Southern Literature Quotes

Scarlett O'Hara wasn't pretty. ~ Margaret Mitchell

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

The woods are full of regional writers, and it is the great horror of every serious Southern writer that he will become one of them. ~ Flannery O'Connor

Although I wasn't there to bear witness, I imagine Lot's wife scanned the masses for her children. Perhaps she sought out the curves of their mouths and the shapes of their faces, trying to memorize her children, grown now. She looked back as I and any strong, loving mother would have done. ~ Brenda Sutton Rose

My mama steps out of her dress
and drops it, an inheritance falling to my feet.
She stands alone: bathed, blooming,
burdened with nothing of this world.
Her body is naked and beautiful,
her wings gray and scorched,
her brown eyes piercing the brown of mine.
I watch her departure, her flapping wings:
She doesn't look back, not even once,
not even to whisper my name ~ Brenda Sutton Rose

At 2:00 sharp on the afternoon of his internment, with his body resting in a casket in the front room of his home, the pallbearers--all bridge players--stuck a deck of cards in Mr. Hampton's cold hands, shut the lid over his head, and played bridge. ~ Brenda Sutton Rose

Potential enemies make the best friends and lovers. Many a blessed union begins in adversity. ~ Randy Thornhorn

What is the fire of inspiration that resides within, if not something to follow along a path? ~ Claire Fullerton

With red clay between my toes,
and the sun setting over my head,
the ghost of my mother blows in,
riding on a honeysuckle breeze, oh lord,
riding on a honeysuckle breeze. ~ Brenda Sutton Rose

Slavery destroys, or vitiates, or pollutes, whatever it touches. No interest of society escapes the influence of its clinging curse. It makes Southern religion a stench in the nostrils of Christendom; it makes Southern politics a libel upon all the principles of republicanism; it makes Southern literature a travesty upon the honorable profession of letters. ~ Hinton Rowan Helper

We are good at stories. We hoard them, like an old woman in a room full of boxes, but now and then we pull out our best, and spread them out. We talk of the bad years when the cotton didn't open, and the day my cousin Wanda was washed in the Blood. We buff our beloved ancestors until they are smooth of sin, and give our scoundrels a hard shake, although sometimes we can't remember exactly which is who. ~ Rick Bragg

No matter what a person does to cover up and conceal themselves, when we write and lose control, I can spot a person from Alabama, Florida, South Carolina a mile away even if they make no exact reference to location. Their words are lush like the land they come from, filled with nine aunties, people named Bubba. There is something extravagant and wild about what they have to say - snakes on the roof of a car, swamps, a delta, sweat, the smell of sea, buzz of an air conditioner, Coca-Cola - something fertile, with a hidden danger or shame, thick like the humidity, unspoken yet ever-present.

Often when a southerner reads, the members of the class look at each other, and you can hear them thinking, gee, I can't write like that. The power and force of the land is heard in the piece. These southerners know the names of what shrubs hang over what creek, what dogwood flowers bloom what color, what kind of soil is under their feet.

I tease the class, "Pay no mind. It's the southern writing gene. The rest of us have to toil away. ~ Natalie Goldberg

You get below the Mason-Dixon line and you have some of the best music, culture, the two races, the literature, and it's so rich. ~ Robert Duvall

Now that we are all so smart, we don't easily find resolutions. ~ Dejan Stojanovic

Psychologists cannot fix the world so they fix women. ~ Germaine Greer

When you don't have, or feel that you don't have, an extra moment to read philosophy, history, or science, when great literature, plays, and novels are as foreign to you as hieroglyphics, do you have any cahnce of seeing your work, career, or life in a new light? You might be doing well in the race, but it's the same race essentially down the same track with the same opponents that may prove to be less than sufficient in enabling you to get those kinds of things done that you want to have completed. ~ Jeff Davidson

Classification may very well not be useless, but it is never analysis, no matter how baroquely detailed and comprehensive-seeming its categories. At best, it begs questions. At worst it is presumptuous and totalitarian, replacing understanding with filing. We have all heard papers where categories are the driving force, according to which the way we understand literature (or whatever) is to work out what title fits where, as if literary theory was a giant card-catalog. Even when the last book has been slotted neatly into the last of the holes that were cut to be filled with books, what we have are books in neat piles. Which is not nothing, but neither is it that much. ~ China Mieville

Society is the stage on which manners are shown; novels are the literature. Novels are the journal or record of manners; and the new importance of these books derives from the fact, that the novelist begins to penetrate the surface, and treat this part of life more worthily. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

I was never one to patiently pick up broken fragments and glue them together again and tell myself that the mended whole was as good as new. What is broken is broken - and I'd rather remember it as it was at its best than mend it and see the broken places as long as I lived. ~ Margaret Mitchell

At times, the reader of World War II literature must think every American, from general to G.I., kept a war diary, later mined for memoirs of the conflict. Few diaries, however, were published in their own right. ~ Nigel Hamilton

There is first the literature of KNOWLEDGE, and secondly, the literature of POWER. The function of the first is
to teach; the function of the second is
to move. ~ Thomas De Quincey

Marriage cannot be a job as it has become. ~ Germaine Greer

First and last, what is demanded of genius is love of truth. ~ Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Knowledge is justified belief. ~ Jerome Bruner

And now the bride begins to move. Little mechanical doll, clinging to her husband's arm, climbing into the carriage. Her white silk stocking, her elegant shoe. ~ Anne Hebert

People are lucky because they have shelters, they have refuges, they have sanctuaries and they have heavens! And what are they? Nature is a refuge; music is a shelter; literature is a sanctuary and art is a heaven! Whenever you need them you can take refuge in them! ~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

The surest method of being incomprehensible or, moreover, to be misunderstood is to use words in their original sense; especially words from the ancient languages. ~ Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

For a tiny speck in the Atlantic, Ireland has made an outsize contribution to world literature. It's a legacy we can all be proud of, one that would take many pages (or indeed a whole library of books) to recount in full. ~ Rashers Tierney

I don't think there's a whole lot of class literature at all. I think most of that has become racially based, and people don't think of it as being class literature. ~ Sherman Alexie

English literature, from the days of the minstrels to the Lake Poets - Chaucer and Spenser and Milton, and even Shakespeare, included - breathes no quite fresh and, in this sense, wild strain. It is an essentially tame and civilized literature, reflecting Greece and Rome. ...
Where is the literature which gives expression to Nature?
...
I do not know of any poetry to quote which adequately expresses this yearning for the Wild.
...
The West is preparing to add its fables to those of the East. The valleys of the Ganges, the Nile, and the Rhine having yielded their crop, it remains to be seen what the valleys of the Amazon, the Plate, the Orinoco, the St. Lawrence, and the Mississippi will produce. ~ Henry David Thoreau

Christ and the life of Christ is at this moment inspiring the literature of the world as never before, and raising it up a witness against waste and want and war. It may confess Him, as in Tolstoi's work it does, or it may deny Him, but it cannot exclude Him; and in the degree that it ignores His spirit, modern literature is artistically inferior. In other words, all good literature is now Christmas literature. ~ William Dean Howells

One of the most extraordinary things about being a spiritual teacher is the rare privilege of being able to look deeply into the very souls of many human beings at the same time. ~ Andrew Cohen

Literature has always carried positive connotations in the world of luxury goods. ~ Michel Houellebecq

There is sublime thieving in all giving. Someone gives us all he has and we are his. ~ Eric Hoffer

Time in the most powerful thing.
Not money, not power, not hope.
A person can have everything they
desire but without time they are,
all useless. ~ Akash Lakhotia

For him that stealeth, or borroweth and returneth not, this book from its owner, let it change into a serpent in his hand and rend him. Let him be struck with palsy, and all his members blasted. Let him languish in pain, crying aloud for mercy, and let there be no surcease to this agony till he sing in dissolution. Let bookworms gnaw his entrails ... and when at last he goeth to his final punishment, let the flames of Hell consume him forever.
- Anonymous Curse on Book Theives from the Monaster of San Pedro, Barcelona, Spain ~ Anatole Broyard

An understandable hunger for ... potential clients tempts many [career counseling therapists] to overpromise, like creative writing teachers who, out of greed or sentimentality, sometimes imply that all of their students could one day produce worthwhile literature, rather than frankly acknowledging the troubling truth, anathema to a democratic society, that the great writer, like the contented worker, remains an erratic and anomalous event, ... immune to the methods of factory farming. ~ Alain De Botton

I was kidnapped by literature at a young age and never wanted to be ransomed. ~ Margaret Atwood

A losing trade, I assure you, sir: literature is a drug. ~ George Borrow

THIS SHOP IS HAUNTED by the ghosts
Of all great literature, in hosts;
We sell no fakes or trashes.
Lovers of books are welcome here,
No clerks will babble in your ear,
Please smoke
but don't drop ashes!
Browse as long as you like.
Prices of all books plainly marked.
If you want to ask questions, you'll find the proprietor
where the tobacco smoke is thickest.
We pay cash for books.
We have what you want, though you may not know you want it.
Malnutrition of the reading faculty is a serious thing.
Let us prescribe for you.
By R. & H. MIFFLIN, ~ Christopher Morley

I know of no better name than Anarchism. ~ Herbert Read

Reagan's failure to become a truly great movie star has been ascribed to project menace, sexuality, or even moral ambiguity. ~ Scott Farris

An early-rising man is a good spouse but a bad husband. ~ Gabriel Garcia Marquez

A house of simple people which stands empty and silent in the vast Southern country morning sunlight, and everything which on this morning in eternal space it by chance contains, all thus left open and defenseless to a reverent and cold-laboring spy, shines quietly forth such grandeur, such sorrowful holiness of its exactitudes in existence, as no human consciousness shall ever rightly perceive, far less impart to another: that there can be more beauty and more deep wonder in the standings and spacings of mute furnishings on a bare floor between the squaring bourns of walls than in any music ever made: that this square home, as it stands in unshadowed earth between the winding years of heaven, is, not to me but of itself, one among the serene and final, uncapturable beauties of existence; that this beauty is made between hurt but invincible nature and the plainest cruelties and needs of human existence in this uncured time, and is inextricable among these, and as impossible without them as a saint born in paradise. ~ James Agee

the most important things can't be lassoed with language. The most important things can only be felt. ~ Megan Jacobson

Extremes in nature equal ends produce; In man they join to some mysterious use. ~ Alexander Pope

More interestingly, it could be argued that, if fantasy (and debatably the literature of the fantastic as a whole) has a purpose other than to entertain, it is to show readers how to perceive; an extension of the argument is that fantasy may try to alter readers' perception of reality. Of course, quack religions (etc.) make similar attempts, but a major difference is that, while the latter attempt to convert people to their codified way of thinking, the best fantasy introduces its readers into a playground of rethought perception, where there are no restrictions other than those of the human imagination. In some modes of the fantastic – e.g., magic realism and surrealism – the attempt to alter the reader's perception is overt, but most full-fantasy texts have at their core the urge to change the reader; that is, full fantasy is by definition a subversive literary form. ~ John Clute

Since I have fought against these Jewish-Soviet ideas in Germany, since I have conquered and stamped out this peril, I fancy that I possess a better comprehension of its character than do these men who have only to deal with it in the field of literature. ~ Adolf Hitler

I don't really need to be inspired by literature though. At the end of the day it's colour and imagery moved around until it works. ~ Danny Fox

For it is a perennial puzzle why no woman wrote a word of that extraordinary literature when every other man, it seemed, was capable of song or sonnet. ~ Virginia Woolf

When the critic has said everything in his power about a literary text, he has still said nothing; for the very existence of literature implies that it cannot be replaced by non-literature ~ Tzvetan Todorov

An unhappy ending makes it literature rather than romantic fiction. ~ Victoria Clayton

To be really realistic a description would
have to be endless. Where Stendhal describes in one phrase Lucien Leuwen's entrance into a room, the
realistic artist ought, logically, to fill several volumes with descriptions of characters and settings, still
without succeeding in exhausting every detail. Realism is indefinite enumeration. By this it reveals that its
real ambition is conquest, not of the unity, but of the totality of the real world. Now we understand why it
should be the official aesthetic of a totalitarian revolution. But the impossibility of such an aesthetic has
already been demonstrated. Realistic novels select their material, despite themselves, from reality,
because the choice and the conquest of reality are absolute conditions of thought and expression. To
write is already to choose. There is thus an arbitrary aspect to reality, just as there is an arbitrary aspect to
the ideal, which makes a realistic novel an implicit problem novel. To reduce the unity of the world of
fiction to the totality of reality can only be done by means of an a priori judgment which eliminates form,
reality, and everything that conflicts with doctrine. Therefore so-called socialist realism is condemned by
the very logic of its nihilism to accumulate the advantages of the edifying novel and propaganda
literature. ~ Albert Camus

Marcel was from Louisiana, so for four years Emily had been southern by association. She insisted on Lynchburg Lemonades. She scheduled interviews around the Gators. She championed gentility. Anyone at a dinner party who thought they could tell a joke making fun of the region encountered a faceful of Emily, quick and ferocious as a convert, as a woman who loved a man.
Emily now had no claim to the South. The region and its interests would proceed without her. ~ Marie-Helene Bertino

It is impossible to talk or to write without apparently throwing oneself helplessly open. ~ Herman Melville

[Science is] the literature of truth. ~ Josh Billings

Whether we can somehow listen in on tree talk is a subject that was recently addressed in the specialized literature. Korean scientists have been tracking older women as they walk through forests and urban areas. The result? When the women were walking in the forest, their blood pressure, their lung capacity, and the elasticity of their arteries improved, whereas an excursion into town showed none of these changes. It's possible that phytoncides have a beneficial effect on our immune systems as well as the trees' health, because they kill germs. Personally, however, I think the swirling cocktail of tree talk is the reason we enjoy being out in the forest so much. At least when we are out in undisturbed forests.

Walkers who visit one of the ancient deciduous preserves in the forest I manage always report that their heart feels lighter and they feel right at home. If they walk instead through coniferous forests, which in Central Europe are mostly planted and are, therefore, more fragile, artificial places, they don't experience such feelings. Possibly it's because in ancient beech forests, fewer "alarm calls" go out, and therefore, most messages exchanged between trees are contented ones, and these messages reach our brains as well, via our noses. I am convinced that we intuitively register the forest's health. ~ Peter Wohlleben