#southerner

Every culture has its southerners -- people who work as little as they can, preferring to dance, drink, sing brawl, kill their unfaithful spouses; who have livelier gestures, more lustrous eyes, more colorful garments, more fancifully decorated vehicles, a wonderful sense of rhythm, and charm, charm, charm; unambitious, no, lazy, ignorant, superstitious, uninhibited people, never on time, conspicuously poorer (how could it be otherwise, say the northerners); who for all their poverty and squalor lead enviable lives -- envied, that is, by work-driven, sensually inhibted, less corruptly governed northerners. We are superior to them, say the northerners, clearly superior. We do not shirk our duties or tell lies as a matter of course, we work hard, we are punctual, we keep reliable accounts. But they have more fun than we do ... They caution[ed] themselves as people do who know they are part of a superior culture: we mustn't let ourselves go, mustn't descend to the level of the ... jungle, street, bush, bog, hills, outback (take your pick). For if you start dancing on tables, fanning yourself, feeling sleepy when you pick up a book, developing a sense of rhythm, making love whenever you feel like it -- then you know. The south has got you. ↗

— Susan Sontag

#culture #north #north-and-south #northerners #perceptions

Southerners are also like ethnic groups in that they have a sense of group identity. ↗

— John Shelton Reed

#ethnic #ethnic groups #group #groups #identity

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

I'm a Southerner - I never take satisfaction in touching a nerve. I guess if I'm forced to find a good side, I'm glad that people are talking about an issue that hasn't really been discussed all that much. I'm glad that people are talking about it from the black perspective and the white perspective. ↗

— Kathryn Stockett

#been #black #discussed #find #forced

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

— Stan Shaw

#southerners #food

Southerners love a good tale. They are born reciters, great memory retainers, diary keepers, letter exchangers . . . great talkers. ↗

— Eudora Welty

#love