#southerner

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

#bill clinton #clinton #every #i #i think

Southerners smile more than other Americans. ↗

— John Shelton Reed

#other #smile #southerners #than

I can see why many Southerners, black ones in particular, don't like the implication that Southernness and the Confederate heritage are one and the same, because they're not. On the other hand, there are people who want to extirpate that completely and want folks to spit on the graves of their ancestors. ↗

— John Shelton Reed

#because #black #completely #confederate #folks

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

#care #define #geographical #live #lousy

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

#different worlds #discovered #i #make #north

Well, Southerners like to eat well. You see, it's an event when it's done right. ↗

— Stan Shaw

#southerners #food

[Yankees] are pretty much like southerners except with worse manners, of course, and terrible accents. ↗

— Margaret Mitchell

#rhett-butler-to-scarlett #southerners #yankees #humor

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

#coming-of-age-stories #growing-up #southern-fiction #southern-gothic #southerners

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

#southern-literature #southerners #writing #literature-quotes

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

#between #blacks #browns #decided #difference