Southerner Quotes

Andrew Johnson was a Southerner generally who proclaimed that his native state of Tennessee was a country for white men. ~ Stephen Ambrose

Every Southerner, I think, knows people like Bill Clinton, maybe not quite as smart and maybe not quite as liberal, but kind of a glad-handing, country-club yuppie Southerner. The problem is we don't have labels for middle-class Southerners. ~ John Shelton Reed

I don't think of myself as a Negro. I'm a Southerner. I just like the Southern way of life. ~ Julian Bond

Murdering anything is just plain criminal, but a Southerner murdering a magnolia? Well, that's an unforgivable sacrilege against nautre and the South. ~ Beth Hoffman

Back so soon?" he asked. "Too bad. I was just about to organize a search for your dead body. What happened when you knocked on the southerner magician's door to sacrifice yourself? Did they kick you out, thinking you too half-witted to waste their time on? ~ Maria V. Snyder

There is a certain type of white Southerner who respects certain Negro individuals. ~ Ethel Waters

Their prejudice allowed white Southerners to look the other way when blacks were denied their most basic human rights, and it encouraged the worst of them to engage in unspeakable acts of cruelty and violence. ~ Linda Chavez

A northerner, insensitive in some ways and full of self-righteousness could gravely offend a southerner in a second. The northerner would be giving his general opinion, more than likely unasked for, and all unknowing challenging the southerner's every deeply held belief, not to mention, with sundry looks and expressions, suggesting that the southerner was possessed of numerous flaws of character and person. The southerner was bound to see offense in every suggestion, insult in every difference of opinion, and to act upon his stung pride. ~ Jane Smiley

I'm sort of a Southerner because those are my roots, but my parents are from Iowa. ~ Geneva Carr

When Kennedy could not get the civil rights bill passed - and he was the big liberal - Lyndon Johnson came in and it got passed, and he was the conservative and the southerner. So sometimes in politics, to get something done, it takes a special kind of knowledge and a special kind of person, but it doesn't always follow the party lines. ~ Jim Brown

I'm a Southerner. We dream of having the family and the kids, and the parents want grandkids, that's all they care about, give me some grandbabies. ~ Lance Bass

You learn to forgive (the South) for its narrow mind and growing pains because it has a huge heart. You forgive the stifling summers because the spring is lush and pastel sprinkled, because winter is merciful and brief, because corn bread and sweet tea and fried chicken are every bit as vital to a Sunday as getting dressed up for church, and because any southerner worth their salt says please and thank you. It's soft air and summer vines, pine woods and fat homegrown tomatoes. It's pulling the fruit right off a peach tree and letting the juice run down your chin. It's a closeted and profound appreciation for our neighbors in Alabama who bear the brunt of the Bubba jokes. The South gets in your blood and nose and skin bone-deep. I am less a part of the South than it is part of me. It's a romantic notion, being overcome by geography. But we are all a little starry-eyed down here. We're Rhett Butler and Scarlett O'Hara and Rosa Parks all at once. ~ Amanda Kyle Williams

Southerners ask intimate questions in the way monkeys groom each other for lice, not to pry but to make you feel cared for. ~ Reynolds Price

It doesn't matter who you marry, as long as he thinks like you and is a gentleman and a Southerner and prideful. For a woman, love comes after marriage."
"Oh, Pa, that's such an Old Country notion!"
"And a good notion it is! All this American business of running around marrying for love, like servants, like Yankees! The best marriages are when the parents choose for the girl. For how can a silly piece like yourself tell a good man from a scoundrel? ~ Margaret Mitchell

King thought he understood the white Southerner, having been born and reared in Georgia and trained a theologian. ~ Constance Baker Motley

Saga of the Sexually Repressed Southerner Who Traded Gold for Whale Teeth. ~ Yanko Tsvetkov

As a southerner I had been brought up to believe that through conditioning and experience you could accept with some measure of tranquility any of the flaws in the human situation. But death is one flaw that always lands like a fist in the center of the forehead. No matter how many times you see it, or smell its gray rotting odor, or come close to buying it yourself, each time is always like the first. No amount of earlier experience prepares you for it, and after it happens the world is somehow unfairly diminished and bent out of shape. ~ James Lee Burke

Besides, Southerners are hospitable. They'll probably offer me lemonade."
Excuse me? You're going to sit on a porch and drink lemonade while I plow a swamp with a goat's horn?"
Yes, ma'am. And I aim to wear my seamless shirt while you do it. ~ Nancy Werlin

The average Southerner has the speech patterns of someone slipping in and out of consciousness. I can change my shoes and socks faster than most people in Mississippi can speak a sentence. ~ Bill Bryson

A southerner would fry a salad if he could figure out how. ~ Joe Thompson

I love the South. Although I grew up primarily in Memphis, my family moved around a ton when I was a kid. I guess I never stayed in one place long enough to pick up the accent, but I definitely identify as a Southerner. ~ Chris Hardwick

I am a southerner who grew up with and around guns. I own some still. My father gave me a .22 rifle when I was 9 and a single barrel .410 shotgun when I was 10. ~ Jon Meacham

I am proud of being a Southerner. I wasn't about to let Southerners on my show be stupid or aw-shuckses who just sit on the front porch and spit in the yard. I wasn't about to do that, and I made that very clear from the start. I was kind of the gate-keeper on that stuff. ~ Andy Griffith

Some Southerners effectively applied slave labor to the cultivation of corn, grain, and hemp (for making rope and twine), to mining and lumbering, to building canals and railroads, and even to the manufacture of textiles, iron, and other industrial products. Nevertheless, no other American region contained so many white farmers who merely subsisted on their own produce. The "typical" white Southerner was not a slaveholding planter but a small farmer who tried, often without success, to achieve both relative self-sufficiency and a steady income from marketable cash crops. ~ David Brion Davis

You said,' Camille protested, 'that when you wanted to get on terms with Gabrielle you cultivated her mother. It's true, everybody saw you doing it, boasting in Italian and rolling your eyes and doing your tempestuous southerner impersonation. ~ Hilary Mantel

The southerner talks music. ~ Mark Twain

I was born in a hurricane in Pensacola, Florida ... my dad was in the military, so we moved all over the place. But I consider myself a southerner from Louisiana. I've lived in Texas for most of my adult life. ~ Kimberly Willis Holt

As a southerner born after the epic events of the civil rights movement, I've always wondered how on earth people of good will could have conceivably lived with Jim Crow - with the daily degradations, the lynchings in plain sight, and, as the movement gathered force, with the fire hoses and the police dogs and the billy clubs. ~ Jon Meacham

Fincher was the kind of Southerner who will try to address you through a web of deep and antic southernness, and who assumes every body in earshot knows all about his parents and history and wants to hear an update about them at every opportunity. He looks young, but still manages to act 65. ~ Richard Ford

It's a touchy subject, but as a Southerner, you can't ignore our history any more than a Renaissance painter can ignore the Virgin Mary. And it's impossible to drive down a road or eat a vegetable or pass a church without being reminded of slavery. ~ Sally Mann

I'll always consider myself a Southerner. A lot of people put California down, but my dreams were realized there. ~ Billy Bob Thornton

What must it be like to live like that? How does such constant scorn affect your faith? How do you teach your children to ignore what other people say about you and the things you hold most sacred? Since I am a Southerner with vivid memories of the American civil rights movement, it is easy to come up with a parallel set of questions. How do you deal with the deadly hostility of people who think they know everything about you simply by looking at you? How do you change a mind that knows nothing about its own shadows? ~ Barbara Brown Taylor

Pres. Lyndon Johnson was a middle-aged man of smalltown America, both a Westerner and a Southerner, and except where politics had demonstrably forced his growth-as on the question of civil rights-he functioned like most men, as a product of his background. ~ Tom Wicker

By the 1850s enslavers had their eyes on expansion into Cuba in order to expand Southern political power. Here we see an idyllic image of a Cuba tobacco plantation, plus the idea of "Southern rights" being used to sell cigars. "Southerner rights segars. Expressly manufactured for Georgia & Alabama by Salomon Brothers. Fabrica de tabacos, de superior calidad de la vuelta-abajo," Broadside, 1859. ~ Edward E. Baptist

It was now the fall of 1956, and nine years after entering Georgia Military Academy as a scrawny "Yankee" from Ohio, I was now considered a "southerner," enrolling at one of the North's most elite institutions. ~ Ted Turner

A determined Yankee book drummer once told a Southerner that 'a set of books on scientific agriculture' would teach him to 'farm twice as good as you do.' To which the Southerner replied: 'Hell, son, I don't farm half as good as I know how now. ~ Grady McWhiney

A true Southerner will never say in 2-3 words what can better be said in 10-12. ~ Charles Kuralt

As a Southerner, I love obstacles for my characters. ~ Karin Slaughter

I'm a Southerner - I never take satisfaction in touching a nerve. ~ Kathryn Stockett

I think we Southerners have talked a fair amount of malarkey about the mystique of being Southern. ~ Reynolds Price

A man from Iowa or Illinois will say 'I'm from the Middle West'..a Georgian or a Mississipian may admit to being merely a Southerner ... but no Texan, given the opportunity, ever said otherwise than 'I'm from Texas'. ~ J. Frank Dobie

The educated Southerner has no use for an 'r', except at the beginning of a word. ~ Mark Twain

As a Southerner I would have to say that one of the main importances of the War is that Southerners have a sense of defeat which none of the rest of the country has. ~ Shelby Foote

A little present from my run-in with a sword. Or should I say from when the sword had a run-in with me?" His eyes lit up.
"Want to see the scar? It's cool." He started pulling his shirt out of his pants.
"Janco," Ari warned. "We're not supposed to be fraternizing with the Sitians."
"But she's not Sitian. Right, Yelena? You haven't gone south on us, have you?" Janco's voice held mock horror.
"Because if you have I can't give you your present."
I took my switchblade out, showing the inscription to Janco. "What about 'Sieges weathered, fight together, friends forever'? Does that change if I become an official southerner?"
Janco rubbed the hair on his chin, considering.
"No," Ari said. "You could change into a goat and it would still apply. ~ Maria V. Snyder

Any Southerner is spoiled when it comes to food. ~ Taylor Hicks

When you live in a lot of places, you can't help but have them become part of you. Technically, I am a Southerner, but I did not grow up in the South. So I'm a Southerner by accident, but a Washingtonian. ~ Neko Case

It's really hard for me to sometimes put myself out there, like 'Hey, how do you feel about making music together?' because maybe I'm afraid of rejection or I don't want to put anybody out. It's the Southerner in me, like, 'I don't mean to bother you but do you mind making a song?' ~ Beth Ditto

When you go apartment-hunting in the South, you encounter little old ladies who ask you if you use strong drink. In New York you encounter paranoids who wonder if you will commit suicide
not that they care; what they worry about is blood on their fresh paint, a dubious smell in the hallway, or a hole in the awning as you pass through on your way to the sidewalk. The Southerner who moves to any part of the country has problems, but the culture shock that attacks the Southerner who moves North is almost indescribable. ~ Florence King

I'm a very big Faulkner fan 'cause I'm a Southerner. ~ Gregory Benford

No southerner had been elected President for more than a century, and it was a bitter article of faith among southern politicians that no southerner would be elected President in any foreseeable future; when members of the House of Representatives gave their Speaker, Sam Rayburn, ruler of the House for more than two decades, a limousine as a present, attached to the back of the front seat was a plaque that read 'To Our Beloved Sam Rayburn - Who Would Have Been President If He Had Come From Any Place but the South. ~ Robert A. Caro

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

One of the things I most wanted to do in New York was to go to a performance by Martha Graham. For me, she's Miss Mattie T. Graham. I thought she needed something in the middle. If she's going to be an honorary Southerner, she's got to have something in the middle, so I just put an initial T and a period. ~ Eugene Walter

... a Southerner is BORN into the lifestyle,
there just ain't no choice about it.
Yer either a Southerner or ya ain't. ~ Chad B. Hanson

I discovered that the people of the North are different and there's no way you can make a person from the North similar to a Southerner. They're two different worlds. ~ Esa-Pekka Salonen

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

Being a Southerner, I'm interested in sex, violence, religion and all the things that make life interesting. ~ Karin Slaughter

You could start an argument in an empty house. ~ Jill Shalvis

A Yorkshireman in the South will always take care to let you know that he regards you as an inferior. If you ask him why, he will explain that it is only in the North that life is 'real' life, that the industrial work done in the North is the only 'real' work, that the North is inhabited by 'real' people, the South merely by rentiers and their parasites. The Northerner has 'grit', he is grim, 'dour', plucky, warm-hearted and democratic; the Southerner is snobbish, effeminate and lazy - that at any rate is the theory. Hence the Southerner goes north, at any rate for the first time, with the vague inferiority-complex of a civilized man venturing among savages, while the Yorkshireman, like the Scotchman, comes to London in the spirit of a barbarian out for loot. ~ George Orwell

Many Americans would die naked in the middle of the road before they'd tell you what's hurt them most. But a born Southerner will show you the cell in their heart that burns the hardest. They'll hold it out to you in their bare right hand. ~ Reynolds Price

To identify a person as a Southerner suggests not only that her history is inescapable and formative but that it is also impossibly present. Southerners live uneasily at the nexus between myth and reality, watching the mishmash amalgam of sorrow, humility, honor, graciousness, and renegade defiance play out against a backdrop of profligate physical beauty. ~ Sally Mann

I am proud to be a Southerner. ~ Paula Deen

Greens are a dish that most Southerners would walk a mile for. ~ Edna Lewis

To be a Southerner, or to live Southern, is to feel, well, something special even in the quiet, something fine in itself after all those rebel yells and fight songs have finally faded into silence. ~ Rick Bragg

To make matters worse, I was out of a job and had very little money and was self-exiled to Flatbush - like others of my countrymen, another lean and lonesome Southerner wandering amid the Kingdom of the Jews. ~ William Styron

I think a proud Southerner is a Southerner who is aware of his or her past, and being proud of one's past does not mean you accept it. It means that you realize that we've come through the fire, and we're headed in another direction. ~ William R. Ferris

The human heart is a lonely hunter-but the search for us southerners is more anguished ... ~ Carson McCullers

I'm a Southerner, born and bred, but that doesn't mean I approve of all that goes on here, and there are a lot of other white people who feel the same. ~ Mildred D. Taylor

I decided to deflect her attitude by giving a long, Southern answer. I come from people who know how to draw things out. Annoy a Southerner, and we will drain away the moments of your life with our slow, detailed replies until you are nothing but a husk of your former self and that much closer to death. ~ Maureen Johnson

But I still do believe that there are useful things to say about Elvis Presley, including what his own ordinariness as a poor Southerner says about 20th-century hero-making. ~ John Shelton Reed

Southerners take no issue with absurdity. We don't pretend the world is logical or fair. If there were a signature regional gesture it would be a shrug. For us, crazy happens. Better to sit back, enjoy the show, and drink the tea ~ Allison Glock

In every southerner, beneath the veneer of clichés lies a much deeper motherlode of cliché. But even cliché is overlaid with enormous power when a child is involved. ~ Pat Conroy

Suppose a man is walking across a field. To the question "Who is that?" a Southerner would reply by saying something like "Wasn't his granddaddy the one whose dog and him got struck by lightning on the steel bridge? Mama's third cousin - dead before my time - found his railroad watch in that eight-pound catfish's stomach the next summer just above the dam. I think it was eight pounds. Big as Eunice's arm. The way he married for that new blue Cadillac automobile, reckon how come he's walking like he has on Sunday shoes, if that's who it is, and for sure it is." A Northerner would reply to the same question (only if directly asked, though, never volunteering), "That's Joe Smith." To which the Southerner might think (but be much too polite to say aloud), "They didn't ask his name, they asked who he is! ~ Mary Hood

Accepting Uncle Tom's Cabin as revelation second only to the Bible, the Yankee women all wanted to know about the bloodhounds which every Southerner kept to track down runaway slaves. And they never believed her when she told them she had only seen one bloodhound in all her life and it was a small mild dog and not a huge ferocious mastiff. They wanted to know about the dreadful branding irons which planters used to mark the faces of their slaves and the cat-o'-nine-tails with which they beat them to death, and they evidenced what Scarlett felt was a very nasty and ill-bred interest in slave concubinage.
Especially did she resent this in view of the enormous increase in mulatto babies in Atlanta since the Yankee soldiers had settled in the town. ~ Margaret Mitchell