South Londoners Quotes

When all's said and done they're a strange breed, these South and East Londoners, and they're amused by little things. Their love of jellied eels and pie 'n' mash is astonishing. "Food of the Gods," they call it, as they enter some filthy hovel to order pie 'n' mash, without even knowing what they're eating. I've asked what meat it is and been told, "Meat? Its pie, pie 'n' mash with liquor. Food of the Gods."
But it's not food of the Gods at all. It's just pie and mashed potatoes, and that's it. Nothing special about it. There's nothing nostalgic about it. It's not Bermondsey Billy Wells or the Artful Dodger. It's just a meat pie and mashed potatoes. And it looks like Barry Manilow's blown his nose in it. ~ Karl Wiggins

Louisiana in September was like an obscene phone call from nature. The air - moist, sultry, secretive, and far from fresh - felt as if it were being exhaled into one's face. Sometimes it even sounded like heavy breathing. ~ Tom Robbins

Everybody now admits that apartheid was wrong, and all I did was tell the people who wanted to know where I come from how we lived in South Africa. I just told the world the truth. And if my truth then becomes political, I can't do anything about that. ~ Miriam Makeba

I was raised in South Alabama in the woods, y'know? I'm country. ~ Shelby Lynne

There had been many such experiments when he worked in South Africa, in Vlakplaas, a notorious apartheid death camp. ~ Chris Abani

For a person who grew up in the '30s and '40s in the segregated South, with so many doors closed without explanation to me, libraries and books said, 'Here I am, read me.' Over time I have learned I am at my best around books. ~ Maya Angelou

Basically, I'm just a ramblin guy,' he said, and laughed. 'A ramblin guy on his way to the Big Sky.' And hell why not? Montana! Or Wyoming. Fucking Rapid City, South Dakota. Anyplace but here. - Barbie ~ Stephen King

I grew up in South Africa, but like many people at that time, I couldn't bear living in the country. The main motivation for moving to Britain was to get away. ~ Manfred Mann

If I really had to pinpoint my happiest days out of the United States, I'd choose those Fifties military days in Britain, particularly my time in South Ruislip. I had a ball. ~ Larry Hagman

To show that a comedian on stage in India talking about sanitation or in South Africa talking about HIV and AIDS awareness, if you follow the joke into their lives, you can see that, like, oh, these things aren't just contrived in joke books. This is real life. I think the best comedians have that bravery and courage to say, Oh, this is what it is. ~ Hasan Minhaj

As a Jew and a psychologist, I understand the stress that religious communities feel in connection with questioning of circumcision ... I raise these questions out of deep caring and compassion, for our community generally, and our male infants in particular. We are inflicting, generally, unrecognized harm with circumcision, and the perpetuation of this harm is far greater a concern than the discomfort that comes from confronting the advisability of this practice. Many Jews who do not circumcise in North America, South America, Europe, and Israel support this view. ~ Ronald Goldman

Being a white South African, I enjoyed the better things that that country gave to a small percentage of its population. ~ Dave Matthews

[Author's Note:] When I was sixteen, two of my cousins were brutally raped by four strangers and thrown off a bridge in St. Louis, Missouri. My brother was beaten and also forced off the bridge. I wrote about that horrible crime in my first book, my memoir, A Rip in Heaven. Because that crime and the subsequent writing of the book were both formative experience in my life, I became a person who is always, automatically, more interested in stories about victims than perpetrators. I'm interested in characters who suffer inconceivable hardship, in people who manage to triumph over extraordinary trauma. Characters like Lydia and Soledad. I'm less interested in the violent, macho stories of gangsters and law enforcement. Or in any case, I think the world has enough stories like those. Some fiction set in the world of the cartels and narcotraficantes is compelling and important - I read much of it during my early research. Those novels provide readers with an understanding of the origins of the some of the violence to our south. But the depiction of that violence can feed into some of the worst stereotypes about Mexico. So I saw an opening for a novel that would press a little more intimately into those stories, to imagine people on the flip side of that prevailing narrative. Regular people like me. How would I manage if I lived in a place that began to collapse around me? If my children were in danger, how far would I go to save them? I wanted to write about women, whose stories a ~ Jeanine Cummins

And even as this old guide-book boasts of the, to us, insignificant Liverpool of fifty years ago, the New York guidebooks are now vaunting of the magnitude of a town, whose future inhabitants, multitudinous as the pebbles on the beach, and girdled in with high walls and towers, flanking endless avenues of opulence and taste, will regard all our Broadways and Bowerys as but the paltry nucleus to their Nineveh. From far up the Hudson, beyond Harlem River where the young saplings are now growing, that will overarch their lordly mansions with broad boughs, centuries old; they may send forth explorers to penetrate into the then obscure and smoky alleys of the Fifth Avenue and Fourteenth Street; and going still farther south, may exhume the present Doric Custom-house, and quote it as a proof that their high and mighty metropolis enjoyed a Hellenic antiquity. ~ Herman Melville

(he was a great believer in the healing powers of cheerfulness, if not of open mirth). Yet he had some faults, and one was a habit of dosing himself, generally from a spirit of enquiry, as in his period of inhaling large quantities of the nitrous oxide and of the vapour of hemp, to say nothing of tobacco, bhang in all its charming varieties in India, betel in Java and the neighbouring islands, qat in the Red Sea, and hallucinating cacti in South America, but sometimes for relief from distress, as when he became addicted to opium in one form or another; and now he was busily poisoning himself with coca-leaves, whose virtue he had learnt in Peru. ~ Patrick O'Brian

No nation has ever prospered or been blessed like the colored people in the South. ~ Bob Jones, Sr.

Lee Dixon will be up against two South American left-handers tonight. ~ Ron Atkinson

The blood of Jesus did not merely "cover" the sins of your wicked heart ... leaving a stain! It completely remove them all wiping them out as if they never existed there in the first place! It's called redemption! ~ John Paul Warren

My schooling was disrupted by the shortage of labor during World War I. It meant foregoing high school. Then, late in 1921, I entered upon a short course in agriculture at South Dakota State College. I managed to enter college in 1924, and I was permitted to complete my college work in three years. ~ Theodore Schultz

I saw goats. A party can't be all bad when you have goats," Lucy said. ~ Mary Jane Hathaway

I hated Sundays when I was growing up in Streatham, south London. Everything closed down and stopped. ~ Simon Callow

I believe that the capital of the Republic of Albania is a suitable venue for discussing the dialogue among religions and civilizations, notably in the countries of South East Europe, because we are well familiar with this country's track record of religious tolerance. ~ Georgi Parvanov

Tyranny flourishes in those societies that reject the Reformed Faith. Tyranny is squelched and liberty flourishes in those societies that embrace the Reformed Faith in all its fullness. ~ Joseph C. Morecraft III

merrymaking. Yes, Katie would enjoy America, Frances thought as she put on her coat and her hat; in fact, America would enjoy Katie. She left her apartment block and, crossing the road, walked the short distance to the Ninth Avenue Elevated line at South Ferry. Although the elevated line took longer, she preferred not to take the subway system, being slightly claustrophobic. The idea of speeding along in a small underground train made her feel dizzy, so she preferred to travel aboveground by the El for her day of work as a domestic at the Walker-Browns' residence. As she took her familiar journey north that morning, along Greenwich Street and Battery Place to Gansevoort Street in lower Manhattan and on to Ninth Avenue ~ Hazel Gaynor

We know that when people are safe in their homes, they are free to pursue their dream for a brighter economic future for themselves and their families. ~ George Pataki

The white men were roused by a mere instinct of self-preservation - until at last there had sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan, a veritable empire of the South, to protect the Southern country. ~ Woodrow Wilson

The morning commuters began to animate the distant South Lake Tahoe roads. But craning your head back, you could see the day's blue darken halfway across the sky, and to the west, the night remained yet unconquered - pitch-black, stars in full glimmer, the full moon still pinned in the sky. To the east, the full light of day beamed toward you; to the west, night reigned with no hint of surrender. No philosopher can explain the sublime better than this, standing between day and night. It was as if this were the moment God said, "Let there be light!" You could not help but feel your specklike existence against the immensity of the mountain, the earth, the universe, and yet still feel your own two feet on the talus, reaffirming your presence amid the grandeur. ~ Paul Kalanithi

In 1961, the United States began chemical warfare in Vietnam, South Vietnam, chemical warfare to destroy crops and livestock. That went on for seven years. The level of poison - they used the most extreme carcinogen known: dioxin. And this went on for years. ~ Noam Chomsky

I grew up in the South, and our way of dealing with each other was teasing, ribbing, making fun and scrapping in the street. Criticism doesn't bother me so much. It actually made me, when I was younger, more aggressive. But you get into middle age, and you lose interest in that stuff. It's not serious. ~ Wynton Marsalis

It deals with so many different aspects of living in South Africa the racial issues of South Africans and Asians with poverty with the reality of children orphaned by AIDS the transition from village life to city life. ~ Laura Thielen

Cook with butter in the North, olive oil in the South. ~ Alain Bremond-Torrent

As far as those kinds of things, I also played at the concert to call for the release of Nelson Mandela when he was a political prisoner in South Africa. We were celebrating his 70th birthday and calling for his release. ~ Jackson Browne

Kosovo today is closer to Europe than other countries in the region of South Eastern Europe. ~ Ibrahim Rugova

On Kwajalein, Louie and Phil leared a dark truth known to the doomed in Hitler's death camps, the slaves of the American South, and a hundred other generations of betrayed people. Dignity is as essential to human life as water, food, and oxygen. ~ Laura Hillenbrand

Our unhappy trek through the wreck of the New South Africa begins with the facts, nothing but the facts. ~ Ilana Mercer

In the wee small hours, California Highway One north of Half Moon Bay is about as desolate as it gets. The narrow, twisting road was etched from sheer cliff faces that towered above me on the right and dropped away a hundred feet to the Pacific Ocean on my left.

A soggy wool blanket of San Francisco's famous fog hung a few feet above the roadway, obscuring the stars and dribbling tiny spots of mist on my windshield. My headlights bored through the gap between road and fog, drilling an endless tunnel through the darkness.

So far as I could tell, there were only two other cars on the entire planet that night - actually, one car and a produce truck. They'd flashed by, one after the other, heading south just past Moss Beach. Their headlights glared in my eyes and made the road seem even narrower, but half an hour later, I was wishing for more signs of life just to help keep my drooping eyelids from slamming shut altogether. It was the wrong thing to wish for.

She appeared suddenly out of the fog on the opposite side of the road. Only, she wasn't in a car. This gal was smack dab in the middle of the southbound lane and running for all she was worth. She wore a white dress and no coat, and that was about all I had time to take in before she was gone and I was alone in the endless tunnel again. ~ H.P. Oliver

For many black South Africans, the story of the war was that there was someone called Hitler and he was the reason the Allies were losing the war. This Hitler was so powerful that at some point black people had to go help white people fight against him - and if the white man has to stoop to ask the black man for help fighting someone, that someone must be the toughest guy of all time. ~ Trevor Noah

When God wanted to create the horse, he said to the South Wind, "I want to make a creature of you. Condense." And the Wind condensed. ~ Abdelkader El Djezairi

Many of our soldiers are stationed at Camp Coyote just south of the Iraqi border. This is how you know we have a strong army, when you can actually tell your enemy exactly where your camp is and what its name is. ~ Jon Stewart

Tamilians love to irritate non-Tamil speakers by speaking in Tamil only. ~ Chetan Bhagat

What drew me to Kazakhstan was a curiosity to learn about life in this 'middle earth' of steppe between the endless forests of Russia in the north and the world's greatest mountain chains to the south. ~ Tim Cope

A southern moon is a sodden moon, and sultry. When it swamps the fields and the rustling sandy roads and the sticky honeysuckle hedges in its sweet stagnation, your fight to hold on to reality is like a protestation against a first waft of ether. ~ Zelda Fitzgerald

Blow, bugles of battle, the marches of peace; East, west, north, and south let the long quarrel cease; Sing the song of great joy that the angels began, Sing the glory to God and of good-will to man! ~ John Greenleaf Whittier

A second, less well-known decision was based on his simple calculation "More people, more power." Copying a Soviet system of the same name, Mao created policy preferences for Hero Mothers, women who had many children. At a time when much of the rest of the world, including most of the developing world, saw reductions in population growth, China's average remained at around six children per woman. Over the next two decades, China added the population of South America, even as they'd hampered their agricultural system. ~ Clay Shirky

To the Spains will come a very powerful king, by land and sea subjugating the South; This will cause harm, lowering again the crescent, clipping the wings of those of Friday. ~ Nostradamus

i remember el salvador, /n it's horse shit, like i tell you.
i stopped chasing the messiahs /n madonnas - wised up,
set myself straight.
i've laid em /n balled em in every half-way house south of biloxi,
every 10 cent bed west of tulsa, fucked /n slobbered myself stupid on swingsets, greyhounds
/n gas station floors the world over.
i've split em in half
from head to ass
in elevator shafts, plus-size fitting rooms,
in the lobbies of sheraton inns
/n kfc parking lots - fucked em everywhere
every way that i could.
someone else can fuck em now.
i'm done w/ el salvador.
i know her militias
her perfume, munitions,
her missing hubcaps /n posters of paris.
i know her goyas, her barricades,
her paintboxes
/n bookshelves
of baudelaire,
her banners, her bullshit /n paris can keep her. ~ Brandon Thomas DiSabatino

I went to South Africa on safari and came eye to eye with a beautiful leopard. We were so close; I was staring at him for a long time and I felt a recognition with my own nature. ~ Bai Ling