Southern Upbringing Quotes

My priorities are leaning more towards family, and I credit my southern upbringing to that. I was raised in the church as well, and God plays a big role in my upbringing and my life. ~ Omari Hardwick

I lived in a picture perfect subdivision with color coordinated houses and mailboxes, yellow labs prancing within the borders of invisible electric fences, and balding dads on riding lawn mowers. It was the type of community where housewives spent their summers tanning by the pool, half-heartedly watching their Ritalin pumped brat beat another brat with a foam noodle while rehashing Sunday's Bible study between whispers of Susie's weight gain and Dan's canoodling with the babysitter. ~ Maggie Young

Imagine a man who doesn't believe in anything, hope for anything, doesn't love anyone. This is a description of a dead or paralyzed soul. This happens from great grief, or from an unhappy upbringing when parents make from their children's souls paralytics. ~ Simon Soloveychik

I would say country is the one type of music I've spent the least amount of time with in my life. I grew up in Virginia, where there was a lot of it, but I was more interested in rock and roll. Southern rock. ~ Connie Britton

And Indiana's John Defrees expressed his belief that the inclusion of Winfield Scott of Virginia, Alexander Stephens of Georgia, and Edward Bates of Missouri "would do much to bring about a re-action among the people of all the Southern States except S. Carolina, which is insane beyond hope of cure."134 (Stephens himself later branded as "totally groundless" the "rumor" that he had ever discussed a cabinet appointment with the president-elect. ~ Harold Holzer

Grapes are grown in such profusion in the Southern and Western States that I have seen damaged bunches thrown to the pigs. Americans find it difficult to understand how highly this fruit is prized in England. ~ Isabella Bird

The Union is what needs defending this year. Government of Enron and by Halliburton and for the Southern Baptists is not the same as what Lincoln spoke of. This gang of Republicans has humbugged us to death on terrorism and tax cuts for the comfy and school prayer and flag burning and claimed the right to know what books we read and to dump their sewage upstream from the rest of us and clear-cut the forests and gut the IRS and promote the corporate takeover of the public airwaves and to hell with anybody who opposes them. ~ Garrison Keillor

If you don't like the weather in southern Ohio, just wait fifteen minutes!!!".

~R. Alan Woods [2013] ~ R. Alan Woods

To those of my race who depend on bettering their condition in a foreign land or who underestimate the importance of cultivating friendly relations with the Southern white man, who is their next-door neighbor, I would say 'Cast down your bucket where you are.' ~ Booker T. Washington

From reading of the people I admired - ranging from the soldiers of Valley Forge and Morgan's riflemen to my Southern forefathers and kinfolk - I felt a great admiration for men who were fearless and who could hold their own in the world. And I had a great desire to be like them. ~ Theodore Roosevelt

Among the Founders, Thomas Jefferson wrote about race at greatest length. He thought blacks were mentally inferior to whites and biologically distinct: "[They] secrete less by the kidnies [sic], and more by the glands of the skin, which gives them a strong and disagreeable odor." He hoped slavery would be abolished, but he did not want free blacks to remain in America: "When freed, [the Negro] is to be removed from beyond the reach of mixture."
Jefferson was one of the first and most influential advocates of "colonization," or returning blacks to Africa. He also believed in the destiny of whites as a racially distinct people. In 1786 he wrote, "Our Confederacy [the United States] must be viewed as the nest from which all America, North and South, is to be peopled."
In 1801 he looked forward to the day "when our rapid multiplication will expand itself . . . over the whole northern, if not the southern continent, with a people speaking the same language, governed in similar forms, and by similar laws; nor can we contemplate with satisfaction either blot or mixture on that surface. ~ Jared Taylor

I could not imagine the kind of person that would, upon seeing a crazy talcum-powder-covered Southern lady think to herself, Hmmmm, she might make a great new friend. The line between normal and crazy seemed impossibly thin. ~ Augusten Burroughs

So I'm not a Southern writer in the commonly held sense of the term, like Faulkner or Eudora Welty, who took the South for their entire literary environment and subject matter. ~ Donna Tartt

I had an upbringing in which I was allowed to be free and use my mind. My parents only helped me to be myself.It was only in my teenage years that I met people who made me start having doubts about who I was. They said you shouldn't be confident, you shouldn't be strong. It is only when you meet those other people that you lose confidence. ~ Juliette Lewis

I have been distracted from my duty as a father to some extent, but there is no greater exercise to a man's talents than the upbringing of his son. ~ Conn Iggulden

Peacekeeping there is still just totally ineffective. The UN is now saying they are sending reinforcements in the area, but I have no particular reason to believe that they will be any stronger than the force there. In Southern Kordofan, it's mostly an Egyptian battalion, and that's really problematic because the population already doesn't trust the Egyptians; they think they're on payroll of the north. So we already have a force that is seen as compromised. ~ Rebecca Hamilton

Tons. Marco Polo, who sailed from China to Persia on his return home, described the Mongol ships as large four-masted junks with up to three hundred crewmen and as many as sixty cabins for merchants carrying various wares. According to Ibn Battuta, some of the ships even carried plants growing in wooden tubs in order to supply fresh food for the sailors. Khubilai Khan promoted the building of ever larger seagoing junks to carry heavy loads of cargo and ports to handle them. They improved the use of the compass in navigation and learned to produce more accurate nautical charts. The route from the port of Zaytun in southern China to Hormuz in the Persian Gulf became the main sea link between the Far East and the Middle East, and was used by both Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta, among others. ~ Jack Weatherford

I became alienated from this religious upbringing, and started making music. I wanted to be a big star. All those things I saw in the films and on the media took hold of me, and perhaps I thought this was my god: the goal of making money. ~ Cat Stevens

I'm an enormous product of my century, I'm a product of my upbringing. I was not aware of the fact that I was entering marriage with the highest set of expectations that humans have ever brought to the institution. It was really good to find that out. It doesn't have to be the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end, the moon and the stars - it can just be the moon. It's enough that it just can be what it is. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

I'm an Asian with a Southern accent. To a lot of people, that right there is funny. ~ Henry Cho

I tell our sisters in the South that so far as Tennessee is concerned she will not be dragged into a Southern or any other confederacy until she has had time to consider; and then she will go when she believes it to be her interest, and not before. ~ Andrew Johnson

She was Mattie Tucker now, mother of three and a good forty pounds heavier, casting that burning eye over them all, reaching way back for a southern pleasantry that was more like a Halloween apple with a razor blade in it: 'Well, don't y'all make just the perfect family of four? ~ John Burnham Schwartz

IRELAND
Spenserian Sonnet
abab, bcbc, cdcd, ee

What is it about the Kelly velvet hillsides and the hoary avocado sea,
The vertical cliffs where the Gulf Stream commences its southern bend,
Slashing like a sculptor gone mad or a rancorous God who's angry,
Heaving galaxies of lichen shrouded stones for potato farmers to tend,
Where the Famine and the Troubles such haunting aspects lend,
Music and verse ring with such eloquence in their whimsical way,
Let all, who can hear, rejoice as singers' intonations mend,
Gaelic souls from Sligo and Trinity Green to Cork and Dingle Bay,
Where fiddle, bodhran, tin whistle, and even God, indulge to play,
Ould sod to Beckett, Wilde and Yeats, Heaney and James Joyce,
In this verdant, welcoming land, 'tis the poet who rules the day.
Where else can one hear a republic croon in so magnificent a voice?
Primal hearts of Celtic chieftains pulse, setting inspiration free,
In genial confines of chic caprice, we're stirred by synchronicity. ~ David B. Lentz

Reggae is definitely a natural influence. Even living in Southern California, near the water, you get that reggae feel. ~ Tori Kelly

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

They're in southern France. Oldest paintings ever found there. We're talking like thirty thousand years old. Scenes typical of the Paleolithic - horses, cattle, mammoths, that kind of thing. No pictures of humans but one depiction of a vagina, for what that's worth. The really interesting thing is what happened when they carbon-dated the place. They found pictures in the same room painted six thousand years apart. They looked identical."

"Okay. So?"

"So think about that. For six thousand years there was no progress and no evidence of any impulse to change anything. People were fine with the way things were. In other words, this is not a people experiencing spiritual desolation. You and I need new diversions nightly. These people didn't change a thing for sixty centuries. This is not a people tired of their snack routine."

The drumming outside escalates for a moment and then fades "back into a kind of ominous tolling.

"Melancholy," Periwinkle says, "had to be invented. Civilization had this unintended side effect, which is melancholy. Tedium. Routine. Gloom. And when those things were birthed, so were people like me, to attend to them. So no, it's not patriotism. It's evolution. ~ Nathan Hill

It is plain, therefore, that if, when the Constitution says treason, it means treason - treason in fact, and nothing else - there is no ground at all for pretending that the Southern people have committed that crime. But if, on the other hand, when the Constitution says treason, it means what the Czar and the Kaiser mean by treason, then our government is, in principle, no better than theirs; and has no claim whatever to be considered a free government. ~ Lysander Spooner

If there were a Mount Rushmore of American humor, Terry Southern would be the mountain they'd carve it from ~ Michael O'Donoghue

One thing a Soviet upbringing taught you was to pay attention. ~ Yelena Akhtiorskaya

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

I am proud to be a Southerner. I think Southern hospitality is very ... I don't think it's just a term. I think it really exists. You can come to Savannah, and the people are so sweet and so nice. ~ Paula Deen

There was between 1821 and 1913 a prolonged and atrocious holocaust which we have chosen to forget, and from which we have learned absolutely nothing. In 1821, between 26 March and Easter Sunday, in the name of liberty, the southern Greek Christians tortured and
massacred 15,000 Greek Muslim civilians, looted their possessions, and burned their dwellings. The Greek hero Kolokotronis boasted without qualm that so many were the corpses that his horse's hooves never had to touch the
ground between the town gates of Athens and the citadel. In the Peloponnese, many thousands of Muslims, mainly women and children, were rounded up and butchered. Thousands of shrines and mosques were destroyed, so that even now there are only one or two left in the whole of Greece. ~ Louis De Bernieres

You boys may be gentlemen," Dusty said. "But I'm about to shoot like a lady. You ready, baby? ~ Stephanie Kate Strohm

There was a time when a new deputy tried to teach Mr. Fruit about the difference between a red and a green light, but Mr. Fruit had resisted all efforts to reorder what he had been doing perfectly well for many years. He had not only monitored the comings and goings of the town, his presence softened the ingrained evil that flourished along the invisible margins of the town's consciousness. Any community can be judged in its humanity or corruption by how it manages to accommodate the Mr. Fruits of the world. Colleton simply adjusted itself to Mr. Fruit's harmonies and ordinations. He did whatever he felt was needed and he did it with style. "That's the Southern way" my grandmother said. "That's the nice way. ~ Pat Conroy

We don't always get what we want. And sometimes, when we do, it's not worth the price. ~ Stephanie Lawton

Girls Incorporated of Greater Philadelphia and Southern New Jersey continues to advance their cause and to strengthen their community by aspiring to open a Girl's Center for Philadelphia. ~ Robert Brady

She was Darcy Montgomery, Southern Sanctuary Special Liaison, she fixed things. When people irritated her, well, she fixed them… she fixed them good. Or should that be, for good? ~ Jane Cousins

It was there that I wanted, out there somewhere, when I sat elbow-to-elbow with my giggling friends and let my thoughts swirl up and away from the three-mile radius of our small town lives. In my head, I careened out of town and across state lines, until the landscape became strange and unfamiliar. I wanted to see all of it. Everything. The vast expanses of the flat Midwest, miles of horizontal earth with the curving horizon at its end. Strange, stunted trees and driftwood skeletons on the lonely windswept beaches of the farthest coasts. Towering oaks hung thick with the gray lace of Spanish moss, looming like hovering parents over shaded southern dirt. The California sun, dipping and disappearing into the ocean, tipping the waves with orange light. ~ Kat Rosenfield