Southern Belles Quotes

Vampires didn't faint like Southern belles at the sight of blood. ~ Flynn Meaney

A chorus of tough southern belles whispered, You need a loyal husband around here. Loyal to you, loyal to your family, loyal to your land.
I added, Good in bed, smart, and romantic. Politically, socially, and religiously compatible. And he had to want children. ~ Deborah Smith

I was too awestruck to speak. Vines of bright pink flowers danced over a wrought-iron arbor. I recognized them immediately as the very same variety, bougainvillea, that grew in Greenhouse No. 4 at the New York Botanical Garden. Just beyond, two potted trees stood at attention- a lemon, its shiny yellow globes glistening in the sunlight, and what looked like an orange, studded with the tiniest fruit I'd ever seen.
"What is this?" I asked, fascinated.
"A kumquat," she said. "Lady Anna used to pick them for the children." She reached out to pluck one of the tiny oranges from the tree. "Here, try for yourself."
I held it in my hand, admiring its smooth, shiny skin.
I sank my teeth into the flesh of the fruit. Its thin skin disintegrated in my mouth, releasing a burst of sweet and sour that made my eyes shoot open and a smile spread across my face. "Oh, my," I said. "I've never had anything like it."
Mrs. Dilloway nodded. "You should try the clementines, then. They're Persian."
I walked a few paces further, admiring the potted orchids- at least a hundred specimens, so exquisite they looked like Southern belles in hoop skirts. On the far wall were variegated ferns, bleeding hearts, and a lilac tree I could smell from the other end of the room. ~ Sarah Jio

..the guests milled back and forth: men stood with their heads together, discussing politics and crops, their stiff white shirts puffed and ruffled, their voices rising and falling in steadfast opinions as women of fair whispered to one another and laughed behind silk fans, occasionally calling out gaily to pull another into their ring of white shoulder flounced with satin as house niggers dipped and weaved all around them bearing trays of syllabub and sack, almost invisible as the shadows they cast ~ Pamela Jekel

The model for South America was Broadway actress Maxine Elliot. North America, a pretty blonde, was modeled on Maud Coleman Woods of Charlottesville, Virginia. (Sadly, she would die of typhoid fever that summer, ten days before McKinley arrived in Buffalo, thereby never living to see herself on a coaster, every southern belle's dream.) ~ Sarah Vowell

A Short Southern Screw? So I was right. You're craving something south ot the Mason-Dixon Line."
He moved closer, crowding her even though there was still a good twelve inches between them.
"I can assure you, though, I'm a man who isn't short in any sense of the word. ~ Katee Robert

Hiding had been effortless in New York City. Getting lost in a sea of people was as easy as stepping onto a crowded Subway car. Sweet Laurel Cove would be very different. Generations of families filled its church pews, ran its farms, and schooled its children. Anonymity was as rare as lightning bugs in wintertime - as her grandmother would say. ~ Teresa Tysinger

Not everyone was laughing. Ascribing "incapacity, stupidity, imbecility, gross ignorance and habitual venality" to the stalemated Congress, the New York Herald angrily concluded that "no remedy whatever is to be looked for from their representatives." Sounding eerily like President Buchanan in his December annual message, it blamed not Southern extremism but "republican fanaticism" for the current "avalanche of destruction. ~ Harold Holzer

From time to time the continent shifts, and everything that isn't fastened down slides into Southern California. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

I anticipate with joy the approaching period when the stigmas of poverty and pride so liberally bestowed on the highlanders by our southern gentry will be as inapplicable to the inhabitants of that country as of any in the island. ~ James Hogg

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. ~ Joy Jordan-Lake

Because of sorrow, my awareness of life's pulse is strongly detectable. It is syncopation while I journey, a lap of ocean in the eyes of every person I meet. This awareness informs the flesh of my stories. Grief has been an odd companion, at first a terror, but now I am all the better having accepted it for its intrinsic worth. ~ Patricia Hickman

Anything to do with the South resonates with me, because I'm Southern. ~ Mary Steenburgen

At this moment the President is beginning to speak in New Orleans and the Vice-President is mounting the platform at NASA a few miles away. Both are making a plea for unity. The President, who is an integrationist Mormon married to a liberated Catholic, will appeal to Leftists to respect law and order. The Vice-President, a Southern Baptist Knothead married to a conservative Unitarian, is asking Knotheads for tolerance and understanding, etcetera. The poor U.S.A.! Even ~ Walker Percy

I'm from southern Arelon, Princess," Ahan said, reaching for some more clams. "To us, round is beautiful. Not everyone wants their women to look like starving schoolboys. ~ Brandon Sanderson

The Kerguelen Islands in the southern Indian Ocean are a six-day boat ride from Madagascar, and their only inhabitants are French scientists. ~ Cary McNeal

Like a physically beautiful but otherwise rather dull person who trades on his or her looks, Southern California swings perpetually between a profound inferiority complex and an equally profound sense of entitlement. ~ Meghan Daum

She was a southern girl, which is the same as saying she was insane. ~ Bill Hicks

People were saying that Southern folk song was dead, that the land that had produced American jazz, the blues, the spirituals, the mountain ballads and the work songs had gone sterile. ~ Alan Lomax

Maybe we've been brainwashed by 130 years of Yankee history, but Southern identity now has more to do with food, accents, manners, music than the Confederate past. It's something that's open to both races, a variety of ethnic groups and people who move here. ~ John Shelton Reed

Corus lay on the southern bank of the Oloron River, towers glinting in the sun. The homes of wealthy men lined the river to the north; tanners, smiths, wainwrights, carpenters, and the poor clustered on the bank to the south. The city was a richly colored tapestry: the Great Gate on Kings-bridge, the maze of the Lower City, the marketplace, the tall houses in the Merchants' and the Gentry's quarters, the gardens of the Temple district, the palace. This last was the city's crown and southern border. Beyond it, the royal forest stretched for leagues. It was not as lovely as Berat nor as colorful as Udayapur, but it was Alanna's place. ~ Tamora Pierce

She was temptation wrapped in seduction, a Southern beauty with a viper's tongue, a
rapier wit and a bone-deep grit that rivaled his own. Yes, she'd basically blown his mind with her
brilliant concept of time ~ Gena Showalter

What avail all your scholarly accomplishments and learning, compared with wisdom and manhood? To omit his other behavior, see whata work this comparatively unread and unlettered man wrote within six weeks. Where is our professor of belles-lettres, or of logic and rhetoric, who can write so well? ~ Henry David Thoreau

That was a version of history reliant on a narrow range of official summaries and gubernatorial archives created and archived by the most dubious sources - southern whites who engineered and most directly profited from the system. It overlooked many of the most significant dimensions of the new forced labor, including the centrality of its role in the web of restrictions put in place to suppress black citizenship, its concomitant relationship to debt peonage and the worst forms of sharecropping, and an exponentially larger number of African Americans compelled into servitude through the most informal - and tainted - local courts. ~ Douglas A. Blackmon

Flannery O'Connor, in a note to the editor of "Wise Blood" that pertained to changes he wanted to make, wrote "Perhaps I am prematurely arrogant ... ~ Flannery O'Connor

grown up poor in the midst of Southern California affluence, graduated from Stanford Law School, and held a series of jobs, including corporate lawyer, developer of vast Southern California orange groves, and deputy chair of ~ Gwenda Blair

Most of us need a good ride on the Sin Wagon, and if I were to meet a man who was better looking than say, Yoda, I might treat him to some Serta hospitality. I'd like to have said this to Mama but could not because she is certain that a real Southern lady doesn't enjoy the business at hand. ~ Susan Reinhardt

Nothin very bad happen to me lately.
How you explain that? --I explain that, Mr
Bones,
terms o' your bafflin odd sobriety.
Sober as man can get, no girls, no telephones,
what could happen bad to Mr Bones?
--If life is a handkerchief sandwich,

in a modesty of death I join my father
who dared so long agone leave me.
A bullet on a concrete stoop
close by a smothering southern sea
spreadeagled on an island, by my knee.
--You is from hunger, Mr Bones,

I offers you this handkerchief, now set
your left foot by my right foot,
shoulder to shoulder, all that jazz,
arm in arm, by the beautiful sea,
hum a little, Mr Bones.
--I saw nobody coming, so I went instead. ~ John Berryman

The child came to a stop beside her mother and stared up at her face as if she had never seen it before. It was the face of the new misery she felt, but on her mother it looked old and it looked as if it might have belonged to anybody, a Negro or a European or to Powell himself. The child turned her head quickly, and past the Negroe's ambling figures she could see the column of smoke rising and widening unchecked inside the granite line of trees. She stood taut, listening, and could just catch in the distance a few wild high shrieks of joy as if the prophets were dancing in the fiery furnace, in the circle the angel had cleared for them. ~ Flannery O'Connor

I've enjoyed my time in the American League, the fans of Southern California and other friendships. ~ Joe Torre

What was it you called me? Hell's overlord who wields his lucky pen like it's… what was that last part?"

Enough! Elise's tolerance disappeared in a sulfurous cloud of smoke. "Hell's overlord who wields his lucky pen like it's his staff of masculinity," she ground out, then lowered her head and furiously pounded on the laptop's keyboard.

Luc laughed and the hairs at the nape of her neck prickled. "Staff of masculinity. How could I have forgotten that? You could have just said - "

Her cheeks burned red hot. "I made that up before I knew you liked to beat your lucky pen against the desk."

He turned in his seat and smiled the smile that never failed to raise her body temperature a hundred degrees. "And it was that particular phrase which made your habit of sucking on pen caps all the more bearable."

She glared at him and his smile widened. "Don't make me get up and come near your desk, Lucien Masters."

"Getting up and coming near my desk are the least of my worries," he replied in a husky, Southern rumble. ~ Elijana Kindel

I thought we were meeting by the field house," I call out as I make my way over.
He doesn't even turn around. "Nah, I'm pretty sure I said the parking lot."
"You definitely said the field house," I argue. Why can't he ever just admit that he's wrong?
"Geez, field house, parking lot. What difference does it make?" Mason asks. "Give it a rest, why don't you."
I shoot him a glare. "Oh, hey, Mason. Remember when your hair was long and everyone thought you were a girl?"
Ryder chuckles as he releases a perfect spiral in Mason's direction. "She's got you there."
"Hey, whose side are you on, anyway?" Mason catches the ball and cradles it against his chest, then launches it toward Ben. I just stand there watching as they continue to toss it back and forth between the three of them. Haven't they had enough football for one day?
I pull out my cell to check the time. "We should probably get going."
"I guess," Ryder says with an exaggerated sigh, like I'm putting him out or something. Which is particularly annoying since he's the one who insisted on going with me.
Ben jogs up beside me, the football tucked beneath his arm. "Where are you two off to? Whoa, you're sweaty."
I fold my arms across my damp chest. "Hey, southern girls don't sweat. We glow."
Ben snorts at that. "Says who?"
"Says Ryder's mom," I say with a grin. It's one of Laura Grace's favorite sayings--one that always makes Ryder wince.
"The hardware store," Ryder ~ Kristi Cook

This is how southern woman worked all peaches in cream laced with arsenic ~ Molly Harper

The Dog-star and Aldebaran, pointing to the restless Pleiades, were half-way up the Southern sky, and between them hung Orion, which gorgeous constellation never burnt more vividly than now, as it soared forth above the rim of the landscape. Castor and Pollux with their quiet shine were almost on the meridian: the barren and gloomy Square of Pegasus was creeping round to the north-west; far away through the plantation Vega sparkled like a lamp suspended amid the leafless trees, and Cassiopeia's chair stood daintily poised on the uppermost boughs. "One o'clock," said Gabriel. ~ Thomas Hardy

The hotel which had had the bad luck to draw Aunt Agatha's custom was the Splendide, and by the time I got there there wasn't a member of the staff who didn't seem to be feeling it deeply. I sympathized with them. I've had experience of Aunt Agatha at hotels before. Of course, the real rough work was all over when I arrived, but I could tell by the way everyone grovelled before her that she had started by having her first room changed because it hadn't a southern exposure and her next because it had a creaking wardrobe and that she had said her say on the subject of the cooking, the waiting, the chambermaiding and everything else, with perfect freedom and candour. She had got the whole gang nicely under control by now. The manager, a whiskered cove who looked like a bandit, simply tied himself into knots whenever she looked at him. ~ P.G. Wodehouse

Any Southern nationalist movement, especially one that wraps itself in the Confederate flag, is going to be viewed with suspicion, given the historical record. ~ John Shelton Reed

I've been to Sardinia about 10 times because my wife, my daughter and I used to go every year with another family. We rented the same house each time in Villasimius in the southern part of the island, and always went to the same two beaches and same three restaurants. ~ Rick Astley

One cannot help asking sadly, why is love of gold more potent than love of souls? The number of men mining and prospecting for gold in Shantung is more than double the number of men representing Southern Baptists! What a lesson for Southern Baptists to ponder! ~ Lottie Moon