Top 98 Quotes About Southerners
#1. Writing about where I was from and the people I knew was not something that would have occurred to me early on, because like so many Southerners of that period - the Sixties - I rejected those things when I went north.
Bobbie Ann Mason
#2. Southerners love a good tale. They are born reciters, great memory retainers, diary keepers, letter exchangers ... great talkers.
Eudora Welty
#3. I worked with these liberal elites for 28 years at CBS News, and they were always throwing around the term 'white trash,' by which they meant poor southerners who didn't go to Harvard. I'm not sure why that makes them trash.
Bernard Goldberg
#4. 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
#5. Americans are much more American than they are Northerners, Southerners, Westerners, or Easterners ... California Chinese, Boston Irish, Wisconsin German, yes, Alabama Negroes, have more in common than they have apart ... The American identity is an exact and provable thing.
John Steinbeck
#6. She was one of those Southerners who knew from an early age that the South could never be more for them than a fragrant prison, administered by a collective of loving but treacherous relatives.
Pat Conroy
#8. Before the thunderous clamor of political debate or war set loose in the world, love insisted on its promise for the possibility of human unity: between men and women, between blacks and whites, northerners and southerners, haves and have-have-nots, self and self.
Aberjhani
#9. Southerners don't gossip; Southerners pray for one other. Of course, you have to know the details of the sinner's sins to get any good praying done, then you have to recruit others to pray, and they need the details too. It's called Prayer Circle.
Gretchen Archer
#10. 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
#11. Basically there is no difference between whites and blacks, browns and yellows. I decided to think no more of people as Northerners and Southerners.
Ethel Waters
#12. If you care to define the South as a poor, rural region with lousy race relations, that South survives only in geographical shreds and patches and most Southerners don't live there any more.
John Shelton Reed
#13. In greeting, we Southerners say "hey" not "hi." To alert, draw the attention of, or show objection to another, we also say "hey," but air is expelled and the ending is truncated. This
Kathy Reichs
#14. Well, Southerners like to eat well. You see, it's an event when it's done right.
Stan Shaw
#15. We Southerners are a strong lot. Like our ancestors before us, we will survive. I will never lose faith. I am standing on the promise that tomorrow will be a better day.
Nancy B. Brewer
#16. For nearly a century, the South made itself believe that Negroes and white people were really communicating. So convinced of this were the white Southerners that they almost made the nation believe that they, and only they, knew the mind of the Southern Negro.
Benjamin E. Mays
#17. Southerners have a genius for psychological alchemy ... If something intolerable simply cannot be changed, driven away or shot they will not only tolerate it but take pride in it as well.
Florence King
#18. [Yankees] are pretty much like southerners except with worse manners, of course, and terrible accents.
Margaret Mitchell
#19. Many whites, even white Southerners told me that even though it may have seemed like the blacks were being freed (by my actions) they felt more free and at ease themselves. They thought that my action didn't just free blacks but them, too.
Rosa Parks
#20. My father served as an Army doctor in West Germany in the late '50s and early '60s. As a result, he and my mother - both native southerners - were acutely aware of what had happened during the Holocaust.
Greg Iles
#21. For Southerners, a white skin was the distinguishing badge of mind and intellect. Black skin was the sign that a given people had been providentially designed to serve as menial laborers, as what Hammond called the "mudsill" class necessary to support every society.
David Brion Davis
#22. Counting both Northerners and Southerners, more American lives were lost in the Civil War than in any other conflict.
Richard Shenkman
#23. While many a Georgian condemned the Yankees for ravaging the countryside, it should be noted that the Confederates often treated Southerners just as badly, if not worse. Major
James Lee McDonough
#24. As flawed as Southern culture is, mendacity has always been treated in the South as a despicable characteristic. Notice how often Southerners casually address others as "you son of a bitch" with no insult intended. When the same person calls someone a "lying son of a bitch," you know he's serious.
James Lee Burke
#25. 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
#26. Being Southerners, it was a source of shame to some members of the family that we had no recorded ancestors on either side of the Battle of Hastings.
Harper Lee
#27. With the possible exception of grits, there's no food more Southern than greens, whose bitter smell while cooking down in salty fatback amid the jittery hiss of a pressure cooker is a Proustian madeleine for generations of black and white Southerners alike. The
Sela Ward
#28. The nice thing about Southerners is the way we enjoy our neuroses.
Florence King
#29. The past that Southerners are forever talking about is not a dead past
it is a chapter from the legend that our kinfolks have told us, it is a living past, living for a reason. The past is a part of the present, it is a comfort, a guide, a lesson.
Ben Robertson
#30. The racial terrorism of lynchings in many ways created the modern death penalty. America's embrace of speedy executions was, in part, an attempt to redirect the violent energies of lynching while ensuring white southerners that Black men would still pay the ultimate price.
Bryan Stevenson
#31. Southerners make good novelists: they have so many stories because they have so much family.
Gore Vidal
#32. The Southerners are the only cooks in the United States. The real difference between the South and the North is that one enjoys itself getting dyspepsia and the other does not.
Gertrude Atherton
#33. She hasn't known many Southerners. That twang and aw-shucks about him
it's sort of exotic.
Tom Rachman
#34. I came from a big family ... a big family of Southerners.
Blake Lively
#35. I think of myself as a Hollywood hillbilly, but I'm sick of all these questions people ask about Alabama. 'Do you have an outhouse?' 'Is there a lot of inbreeding in your family?' They think all Southerners don't have computers and TV sets and that we're all still living in 1862.
Sunny Mabrey
#36. Christian talk, when said in a non-Christian way, scares these Southerners to death.
Adam Johnson
#37. Forty-seven generations before, the King of the Southerners had stolen a rhinoceros out of the Northern King's private zoo. ( - That's it? - Wars have started for less. - But that's stupid. - Precisely.)
Patrick Ness
#38. The Mormons' passage from bugbears of the Republican Party to its stalwarts may be analogized to a similar move among middle-class white Southerners, to whom the Republican Party was anathema until the 1970s and '80s, after which it became almost the sole representative.
Noah Feldman
#40. 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
#41. Lincoln had internalized the pain of those around him - the wounded soldiers, the captured prisoners, the defeated Southerners. Little wonder that he was overwhelmed at times by a profound sadness that even his own resilient temperament could not dispel.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#42. For generations, even many otherwise decent white Southerners learned to despise black people.
Linda Chavez
#43. Nobody used the minute hand. And Southerners were suspicious of Yankees who did.
D.D. Scott
#45. We could say that people who eat grits, listen to country music, follow stock-car racing, support corporal punishment in the schools, hunt 'possum, go to Baptist churches and prefer bourbon to Scotch are likely to be Southerners.
John Shelton Reed
#46. It wasn't hard to take a liberal stand on race so long as it was seen as a Southern problem, and the Republicans didn't have any white Southerners to placate.
Rick Perlstein
#47. Among the American contemporaries I read with most enjoyment are several North Carolinians. I think the best poetry being written these days is being written by Southerners.
Robert Morgan
#48. To Southerners like my mother, 'Gone With the Wind' was not just a book; it was an answer, a clenched fist raised to the North, an anthem of defiance.
Pat Conroy
#49. Southerners had a long tradition of looking for religious significance in even the most humble forms of nature, and I always preferred the explanations of folklore to the icy interpretations of science.
Pat Conroy
#50. I think we Southerners have talked a fair amount of malarkey about the mystique of being Southern.
Reynolds Price
#51. Southerners have never been afraid of seasoning. It's kind of the other way around; our seasoning is afraid of us.
Paula Deen
#52. The human heart is a lonely hunter-but the search for us southerners is more anguished ...
Carson McCullers
#53. It may be because Southerners are very much like Frenchmen in that they must talk; and not only must they talk, but they must express their opinions.
James Weldon Johnson
#54. Only Southerners have taken horsewhips and pistols to editors about the treatment or maltreatment of their manuscript. This
the actual pistols
was in the old days, of course, we no longer succumb to the impulse. But it is still there, within us.
William Faulkner
#55. Southerners have been known to stay over the Fourth and not get home before Thanksgiving. Some oldtimers take in overnight guests and keep them through three generations.
Mary Ellen Snodgrass
#56. I had in mind a message, although I hope it doesn't intrude too badly, persuading Americans, and especially Southerners, of the critical importance of land and our vanishing natural environment and wildlife.
E. O. Wilson
#57. Southerners have many fine qualities, charm and civility among them, and a sense of the tragic ...
Dean Koontz
#58. A man working for wages his whole life is not really free. That is why Jefferson said, you have to own land. Southerners said, - and they weren't being hypocritical - they said slavery is the foundation of freedom because if you own slaves, you are freer yourself.
Eric Foner
#59. Southerners...People partial to front porches, peaches, cool breezes, fast horses, sweet tea, bourbon, beautiful women and handsome men!
Unknown
#60. Southerners have mastered picking, choosing, and rationalizing religious texts to fit their social agenda better than their own mother's fried chicken recipe.
Maggie Young
#61. 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
#62. During a crisis period, a desperate attempt is made by the extremists to influence the minds of the liberal forces in the ruling majority. So, for example, in the present transition white Southerners attempt to convince Northern whites that the Negroes are inherently criminal.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#63. What we are working for is an educational program that has become a resource and rallying point for scores of brave southerners who are leading the fight for justice and better race relations in these crucial days
Septima Poinsette Clark
#64. But we southerners know that you can insult someone as much as you want so long as you add that "bless her heart" to the end of your comment.
Katherine Allred
#65. [I] the is the duty of black men to judge the Southern discriminate lyrics. The present generation of Southerners are not responsible for the past, and they should not be blindly hated or blamed for it.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#66. Greens are a dish that most Southerners would walk a mile for.
Edna Lewis
#67. Southerners are the more lonely and spiritually estranged, I think, because we have lived so long in an artificial social system that we insisted was natural and right and just - when all along we knew it wasn't.
Carson McCullers
#68. Two great areas of deafness existed in the South: White Southerners had no ears to hear that which threatened their Dream. And colored Southerners had none to hear that which could reduce their anger.
Sarah-Patton Boyle
#69. Southerners are also like ethnic groups in that they have a sense of group identity.
John Shelton Reed
#70. 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
#71. My great-grandfather and his two brothers fought at Gettysburg. They were in artillery, and they survived the war, thank goodness. So I revere what they did. I think their motivations were honorable when they undertook the war and participated in it along with other Southerners.
Jimmy Carter
#72. Shadwell hated all southerners and, by inference, was standing at the North Pole.
Terry Pratchett
#73. Most Southerners of my parents' era were raised to feel that it wasn't respectable to be rich. We felt that all patriotic Southerners had lost everything in defense of the South, and sufficient time hadn't elapsed for respectable rebuilding of financial security in a war- impoverished region.
Sarah-Patton Boyle
#75. 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
#76. Southerners are so devoted to genealogy that we see a family tree under every bush.
Florence King
#77. Living in Atlanta those seven tumultuous years, I learned not to trust the Northern stereotype of white Southerners as incorrigible racists. Yankee self-righteousness ignored the depth of race hatred in places like Boston or New York.
Howard Zinn
#78. ... 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
#79. 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
#80. In the South, history clings to you like a wet blanket. Outside your door the past awaits in Indian mounds, plantation ruins, heaving sidewalks and homestead graveyards; each slowly reclaimed by the kudzu of time.
Tim Heaton
#81. The proverbial hospitality of the South may be selectively extended but it is not a myth.
Sally Mann
#82. I've been the sheriff here for about five years now, and I'm surprised we haven't met."
"She's been gone awhile
out to California," Trip explained.
The Sheriff nodded, replacing his hat,"Sorry to hear that.
Karen White
#83. Sometimes you have to travel back in time, skirting the obstacles, in order to love someone.
Frances Mayes
#84. Magic of Southern expressions? Similes and metaphorical allusions. They are the yellow highlighter of conversation.
Tim Heaton
#85. We have been told to ask about everything: Will it leave us free?
Ben Robertson
#86. To living in the South: If you've never had a Porterhouse, everything tastes like baloney.
Tim Heaton
#87. If the least thing goes wrong with a saddle, or clothes, or a boot, you cannot find a soul to make repairs, and the other day a cobbler answered us, 'Yes, that's right, I'm a shoemaker, and sometimes I work, but I'm not in the mood right now.
Louis-Philippe
#88. It is a great comfort to a rambling people to know that somewhere there is a permanent home
perhaps it is the most final of the comforts they ever really know.
Ben Robertson
#89. Puttin' on a cowboy hat & a pair of boots doesn't make you country; Like puttin' on a ball gown & glass heels won't make me Cinderella.
Kellie Elmore
#90. No one knows how to hold a grudge like a proper Southerner.
Charles M. Blow
#91. I think the people from Mississippi ought to come to Chicago to learn how to hate. Martin Luther King, Jr. after the violent reception he received in Chicago in 1966.
Rick Perlstein
#92. When we became teenagers boredom grew like a moth in a cocoon fighting to escape, and the peace created by our parents became a prison. We sought excitement and adventure. We sought anything but the sinless, pure, and average of the faux idyllic.
Scott Thompson
#93. The first time I saw my father-in-law's cotton, I though of the Original Sin, gardening being the root of the South's downfall.
Michael Lee West
#94. He had met this sort of white man before, earnest and believing what came out of their mouths. The veracity of their words was another matter, but at least they believed them. The southern white man was spat from the loins of the devil and there was no way to forecast his next evil act.
Colson Whitehead
#95. Because the South can be a dangerous place, especially for those who don't understand it.
Shannon Celebi
#96. I might be from Kentucky, but I know that 'bless her heart' means 'fuck that bitch' in Southern.
Laura Kreitzer
#97. For that matter I didn't understand Civil War reenactments. Why would you celebrate the biggest thing you ever lost? I quickly learned not to give voice to such skepticisms, and when asked if I was a Yankee I said I didn't follow baseball closely. That usually shut the person up.
Patricia Cornwell
#98. In the North, he discoverd, courtesy was considered a barometer of genuine esteem; for any decently brought up Southerner, good manners were simply habitual.
Mary Doria Russell
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