fashioned. But actually he's a Democrat. In the South, the difference is that Democrats go bird hunting while Republicans go deer hunting.”
― Maggie Thrash, Lost Soul, Be at Peace

“He speaks always in reference to a real world, thoroughly experienced and understood. His words keep an almost physical hold on 'what I have touched with my hands and what have touched me...' Surely this is the power that we have periodically sensed in what is called (vulgarly) 'the vulgar tongue. It is a language under the discipline of experience, not of ideas or rules. Shaw's words, always interposed between experience and intelligence, have the exactitude of conviction, whereas the words of an analyst or theorist can have only the exactitude of definition.”
― Wendell Berry, What Are People For?

“It seemed to me a lot of people had marrying on the mind in Louisiana. As if there was something like an unfinished sentence about a woman of 19 traveling alone. Perhaps, in the south, it was just hard to imagine that, “A woman of 19 travels alone.” was a complete sentence.”
― Vanessa Osage, Can't Stop the Sunrise: Adventures in Healing, Confronting Corruption & the Journey to Institutional Reform

“For many years, Blanche worried that it was fear which sometimes made her reluctant to meet white people's eyes, particularly on days when she had the loneliest or the unspecified blues. She'd come to understand that her desire was to avoid pain, a pain so old, so deep, its memory was carried not in her mind, but in her bones. Some days she simply didn't want to look into the eyes of people likely raised to hate, disdain, or fear anyone who looked like her. It was not always useful to be in touch with race memory. The thought of her losses sometimes sucked the joy from her life for days at a time.”
― Barbara Neely, Blanche on the Lam

“They are willing to make almost any sacrifice to obtain a railroad ticket, and they left with the intention of staying.”
― Emmett J. Scott

“Was there such a thing as politically correct remembrance of the Confederacy? Or was any attempt to honor the Cause inevitably tainted by what Southernerners once delicately referred to as their 'peculiar institution?”
― Tony Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War

“We don’t pretend the South has reconciled
itself—this is a land that has been built by and
taken from enslaved people. We are committed
to having the uncomfortable discussions, telling
the truth, and letting our curiosity fuel questions,
in the name of moving civil liberties, gender
equality, and race relations forward. I am merely
a photographer and storyteller, but my goal is
to shine light on the idea that art and creativity
reveal that we are far more alike than different.”
― Alyssa Rosenheck, The New Southern Style: The Interiors of a Lifestyle and Design Movement

“I replicated those intimate memorials
of rigor and grits with my own hands,
now leaning over a casket to straighten
the lapel on Shawn's black suit and red
tie whisper his name in psalm”
― Yolanda J. Franklin, Blood Vinyls

“We’ve managed to skip the weather, which in the South consumes at least the first five minutes of every casual conversation between two men before the subject turns to football, which goes on for an average of fifteen minutes.”
― John Grisham, The Guardians

“At the end of the day that statue is nothing more than a chunk of granite and copper sitting in front of the library. That statue matters a lot less than the end goal. Holding onto history is not nearly as important as where we are headed. Pride matters less than power.”
― David Joy

“Men can't all think alike, and the trouble with the Southern people always has been that they won't tolerate any difference of opinion. If God Almighty had intended all men to think just alike, He might just as well have made but one man....My opinion is that the only true solution for Southern troubles is for the people to accept cordially and in good faith all the results of the war, including the reconstruction measures, the acts of Congress, negro suffrage, etc., and live up to them like men. If they would do this, and encourage Northern immigration, and treat all men fairly, whites and blacks, the troubles would soon be over, and in less than five years, the South would be in the enjoyment of greater prosperity than ever. -- JAMES LONGSTREET, Interview with correspondent from the Indianapolis Journal, September 24, 1874.”
― Elizabeth Varon, Longstreet: The Confederate General Who Defied the South

“I faced the South with dread. Here, I knew, were pain and confusion and all the manic results of bewilderment and fear. And the South being a limb of the nation, its pain spreads out to all America.”
― John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America