Quotes About Southern

Some historians, in fact, suggest Hartford recruiters may have pioneered strategies that spurred the great migration of Southern rural blacks to Northern cities.

For if you start dancing on tables, fanning yourself, feeling sleepy when you pick up a book, developing a sense of rhythm, making love whenever you feel like it—then you know. The south has got you. *

Hail to thee Alabama, you verdant trollop.

We came up in a different time than you. Some nights these southern trees around here bore some strange fruit. You understand me? Now, I don't talk about that mess. Not with pretty little white girls whose foot never touched the earth until years after Dr. King got buried in it.

I had been born and mostly raised in the South, so I ought to have been able to find a way to reach him. Southern girls are trained from birth up that the way to a man's heart is never through the front door. They may leave a basket of cookies there, and while he's busy picking them up, they're squirming in through a back window.

Now all white Southern women keep as a weapon against uncouth world a certain smile that can be whipped out of storage and tacked up, in an instant, covering over a multitude of too-candid moments. My mother's face, whose upturned mouth never moved, registered confusion, then fear-then landed where I expected that steely doggedly cheerful resolve of a smile.

I am a southern woman, and I write about the places that flavor me. I cannot help myself.

Alabama sun was really something, Willie thought, it was really something. It battered you, enshrouded you, like it had made a pact with hell and humidity to bring you to your knees.

You're just a bee charmer, Idgie Threadgoode. That's what you are, a bee charmer.

She picked up a fork and used it to flip over the catfish fillet she'd left frying in her daddy's cast-iron skillet. It was flaky, golden, and perfect, exactly as she'd intended.

The weeping of the guitar begins. The goblets of dawn are smashed. The weeping of the guitar begins. Useless to silence it. Impossible to silence it. It weeps monotonously as water weeps as the wind weeps over snowfields. Impossible to silence it. It weeps for distant things. Hot southern sands yearning for white camellias. Weeps arrow without target evening without morning and the first dead bird on the branch. Oh, guitar! Heart mortally wounded by five swords.

Whenever I'm asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one.

I doubt if the texture of Southern life is any more grotesque than that of the rest of the nation, but it does seem evident that the Southern writer is particularly adept at recognizing the grotesque; and to recognize the grotesque, you have to have some notion of what is not grotesque and why.

The Southern man has a certain swagger about him that every woman craves in a man, whether she is willing to admit it or not. in this depressingly utilitarian age, when young lovers remove identical faded jeans and pea jackets before getting into bed together, the thought of a beau sabreur lover is not unappealing, Neither the overbearing male chauvinist nor the supportive gelding are capalbe of stirring the female blood, but a dashing cavalier is.

Louise Clark's southern accent was as thick as hominy grits. No one else in the Philadelphia branch of her family had such an accent. Her mother and father had dropped theirs as soon as they crossed the Pennsylvania state line.

Rather than making black music or white music or a white imitation of black music, he was making music that was the voice of the Southern poor—both black and white working-class groups. "In their indigence and low social

The Negro is not the man farthest down. The condition of the coloured farmer in the most backward parts of the Southern States of America, even where he has the least education and the least encouragement, is incomparably better than the condition and opportunities of the agricultural population in Sicily.

Mr. Clark Howell, the editor of the Atlanta Constitution, telegraphed to a New York paper, among other words, the following, "I do not exaggerate when I say that Professor Booker T. Washington's address yesterday was one of the most notable speeches, both as to character and as to the warmth of its reception, ever delivered to a Southern audience. The address was a revelation. The whole speech is a platform upon which blacks and whites can stand with full justice to each other.

The Negro is not the man farthest down. The condition of the coloured farmer in the most backward parts of the Southern States in America, even where he has the least education and the least encouragement, is incomparably better than the condition and opportunities of the agricultural population in Sicily.

In other words, all I want to be is the Jane Austen of south Alabama

A mob's always made up of people, no matter what. Mr. Cunningham was part of a mob last night, but he was still a man. Every mob in every little Southern town is always made up of people you know--doesn't say much for them, does it?

Somehow, it was hotter then: a black dog suffered on a summer's day; bony mules hitched to Hoover carts flicked flies in the sweltering shade of the live oaks on the square. Men's stiff collars wilted by nine in the morning. Ladies bathed before noon, after their three o'clock naps, and by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum.

in favor of southern womanhood as much as anybody, but not for preserving polite fiction at the expense of human life.

To the Richmond Leader in 1966 when the school board banned her novel: "Surely it is plain to the simplest intelligence that 'To Kill a Mockingbird' spells out in words of seldom more than two syllables a code of honor and conduct, Christian in its ethic, that is the heritage of all Southerners. To hear that the novel is 'immoral' has made me count the years between now and 1984, for I have yet to come across a better example of doublethink.