#southerners

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

#bourbon #churches #corporal #could #country

I decided to deflect her attitude by giving a long, Southern answer. I come from people who know how to draw things out. Annoy a Southerner, and we will drain away the moments of your life with our slow, detailed replies until you are nothing but a husk of your former self and that much closer to death. ↗

— Maureen Johnson

#shades-of-london #southerners #the-name-of-the-star #ya #young-adult

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

We have been told to ask about everything: Will it leave us free? ↗

— Ben Robertson

#scots-irish #southerners #freedom

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

For generations, even many otherwise decent white Southerners learned to despise black people. ↗

— Linda Chavez

#decent #despise #even #generations #learned

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

#allowed #basic #basic human rights #blacks #cruelty

Long before there was discrimination against blacks, there was discrimination against white southerners. When large numbers of these country people moved north during World War II, they were aggressively excluded from neighborhoods, jobs, and homes - not because of their skin color, but their accents. ↗

— Ann Coulter

#politics #southerners #home

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

#country #country-life #cowboys #cowgirls #life

Southerners are known for their hospitality and the foremost way of exhibiting it is through food. ↗

— Cicely Tyson

#southerners #food