Southern American Sayings

#1. I love that there's this tradition of being able to discuss the heaviest topics and the gnarliest stuff that goes down in people's lives in traditional Southern American music.

Gillian Welch

#2. 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

#3. An auctioneer is such a uniquely American thing. I keep thinking in my head, perhaps it's not as American as I think, but it feels so Southern. It feels so American. Like, hundreds of years of American tradition is involved in it.

Jack White

#4. East and Gulf Coast states are at risk of hurricanes; prairie and other central and southern states are constantly threatened by tornados; and western states commonly face damaging droughts. Extreme weather does not discriminate by American geography.

Matt Cartwright

#5. Louis Brandeis never had the opportunity - or he never sought the opportunity I should say - to work closely with African American lawyers. He was also a Southern Democrat, you know, at a time when both parties were supportive of segregation.

Jeffrey Rosen

#6. You can't learn 'bout the War for Southern Independence in any textbook. You have ta see it for yourself, and every one a you kids should, because the same country that fought together in the American Revolution for independence, turned clear against itself in the War.

Kami Garcia

#7. Most of the American films were made in southern California, so if you were in Europe, watching those palm trees swaying in the wind with someone like Rita Hayworth gliding underneath them in a white convertible, you got all kinds of wonderfully wrong ideas about the place.

Charles Simic

#8. I'm accountable - this sounds emo - to black American writing, Southern writing, Southern black American writing, American writing and my people. That's kind of what keeps me accountable.

Kiese Laymon

#9. It was true what they said about an American woman's southern drawl being able to melt a man.

Lyla Dune

#10. But unless some great revolution in nature modifies the present relative level between land and sea, it may safely be maintained that the present outer reef is the final southern boundary of the North American continent.

Louis Agassiz

#11. So, we went from being an Athens band to being a Georgia band to being a Southern band to being an American band from the East Coast to being an American band and now we're kind of an international phenomenon.

Michael Stipe

#12. Wonderful songwriting, beautiful production, and deeply rooted in what makes American Roots Music great: Deep Southern Pain. It's the hurt that brings the songs, and it's the songs that heal the hurt. Jonathan's songs bring us there, and back. Check this record out, it's a good 'un.

Mary Gauthier

#13. If there were a Mount Rushmore of American humor, Terry Southern would be the mountain they'd carve it from

Michael O'Donoghue

#14. My take on rap is driven by straightforward American southern rock and blues.

Kid Rock

#15. Look, I grew up in, went to school in, and now live in the American South, and southern white women are interesting, complex and quirky, even the ones with racial anxieties.

Melissa Harris-Perry

#16. People were saying that Southern folk song was dead, that the land that had produced American jazz, the blues, the spirituals, the mountain ballads and the work songs had gone sterile.

Alan Lomax

#17. We all have scars. Just because mine are hidden doesn't make them any less painful.

Nicki Salcedo

#18. I can never do justice to the great feeling of amazement and encouragement I felt when, perhaps for the first time in American history, white citizens of a Southern state banded together to come to Selma and show their indignation about the injustices against the African-Americans.

Amelia Boynton Robinson

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

Donald Hays

#20. David Burnett was the son of Martha Foley, who edited the Best American Short Stories series. She hired me to work with David and her to read stories for the anthology.

Terry Southern

#21. The great thing about not being American is that you don't assume you know what a Southern accent sounds like, so you have to be specific.

Cate Blanchett

#22. I've enjoyed my time in the American League, the fans of Southern California and other friendships.

Joe Torre

#23. YANKEE, n. In Europe, an American. In the Northern States of our Union, a New Englander. In the Southern States the word is unknown.

Ambrose Bierce

#24. My ancestors come from a part of southern China where most villages can trace their roots back at least a thousand years or even more. However, as a typical American, I have lived in four cities and moved at least seven times.

Laurence Yep

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

Donald Hays

#26. There is international criminal organizations penetrating our southern based borders, and we need to do something about it. Secure the border, enforce the law, no amnesty, and go forward with the legal immigration system that gives priority to American working families and wages.

Scott Walker

#27. The authentic Gullah dialect is actually very clipped, and so it would sound almost Jamaican and be very odd to an American audience's ears. It's not the typical Southern dialect that we're used to.

Audra McDonald

#28. By the eve of the American Revolution, a third of the native people in Rhode Island were enslaved. Indian bondage was more common still in the southern

Charles C. Mann

#29. For most of American history, of course, the important religious divides were between denominations - not just between Protestants and Catholics and Jews but between Lutherans and Episcopalians and Southern Baptists and the other endlessly fine-tuned sects.

Hanna Rosin

#30. So far from thinking that a slaveholder is bound by the immoral and unconstitutional laws of the Southern States, we hold thathe is solemnly bound as a man, as an American, to break them, and that immediately and openly ...

Angelina Grimke

#31. Thus the American people were maneuvered into a Civil War which they neither envisioned nor desired. They were manipulated by Masonic Canaanite conspirators working together in the Northern and the Southern states.

Eustace Mullins

#32. I decided early on that I wanted to participate in the greater American experience, rather than the parochial one in Mississippi. But I have an urge as a writer to meld the Southern experience into the larger American one.

Richard Ford

#33. Southern California, where the American Dream came too true.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#34. I believe that the truth of any subject only comes when all sides of the story are put together.

Alice Walker

#35. An absolutely devastating ridicule of all that is false, primitive, and vicious in current American life: the abuses of power, hero worship, aimless violence, materialistic obsession, intolerance, and every form of hypocrisy.

Terry Southern