Quotes About Southern Literature

#1. My mother, Southern to the bone, once told me, "All Southern literature can be summed up in these words: 'On the night the hogs ate Willie, Mama died when she heard what Daddy did to Sister.'" She raised me up to be a Southern writer, but it wasn't easy.

Pat Conroy

#2. People may think of Southern humor in terms of missing teeth and outhouse accidents, but the best of it is a rich vein running through the best of Southern literature.

Roy Blount Jr.

#3. 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

#4. Unreason is in the same relation to reason as dazzlement to the brightness of daylight itself.

Michel Foucault

#5. Sometimes you have to be silent to be heard.

Stanislaw Jerzy Lec

#6. A song rises up from the belly of my past
and rocks me in the bosom of buried memories.

Brenda Sutton Rose

#7. Live life to the fullest tomorrow may never be.

Shahrukh Khan

#8. So long as the majority of Canadians have two countries, one here and one in Europe, national unity will remain a myth and a constant source of internecine quarrels.

Henri Bourassa

#9. There's no doubt in my mind that going vegetarian has made me feel better not only physically but also because I learned about the suffering of animals who are raised and killed for food. I feel good knowing I'm not contributing to that.

Sophie Monk

#10. This town of churches and dreams; this town I thought I would lose myself in, with its backward ways and winding roads leading to nowhere; but, I found myself instead. -Magic in the Backyard (excerpt from American Honey)

Kellie Elmore

#11. Your hair is ridiculous,' I say. 'And I love you.' I'm surprised how easily the words come out.
'My hair is ridiculous.' Charlie smiles even wider and says, just as easily, 'And I love you too.

Jen Violi

#12. 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

#13. Every man's religion is his own, and nobody else's business.

Thomas Chandler Haliburton

#14. Seasons didn't come behind the nicotine-stained walls of Mountain City's prison, so Harm always imagined it spring--the locust trees clustered with shaggy white blooms, the wet woods flecked with bloodroot, and wild roses and honeysuckle flashing white among the chestnuts on the mountainsides...

Sharyn McCrumb

#15. I don't feel the need to brand myself in that way [social media]. But as a means to share information and raise awareness of things, I think these social-networking platforms are unprecedented.

Scarlett Johansson

#16. I've worked with a lot of directors who really don't have a sense of what the hell they want.

Adrienne Shelly

#17. If John Grisham, Harper Lee, and Larry the Cable Guy were penned up in a remote cabin for a weekend with nothing but good bourbon, fine wine, and a couple of cases of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer, something like Common Pleas (A Tale of Whoa!) might result...

J. Randolph Cresenzo

#18. 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

#19. Sometimes, when loneliness seems about to crush everything, the only way to resist is to keep on loving.

Paulo Coelho

#20. Too many things to say. Too many things unsaid.

Kristen Heitzmann

#21. I've got this amazing relationship with God that is better than life, itself, so marvelous, so wonderful that everything else can fall apart and I'm okay.

Francis Chan

#22. The job in Wisconsin was the first genuine offer of an academic job in a university which I received.

Stephen Cole Kleene

#23. Wild steep mountains floating in a haze of cloud...a sea of green trees swallowing the hills and valleys, and curling around the trails and rivers, with the wind in the leaves as its tide.

Sharyn McCrumb

#24. Christians are the salt of the earth ... Nothing grows where they've been.

Donald Hays

#25. I love the leisurely amplitude, the spaciousness, of taking a walk, of heading somewhere, anywhere, on foot. I love the sheer adventure of it: setting out and taking off.

Edward Hirsch

#26. 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

#27. Serving time doesn't make you fit to do anything but serve more time.

Donald Hays

#28. Maybe these dreams of ours just floats away. Here we go again ... changin' face.

Randolph Randy Camp

#29. 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

#30. Potential enemies make the best friends and lovers. Many a blessed union begins in adversity.

Randy Thornhorn

#31. Scarlett O'Hara wasn't pretty.

Margaret Mitchell