Southern Mystery Quotes

The bones said death was comin', and the bones never lied.
Eva Savoie leaned back in the rocking chair and pushed it into motion on the uneven wide-plank floor of the one-room cabin. Her grand pere Julien had built the place more than a century ago, pulling heavy cypress logs from the bayou and sawing them, one by one, into the thick planks she still walked across ever day.
She had never known Julien Savoie, but she knew of him. The curse that had stalked her family for three generations had started with her grandfather and what he'd done all those years ago.
What he'd brought with him to Whiskey Bayou with blood on his hands.
What had driven her daddy to shoot her mama, and then himself, before either turned forty-five.
What had led Eva's brother, Antoine, to drown in the bayou only a half mile from this cabin, leaving a wife and infant son behind.
What stalked Eva now. ~ Susannah Sandlin

Tinkie's on the list."
"That's ridiculous. She and Enzo were only flirting."
"And Oscar showed his ass and then was seen floundering in the bayou where a blow-up sex doll, complete with a death threat, later showed up in front of an entire town." ...
"Even though they don't have a body, Pret is thinking Enzo's disappearance may prove to be a homicide. ~ Carolyn Haines

Where is Wildene?"
"Just step out the door and holler "Sooie! Sooie! She's a ho hog if ever I saw one. She'll come running. ~ Carolyn Haines

Boopsy's Boutique catered to the woman, or man, with money and lots of it. Date dresses ran upward of a thousand dollars, and some of the high-end designer frocks touched five figures. The dresses were exquisite, emblazoned with crystals and pearls, complete with jewel-encrusted shoes to match. Needless to say, it wasn't a place I frequented. ~ Carolyn Haines

What a voice. Deep, throaty, but not in a sexy way. In a haunted way. A voice full of heartbreak and ghosts.

I won't go back, I won't go home,
'Cause in this place, the dead still roam,
'Cause this time, Whiskey Bayou won't let me go. ~ Susannah Sandlin

She's smart and a hard worker."
"And?"
"A little on the crazy side." Cece inhaled with resignation. "I was overjoyed when the district elected a woman, but Rebecca's half a bubble off plumb. ~ Carolyn Haines

The greatest mystery a man ever learned, is to know how to control the human mind, and bring every faculty and power of the same in subjection to Jesus Christ; this is the greatest mystery we have to learn while in these tabernacles of clay. ~ Brigham Young

It's a cosmic joke that I'm a lesbian, because I understand men so well but women are a complete mystery to me. ~ Lea DeLaria

What a hideout: Holiness lies spread and borne over the surface of time and stuff like color. ~ Annie Dillard

The fact that some things are mysterious or that they touch on mystery isn't in some way a capitulation, and one should realize that there are some things that we may never understand and, to that extent, should be humbled by that. ~ Simon Conway Morris

One master defines Zen as the art of feeling the polar star in the southern sky. Truth can be reached only through the comprehension of opposites. ~ Okakura Kakuzo

It ended up being a great quarter across the country. The national trend was more on the IT (information technology) side of things. When you look at Southern California and San Diego specifically, it's driven largely by the life sciences and biotech side of things. ~ Don Williams

I get glimmers of the bad nineteenth-century teaching which has made Mother remove God from the realm of mystery and beauty and glory, but why do people half my age think that they don't have faith unless their faith is small and comprehensible and like a good old plastic Jesus? ~ Madeleine L'Engle

Canadians shouldn't come down to Southern California and take jobs away from Mexicans. ~ Stanley Ralph Ross

There are things that music can do that language could never do, that painting could never do, or sculpture. Music is capable of going directly to the source of the mystery. It doesn't have to explain it. It can simply celebrate it. ~ Marsha Norman

The legal system is often a mystery, and we, its priests, preside over rituals baffling to everyday citizens. ~ Henry Miller

The cotton was open and spilling into the fields; the very air smelled of it. In field after field as he passed along the pickers, arrested in stooping attitudes, seemed fixed amid the constant surf of bursting bolls like piles in surf, the long, partly-filled sacks streaming away behind them like rigid frozen flags. The air was hot, vivid and breathless
a final fierce concentration of the doomed and dying summer. ~ William Faulkner

And we love to dance, especially that new one called the Civil War Twist. The Northern part of you stands still while the Southern part tries to secede. ~ Dick Gregory

Nevertheless, the book gave Jack a feeling he had never had before, that the past was like a story, in which one thing led to another, and the world was not a boundless mystery, but a finite thing that could be comprehended. ~ Ken Follett

When Rin Tin Tin first became famous, most dogs in the world would not sit down when asked. Dogs performed duties: they herded sheep, they barked at strangers, they did what dogs do naturally, and people learned to interpret and make use of how they behaved. The idea of a dog's being obedient for the sake of good manners was unheard of. When dogs lived outside, as they usually did on farms and ranches, the etiquette required of them was minimal. But by the 1930s, Americans were leaving farms and moving into urban and suburban areas, bringing dogs along as pets and sharing living quarters with them. At the time, the principles of behavior were still mostly a mystery -- Ivan Pavlov's explication of conditional reflexes, on which much training is based, wasn't even published in an English translation until 1927. If dogs needed to be taught how to behave, people had to be trained to train their dogs. The idea that an ordinary person -- not a dog professional -- could train his own pet was a new idea, which is partly why Rin Tin Tin's performances in movies and onstage were looked upon as extraordinary. ~ Susan Orlean

Rhett: Don't start flirting with me. I'm not one of your plantation beaus. I want more than flirting from you. Scarlett: What do you want? Rhett: I'll tell you, Scarlett O'Hara, if you'll take that Southern-belle simper off your face. Someday, I want you to say to me the words I heard you say to Ashley Wilkes: I love you! Scarlett: That's something you'll never hear from me Captain Butler as long as you live. ~ Clark Gable

A critical discourse that had respect for the mystery of art would look to the sense of life which finds expression in paradox, metaphor, tautology, and syntax. ~ Denis Donoghue

We kissed, then, and the ardour of her kiss stole my breath away. I returned her passion with all the fervor I possessed. A lifetime of vows and heart-felt disciplines had prepared me well, for in that kiss I sealed with all my soul the fate before me, embracing a mystery clothed in warm and yielding female flesh. Holding only the moment, with neither thought nor care for the future, I kissed her, and drank deep the strong wine of desire. ~ Stephen R. Lawhead

So it became,
the law of universe,
to have the,
profoundest,
of the words,
cloaked in the,
darkest of the masks. ~ Jasleen Kaur Gumber

Everyone is a whore, Fiona." I felt rather than heard when he unfolded himself from the settee. He wasn't so much a warmth or an essence behind me. But the absence of either.

"We each merely offer different parts of ourselves for use, do we not? Our sex. Our blades. Our muscles. Our mind. Our time. Our souls. ~ Kerrigan Byrne

In general, those from outside the southern culture built a style around exaggerations of southern music, and missed the lonesome hillbilly and blues feel that was its core. In the quest for abandon, they also failed to understand that southern music is lazy music - at any tempo. ~ Colin Escott

To our three levels of complicating alienation we must add the fundamental distinction or break between God and humankind, between Creator and creature. That "division" is no tragedy, but part and parcel of our identity and God's grandeur. It must be accounted for in the mystery of God, who reveals himself to us as we can bear it: revelation invariably involves concealment, since God is God and we are not. The communion that he forges with us remains a tantalizing "mystery" that leads us to know more and more of him, but never in completion - and at this, we wonder! As Kallistos Ware puts it, where knowledge of God is concerned, "The eyes are closed - but they are also opened" (The Orthodox Way, p. 15). ~ Edith M. Humphrey

Since, in the best Southern tradition, I was named Edmund Valentine White III, sometimes when people look up my books on Amazon they find 'Chocolate Drops from the South' by my grandfather. ~ Edmund White

When you approach spirituality as an adventure of being alive, you start as you would any adventure
with a sense of mystery and not-knowing. Instead of searching for answers that make you feel safe, you set out into the vastness of life and death, with a willingness to continually grow. You open up to the possibility that your ordinary life is an extraordinary adventure, and that your joys and sorrows have meaning. Spiritual practice becomes your rudder, offering direction and insight and discretion as you venture into the unknown. ~ Elizabeth Lesser

I know I can do it," Todd Downey said, helping himself to another ear of corn from the steaming bowl. "I'm sure that in time her death will be a mystery, even to me. ~ Stephen King

Only God is the Giver and Master of Creativity and imagination because they are gifts that can only come from Him Alone! ~ Cheyenne Mitchell

The origin of Georgia's southern border is simpler than that of it's northern border. And bloodier ~ Mark Stein

The spiritual life goes through alternating phases in which God successively shows and hides himself, makes himself heard and is quiet. Prayer teaches us the subtleties of divine speech. Is God being silent, or are we not hearing him because our interior ear and our intellect are not accustomed to his language? The fruit of silence is learning to discern his voice, even though it always keeps its mystery. ~ Robert Sarah

Nine Southern states adopted vagrancy laws - which essentially made it a criminal offense not to work and were applied selectively to blacks - and eight of those states enacted convict laws allowing for the hiring-out of county prisoners to plantation owners and private companies. Prisoners were forced to work for little or no pay. One vagrancy act specifically provided that 'all free negroes and mulattoes over the age of eighteen' must have written proof of a job at the beginning of the year. Those found with no lawful employment were deemed vagrants and convicted. Clearly, the purpose of the black codes in general and the vagrancy laws in particular was to establish another system of forced labor. In W.E.B. Du Bois's words: 'The Codes spoke for themselves. . . . No open-minded student can read them without being convinced they meant nothing more nor less than slavery in daily toil. ~ Michelle Alexander

Think what it would be like if you got back to your island and there was no old man, no girl any more. No mysterious fun and games. The whole place locked up forever. ~ John Fowles

Time remains a mystery to Margaret. A game of Monopoly can consume an afternoon, and an hour on the treadmill seems like forever. But a lifetime passes in an instant. ~ Hilderbrand, Elin

Death was such a mystery. The complete disappearance of something as complex and miraculous as a living, breathing human being had always been beyond her comprehension. ~ G.A. McKevett

One ship is very much like another and the sea is always the same. In the immutability of their surroundings the foreign shores, the foreign faces, the changing immensity of life, glide past, veiled not by a sense of mystery but by a slightly disdainful ignorance; for there is nothing mysterious to a seaman unless it be the sea itself, which is the mistress of his existence and as inscrutable as Destiny. ~ Joseph Conrad

If I can't talk smart I'll just sit back and listen. ~ Rae Sanders

His eyes once did land on a longer piece of writing in which she put down her thoughts about the mystery of time. How one moment flowed into the next and that into the following, and so on, making an endless chain of tiny packets that defined one's existence. How no one could know what any approaching moment might hold. How they whisper by like leaves in a stream or hurtle past with great uproar, each with the prospect of changing the lives of people and nations. ~ Donald Smith

The first unanalysed impression that most readers receive from Jane Eyre is that it has a very violent atmosphere. If this were simply the effect of the plot and the imagined events then sensation novels like Walpole's The Castle of Otranto or Mrs Radcliffe's The Mystery of Udolpho ought to produce it even more powerfully.
But they do not. Nor do they even arouse particularly strong reader responses. Novelists like Charlotte Brontë or D. H. Lawrence, on the other hand, are able quite quickly to provoke marked reactions of sympathy or hostility from readers. The reason, apparently, is
that the narrator's personality is communicating itself through the style with unusual directness. ~ Ian Gregor

A friend is someone who will bike to the ice cream shop with you, even when you don't look so good. ~ Lois Greiman

I hope I have helped to raise the profile of science and to show that physics is not a mystery but can be understood by ordinary people. ~ Stephen Hawking

Leaving aside the mysteries and the inequities of human talent, brains, taste, and reputations, the matter of art in photography may come down to this: it is the capture and projection of the delights of seeing; it is the defining of observation full and felt. ~ Walker Evans

She looked down a slope, needing to squint for the sunlight, onto a vast sprawl of houses which had grown up all together, like a well-tended crop, from the dull brown earth; and she thought of the time she'd opened a transistor radio to replace a battery and seen her first printed circuit. The ordered swirl of houses and streets, from this high angle, sprang at her now with the same unexpected, astonishing clarity as the circuit card had. Though she knew even less about radios than about Southern Californians, there were to both outward patterns a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning, of an intent to communicate. There'd seemed no limit to what the printed circuit could have told her (if she had tried to find out); so in her first minute of San Narciso, a revelation also trembled just past the threshold of her understanding. ~ Thomas Pynchon

With strange detachment, Naomi's mind noticed nothing but the beauty of the jump. Air sliced along her body as it streamed straight as an arrow in its path of utmost precision. The world fell away behind her. For an immeasurable moment, Naomi wasn't a terrestrial being at all. She was wildly liberated like a bird, soaring through the sky with the chaotic freedom of a wild animal. ~ Jennifer Perry

Now, to tell my story
if not as it ought to be told, at least as I can tell it,
I must go back sixteen years, to the days when Whitbury boasted of forty coaches per diem, instead of one railway, and set forth how in its southern suburb, there stood two pleasant house side by side, with their gardens sloping down to the Whit, and parted from each other only by the high brick fruit-wall, through which there used to be a door of communication; for the two occupiers were fast friends. ~ Charles Kingsley

That blessed mood in which the burthen of the mystery, in which the heavy and the weary weight of all this unintelligible world is lightened. ~ William Wordsworth

With Southern actors you always think you're from the same place. Even if one is from Texas, one is from Georgia, you're like, "oh, you're just down the street, man." ~ Lucas Till

Contemplation does not arrive at reality after a process of deduction, but by an intuitive awakening in which our free and personal reality becomes fully alive to its own existential depths, which open out into the mystery of God. For ~ Thomas Merton

...and then a murder mystery will occur. ~ Natsuki Takaya

Ordinary women never appeal to one's imagination. They are limited to their century. No glamour ever transfigures them. One knows their minds as easily as one knows their bonnets. One can always find them. There is no mystery in any of them. They ride in the park in the morning and chatter at tea parties in the afternoon. They have their stereotyped smile and their fashionable mauve. ~ Oscar Wilde

The separation of spirit from matter was a mystery and the union of spirit with matter was a mystery also. ~ Oscar Wilde