Quotes About Appalachia

I started singing when I was about 3 and dancing soon after. Mom just started looking for outlets where I could perform and availed herself of any opportunity she could in the mountains of North Carolina in the '70s.

I live in southern Appalachia, so I'm surrounded by people who work very hard for barely a living wage. It's particularly painful that people are working the farms their parents and grandparents worked but aren't living nearly as well.

Bill, it was said, was a direct descendant of President James Monroe; he grew up in the mountains; he rose from hardscrabble poverty in a backward, backwoods culture; bluegrass music sprang from ancient Scots-Irish culture transplanted to the Appalachians, where it blossomed as a traditional folk art.

Appalachia, my state, eastern Kentucky, has a large amount of poverty.

When the power grid gets compromised the coal from Appalachia can be trucked to our power plants so they can be put back on line as quickly as possible.

BEREA, KENTUCKY, 1939.

I was born in Mullens, West Virginia, and lived in a community called Iroquois in Appalachia. We faced heavy pollution. Our water came from the Sweeney Watershed, which meant we essentially drank acid mine drainage.

I'd lived in West Virginia on and off for four to five years growing up. I'm familiar with Bible Belt, with Appalachia, 'Hillbilly Elegy.'

In some parts of Appalachia, actors and acting are still not considered quite decent.

My parents were not affluent people and were not - didn't come from the extremities of education. My mother had a high school diploma. I often think I so wish she'd come out of the hills in Appalachia and been able to go on to college. I think she would have made a wonderful teacher.

Appalachia, in fact, is a very matriarchal culture. We revere our grandmothers and mothers.

Think of all the mesquite in Texas, the pinyon pines, the acorns in Appalachia, every place has the possibility of mass production. It's an infrastructural system so nestled in ecology, it's a more beautiful ecology.

I went to a large consolidated school in Appalachia. And I wrote the story when I was in the second grade and I took it up to the third floor to the school newspaper office that was written and edited by juniors and seniors.

Yeah, I spent my teen years in West Virginia, and when I was a kid, in Louisiana. I definitely have that exposure to two different sorts of rural: the South and Appalachia.

My family has existed in eastern Kentucky for as long as there are records. If you're familiar with the famous Hatfield-McCoy family feud back in the 1860s, '70s and '80s in the United States, my family was an integral part of that.

Who is destroying the mountains of eastern Kentucky and West Virginia?...It isn't the coal companies. It's us...You did this. Okay, forget the guilt. How can we change that?

Trump could also only win the presidency without a popular-vote majority because a large region of the country, the greater Rust Belt and Appalachia, had been neglected by both parties' policies over the preceding decades, leading to a slow-building social crisis that the national press only really noticed because of Trump's political success.

For better or worse, the bulk of coal industry jobs are in Appalachia - and when that coal is gone, so are the jobs.

There's a roots nature to Appalachia - the origins of folk and bluegrass. I know guys there who are some of the best players I've ever heard but are playing on their porch tonight because they've never chased success. There's simplicity to how they live and what they care about.

Yeah, I spent my teen years in West Virginia, and when I was a kid, in Louisiana. I definitely have that exposure to two different sorts of rural: the South and Appalachia.

I grew up in Appalachia, and I've seen people milk cows and slaughter pigs and plow with a big-footed horse. It's not like I was a city child.

I've always played music. But you know, in eastern Kentucky, everybody plays music.

Race has clearly played a role in Kentucky's Obama-phobia, as it has in other swaths of Appalachia. The Obama administration's supposed 'war on coal' is a big factor too.

The tropical island of Puerto Rico couldn't be more different than America's rust belt or the mountains of Appalachia, but here too live Americans who feel forgotten by our leaders and left behind by our economy.