Quotes About Regionalism

Southern political personalities, like sweet corn, travel badly. They lose flavor with every hundred yards away from the patch. By the time they reach New York, they are like Golden Bantam that has been trucked up from Texas - stale and unprofitable. The consumer forgets that the corn tastes different where it grows.

Bill Monroe is not singing about life in America. He's singing about life in Kentucky and Tennessee. And yet it's had this tremendous impact, not just in America but in the world. Why is Bill Monroe's hyper-regional music so universal? We can be so different and yet still share a tremendous amount.

I grew up in Central Illinois, midway between Chicago and St. Louis and I made a historic blunder. All my friends became Cardinal fans and grew up happy and liberal, and I became a Cub fan and grew up embittered and conservative.

Because of the invariable growth of the counteracting force known as Regionalism, or Nationalism, the Spiritual Power cannot prevail.

I'm convinced that the Great Lakes region will be at the center of an internally-focused North American economy when the hallucination of oil-powered globalism dissolves. Places like Buffalo, Cleveland, and Detroit will have a new life, but not at the scale of the twentieth century.

'Dhoka,' I think, is not just meant for Pakistan and India but for South Asia.

When you're from the East Coast or you're from the South, people expect you to sound a certain way. So if you don't sound that way, people won't label you as that type of artist. For me, I had a whole new lane to create for myself being from Pittsburgh and being a Midwest artist.

We join the call from other States from our region

I don't think massification and globalization and all those other 'izations' are necessarily hostile to regionalism.

A determined Yankee book drummer once told a Southerner that 'a set of books on scientific agriculture' would teach him to 'farm twice as good as you do.' To which the Southerner replied: 'Hell, son, I don't farm half as good as I know how now.

A Michigander can be every bit as prickly as a New Yorker, just not out loud. The Midwesterner's credo: keep it to yourself.

And instead of getting a pepper-and-salt effect, we find very clear and sharp divisions between the dialects of the United States, which are getting more different from each other as time goes on.

Whenever Washington makes a one-size-fits-all decision, it doesn't work in states all around the country.

I'm not a regionalist. Both places have their pros and cons. And the cultural differences are slighter than they are made out to be. L.A. riots, N.Y. shops. Both are good for stress relief.

To put this in international perspective, Mississippi now is about as poor relative to the coastal states as Sicily is relative to northern Italy.

What I've learned, traveling the country and doing book signings, Mama's biscuits - you know, somebody in Montana's got their version of Mama's biscuits, somebody in California's got their version - so it made me realize that we're not as regionalized as we think we are.

Some of these words appear in metropolitan French, but a person of Saintonge who speaks the parlanjhe of the region is uniquely called a goulebenèze, literally, a happy mouth.

I have never lived anywhere but New York or New England, but there are times when I'm talking to you and I hit a Southern vowel, or a word gets caught in a Southern truncation, and I know it's because I'm swimming in your cadences, that you permeate my very language.

I don't know any Londoners 'cos I'm from Manchester.

Regionalism, nationalism, tumultuous new patterns in economic and social life, as well as broad intellectual upheaval were all well advanced before the appearance of Protestantism.

Just because we talk slow doesn't mean we think slow, others point out. On the East Coast they seem to think there's something funny about riding around in a pickup truck. Well in the Deep South, we don't think it's all that natural to hurdle through the dark in a crowded subway.

The first thing the therapist asked me was, 'Are you here because you're depressed?' I said, 'Not at all--I'm here because I'm Southern.'" Anne Herndon

Regional separatism, xenophobia, anti-immigrant campaigns, and religious fundamentalisms all stand to benefit from the decay of power.

When Tony Benn became a minister in the 1960s -- and I think this must be apocryphal -- he had a huge map of Britain hung upside down in his office, so the channel was at the top and Scotland was at the bottom and, apparently, he said, "This is how we need to look at this country, with the money and the power draining by force of gravity out of the south east." That was a great idea. I rather liked him for that. I don't know if it's actually true or not.