Southern Life Quotes

In the midst of this scoured landscape, on a suburban street, I saw the church steeple, and Lucille slowed down and pointed, and waved me on. As I passed her to enter the parking lot, I thanked her, and she gave me a wonderful smile, and just before she drove on she said, "Be blessed." That seemed to be the theme in the Deep South: kindness, generosity, a welcome. I had found it often in my traveling life in the wider world, but I found so much more of it here that I kept going, because the good will was like an embrace. Yes, there is a haunted substratum of darkness in Southern life, and though it pulses through many interactions, it takes a long while to perceive it, and even longer to understand. ~ Paul Theroux

Raw Living: Picking blackberries, beneath late afternoon sun; a sunset reminiscent of watermelon sangria, as the scent of honeysuckle accosts me and the ducks waddle into the lake. Thanking Mama Nature for her abundance. Loving this candied-sweet southern life. ~ Brandi L. Bates

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. ~ Flannery O'Connor

Arising there, a china cabinet, its gifts enclosed in a hug.
Atop a pedestal table, hand-sanded and love-stained,
Mom's Christmas cactus trails and cascades in forest greens
awaiting pink-winged petals alighting in season, a crescendo of bloom framed an autumn-light meandering through remembrance like a dream. ~ Christina M. Ward

That sinuous southern life, that oblique and slow and complicated old beauty, that warm thick air and blood warm sea, that place of mists and languor and fragrant richness ... ~ Anne Rivers Siddons

Mamaw's spirit lingers there, her high-bubbled laugh
carrying on like a song, her quiet dignity still holding
together the air that holds up this house. ~ Christina M. Ward

[N]one of us drinks the chalice of our existence to the last drop. None of us is fully obedient. Each of us falls short of the human nature entrusted to us. ~ Johann Baptist Metz

This kindness, this stupid kindness, is what is most truly human in a human being. It is what sets man apart, the highest achievement of his soul. No, it says, life is not evil!
This kindness is both senseless and wordless. It is instinctive, blind. When Christianity clothed it in the teachings of the Church Fathers, it began to fade; its kernel became a husk. It remains potent only while it is dumb and senseless, hidden in the living darkness of the human heart – before it becomes a tool or commodity in the hands of preachers, before its crude ore is forged into the gilt coins of holiness. It is as simple as life itself. Even the teachings of Jesus deprived it of its strength.
But, as I lost faith in good, I began to lose faith even in kindness. It seemed as beautiful and powerless as dew. What use was it if it was not contagious?
How can one make a power of it without losing it, without turning it into a husk as the Church did? Kindness is powerful only while it is powerless. If Man tries to give it power, it dims, fades away, loses itself, vanishes. ~ Vasily Grossman

People who go to work every day, make sacrifices to raise families, and get through life without hurting other people if they can help it-those are the real heros. ~ Dean Koontz

Don't let circumstances determine your fate. Choose your fate and mold circumstances to fit your fate of choice. ~ D.B. Harrop

Me? I see an old, broke-ass black guy taking care of a bunch of kids, living life, taking them to school, and all that stuff, who's asking himself: What the hell is this? But I wouldn't give it up for the world because I love my wife. I never expected to have a life like this. No chaos ... no confusion ... no lawsuits ... no violence ... no going to jail ... ~ Mike Tyson

His epitaph: This tomb hold Diophantus, Ah, what a marvel! And the tomb tells scientifically the measure of his life. God vouchsafed that he should be a boy for the sixth part of his life; when a twelfth was added, his cheeks acquired a beard; He kindled for him the light of marriage after a seventh, and in the fifth year after his marriage He granted him a son. Alas! late-begotten and miserable child, when he had reached the measure of half his father's life, the chill grave took him. After consoling his grief by this science of numbers for four years, he reached the end of his life. ~ Diophantus

Animists are people who recognize that the world is full of persons, only some of whom are human, and that life is always loved in relationship with others. Animism is lived out in various ways that are all about learning to act respectfully (carefully and constructively) toward and among other persons. ~ Graham Harvey

To view, I had started for the first time in my adult life to live in a world without secrets. I looked at all the laughing women, hips swinging, sashaying down the wide boulevards of Paris, and as spring became summer I started to believe anything was possible. The problem with the spy business, though, is that while you can resign, you can never leave. I suppose I didn't want to acknowledge it then, but too much wreckage floats in the wake of a life like mine - people you've hurt don't forget. And at the back of your mind is the ~ Terry Hayes

So we gave the afternoon some sanity after all and I wonder, Uncle Andrew, is life sane, as we tried to make it? Or is it insanity, as it was yesterday on the Gerard plantation? And why don't more people try to make it sane?
Or if it is full of sanity for them, why do they try to rip that sanity to pieces and impose their form of insanity? Can you help me understand? ~ Ann Rinaldi

Maybe there came a point in life where you had to quit categorizing whole groups of people by a few bad experiences. ~ Lisa Wingate

A true man does not need to romance a different girl every night, a true man romances the same girl for the rest of her life ~ Ana Alas

If your expectations are always those of someone content to live without physical challenge, then when it comes time for mental, moral, or emotional challenge you fail to meet it because you are out of practice. Meeting and overcoming obstacles are skills that can be honed, as opposed to talents with which we are born. The best way to prepare for the inevitable shit that life occasionally hands us all is to live in a way that prepares you for it. If you can treat personal tragedy like a heavy set of 20 squats, you'll do better than someone who has never met any challenge. Intentionally placing yourself in the position of having to complete a task when you don't know if you can is the single best way of preparing to be in that position unintentionally. ~ Mark Rippetoe

Not the least of the problems in clarifying one's consciousness is developing the stoic determination to criticize one's own softness or sentimentality toward oneself. Ego, self-solicitous about its own tenderness, is the ultimate policeman over its own false consciousness, dementedly uprooting every healthy seedling of insight into the truth. As Kierkegaard remarked, most people are subjective toward themselves and objective toward all others, but the real trick and task of life is to learn to be just the very opposite. ~ Kenny Smith

There is no beyond, there is only here, the infinitely small, infinitely great and utterly demanding present. ~ Iris Murdoch

As Americans, we want peace - we work and sacrifice for peace. But there can be no peace if our security depends on the will and whims of a ruthless and aggressive dictator. I'm not willing to stake one American life on trusting Saddam Hussein. ~ George W. Bush

If I could, I would work my way backward, paring away the years. I would reel my life arouond the wheel of this longing like so much loose wire. ~ Kevin Brockmeier

Believing in a conspiracy theory is one strategy people use to regain a sense of control, even if the conspiracy theory is unrelated to what caused the lack of control in a person's life. ~ Oscar Auliq-Ice

Compassion is the basis of all truthful relationship: it means being present with love-for ourselves and for all life, including animals, fish, birds, and trees. Compassion is bringing our deepest truth into our actions, no matter how much the world seems to resist, because that is ultimately what we have to give this world and one another. ~ Ram Dass

The only escape from the miseries of life are music and cats ... ~ Albert Einstein

Nuclear didn't describe families. How could it? Dry physics was not equal to that task. In the twentieth century we needed a biological metaphor, Darwinian in scope, to suggest the gnash and crash of carnivorous life in the family gene pool. But for the 21st century, the new century, I think the metaphors must be chemical. Molecular. In the molecular family people are connected without being bound. They spindle themselves around shared experiences and affections rather than splashing in the shared gene pool. ~ Laura Kalpakian

I observed all the students at IIT. They came from all parts of India, toppers in their respective schools. Few had come there to research science or learn about technology. Most had come to achieve their middle-class dream - a better life. And that is what the IITs promised them. ~ Chetan Bhagat

Lettering creates readable art that comes to life, displaying a quirky, whimsical nature. ~ Peggy Dean

The greater emotion with which we conceive a loved object to be affected toward us, the greater will be our complacency. ~ Baruch Spinoza

There are two things in life I never discuss, Religion and Politics. That is the only way one can have a serene life. ~ Abdulazeez Henry Musa

Life begins on the other side of despair. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

Paper is more patient than man. ~ Anne Frank

Nothing had just happened to her, she had made a choice, and then she had made another and another after that. Taken together, the small choices anyone made added up to a life. ~ J. Courtney Sullivan

Let your life be joyful, mystical, everlasting blossoms of poetic ecstasy. ~ Debasish Mridha

It is very important that you do only what you love to do. You may be poor, you may go hungry, you may live in a shabby place, but you will totally live. And at the end of your days, you will bless your life because you have done what you came here to do. ~ Elisabeth Kubler Ross

The trace I leave to me means at once my death, to come or already come, and the hope that it will survive me. It is not an ambition of immortality; it is fundamental. I leave here a bit of paper, I leave, I die; it is impossible to exit this structure; it is the unchanging form of my life. Every time I let something go, I live my death in writing. ~ Jacques Derrida

I do not think a day passes in my life in which I fail to look with fresh amazement at the miracle of nature. ~ Pablo Casals

It's very natural to believe that everything is aimed at you: storm, cold, whatever. Most of the time it's not; you just happen to be there when it's happening. If you believe that, it will make life easier. ~ Elsie Aidinoff