Southerner Quotes

1. "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."
Author: Aberjhani

2. "We southerners worship our ancestors."
Author: Amanda Stevens

3. "Three days a week she helped at the Manor Nursing Home, where people proved their keenness by reciting received analyses of current events. All the Manor residents watched television day and night, informed to the eyeballs like everyone else and rushed for time, toward what end no one asked. Their cupidity and self-love were no worse than anyone else's, but their many experiences' having taught them so little irked Lou. One hated tourists, another southerners; another despised immigrants. Even dying, they still held themselves in highest regard. Lou would have to watch herself. For this way of thinking began to look like human nature--as if each person of two or three billion would spend his last vital drop to sustain his self-importance."
Author: Annie Dillard

4. "They couldn't close out the whole world, maybe, but they could sure find something on their TV or radio to put scientists or foreigners or whatever they thought he was in a bad light. Truly, they were no better than the city people always looking down on southerners ... If people played their channels right, they could be spared from disagreement for the length of their natural lives. Finally she got it. The need for so many channels."
Author: Barbara Kingsolver

5. "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."
Author: Ben Robertson

6. "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."
Author: Benjamin E. Mays

7. "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."
Author: Bernard Goldberg

8. "Murdering anything is just plain criminal, but a Southerner murdering a magnolia? Well, that's an unforgivable sacrilege against nautre and the South."
Author: Beth Hoffman

9. "Babcock knew no Southerners personally but he had seen them in court often enough...and Ed's manner and appearance said Dixie to him. He imagined Ed at home with his family, a big one, from old geezers to toddlers. He saw them eating their yams and pralines and playing their fiddles and dancing their jigs and guffawing over coarse jokes and beating one another to death with agricultural implements."
Author: Charles Portis

10. "King thought he understood the white Southerner, having been born and reared in Georgia and trained a theologian."
Author: Constance Baker Motley

11. "Nobody used the minute hand. And Southerners were suspicious of Yankees who did."
Author: D.D. Scott

12. "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."
Author: Doris Kearns Goodwin

13. "Basically there is no difference between whites and blacks, browns and yellows. I decided to think no more of people as Northerners and Southerners."
Author: Ethel Waters

14. "Southerners love a good tale. They are born reciters, great memory retainers, diary keepers, letter exchangers . . . great talkers."
Author: Eudora Welty

15. "The Southerner is usually tolerant of those weaknesses that proceed from innocence."
Author: Flannery O'Connor

16. "Southerners make good novelists: they have so many stories because they have so much family."
Author: Gore Vidal

17. "What white Southerners called "redemption" and others deemed simply the return to power of the Democrats, who sufficiently intimidated, cheated and otherwise discouraged Republicans, including most of the freedmen, that they counted for little in Southern politics. With any Democratic presidential nominee guaranteed the South, any Republican had to perform overwhelmingly in the North."
Author: H.W. Brands

18. "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."
Author: Harper Lee

19. "You said,' Camille protested, 'that when you wanted to get on terms with Gabrielle you cultivated her mother. It's true, everybody saw you doing it, boasting in Italian and rolling your eyes and doing your tempestuous southerner impersonation."
Author: Hilary Mantel

20. "Southerners are also like ethnic groups in that they have a sense of group identity."
Author: John Shelton Reed

21. "Southerners smile more than other Americans."
Author: John Shelton Reed

22. "But I still do believe that there are useful things to say about Elvis Presley, including what his own ordinariness as a poor Southerner says about 20th-century hero-making."
Author: John Shelton Reed

23. "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."
Author: John Shelton Reed

24. "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."
Author: John Shelton Reed

25. "As a southerner born after the epic events of the civil rights movement, I've always wondered how on earth people of good will could have conceivably lived with Jim Crow - with the daily degradations, the lynchings in plain sight, and, as the movement gathered force, with the fire hoses and the police dogs and the billy clubs."
Author: Jon Meacham

26. "I am a southerner who grew up with and around guns. I own some still. My father gave me a .22 rifle when I was 9 and a single barrel .410 shotgun when I was 10."
Author: Jon Meacham

27. "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."
Author: Katherine Allred

28. "Though Anne was born in Alabama and schooled in Mississippi, she had traveled North, and, like many Southerners, gained a theoretical understanding of the concept of cold. But the mind is an overprotective parent. What it doesn't care for, it hides. Like many inhabiting the subtropics, Anne had repressed the reality of subzero mercury."
Author: Kathy Reichs

29. "I'm a Southerner. We dream of having the family and the kids, and the parents want grandkids, that's all they care about, give me some grandbabies."
Author: Lance Bass

30. "For generations, even many otherwise decent white Southerners learned to despise black people."
Author: Linda Chavez

31. "She wondered for one traitorous second what it would be like to kiss a man without a tickling mustache. You should be ashamed, Lucy Caldwell! she berated herself instantly. "Anything you like in particular?" Heath inquired lazily.Suddenly she wasn't afraid of him anymore. "You look like any ordinary overgrown Southerner, as far as I can see.""They do grow us taller down South. You scrawny New Englanders spend too much time indoors, and the Lord knows you don't eat well-""We most certainly do!"
Author: Lisa Kleypas

32. "I've..never married a Southerner before," came the apologetic answer, which suddenly infuriated Lucy.For heaven' sake, why did everyone keep saying southerner as if she were marrying some different species of man?"That's all right," Lucy said acidly. "I assume they use the same vows as we do, Reverend, even if they don't pronounce the words right."
Author: Lisa Kleypas

33. "They all watched in silence as the tall Southerner strode towards the doorway. George Peabody,a hot-headed boy who couldn't resist making one remark from the safety of the corner, muttered an insult under his breath.Heath stopped and turned around, giving him a measuring glance, but before he could make a reply, Lucy rounded fiercely on the boy. "George Peabody, you button your mouth!""He'd better see to his breeches first," Heath said, and touched the brim of his hat respectfully to Lucy before slipping out the door.Automatically they all looked at George's trousers, discovering that one of the buttons did indeed need to be fastened. The tension broke, and as the flushed boy spun around to restore his injured dignity, they all chuckled. Even Daniel had to smile. "Impudent Reb," he said ruefully, and no one disagreed."
Author: Lisa Kleypas

34. "In the end what will happen will be what has happened whenever acivilization breaks up. The people who have brains and couragecome through and the ones who haven't are winnowed out. At least,it has been interesting, if not comfortable, to witness aGotterdammerung.''A what?''A dusk of the gods. Unfortunately, we Southerners did think wewere gods."
Author: Margaret Mitchell

35. "Southerners can never resist a losing cause."
Author: Margaret Mitchell

36. "[Yankees] are pretty much like southerners except with worse manners, of course, and terrible accents."
Author: Margaret Mitchell

37. "A little present from my run-in with a sword. Or should I say from when the sword had a run-in with me?" His eyes lit up."Want to see the scar? It's cool." He started pulling his shirt out of his pants."Janco," Ari warned. "We're not supposed to be fraternizing with the Sitians.""But she's not Sitian. Right, Yelena? You haven't gone south on us, have you?" Janco's voice held mock horror."Because if you have I can't give you your present."I took my switchblade out, showing the inscription to Janco. "What about ‘Sieges weathered, fight together, friends forever'? Does that change if I become an official southerner?"Janco rubbed the hair on his chin, considering. "No," Ari said. "You could change into a goat and it would still apply."
Author: Maria V. Snyder

38. "In the North, he discoverd, courtesy was considered a barometer of genuine esteem; for any decently brought up Southerner, good manners were simply habitual."
Author: Mary Doria Russell

39. "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."
Author: Maureen Johnson

40. "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."
Author: Nancy Werlin

41. "In every southerner, beneath the veneer of clichés lies a much deeper motherlode of cliché. But even cliché is overlaid with enormous power when a child is involved."
Author: Pat Conroy

42. "Southerners have never been afraid of seasoning. It's kind of the other way around; our seasoning is afraid of us."
Author: Paula Deen

43. "I am proud to be a Southerner. I think Southern hospitality is very... I don't think it's just a term. I think it really exists. You can come to Savannah, and the people are so sweet and so nice."
Author: Paula Deen

44. "Many Americans would die naked in the middle of the road before they'd tell you what's hurt them most. But a born Southerner will show you the cell in their heart that burns the hardest. They'll hold it out to you in their bare right hand."
Author: Reynolds Price

45. "Andrew Johnson was a Southerner generally who proclaimed that his native state of Tennessee was a country for white men."
Author: Stephen Ambrose

46. "Shadwell hated all southerners and, by inference, was standing at the North Pole."
Author: Terry Pratchett

47. "Jerusalem was capital of southern Israel, known then as Judah. Isn't it true that there's always a rivalry between north and south? North and South Korea, North and South Vietnam, Northern and Southern Ireland, Yankees and Rebels, uptown and downtown. Somebody please tell me why that is? Maybe southerners get too much sun, like Mr. Sock over there, frying his threads, and northerners don't get enough (although I hardly think northern Israel a cool spot in the shade), but southern peoples--tropical and downtown types--always seem to lean toward decadence, whereas uptown, in the north, progress is favored. Decadence and progress obviously are at odds."
Author: Tom Robbins

48. "Nobody but a Southerner knows the wrenching rinsing sadness of the cities of the North."
Author: Walker Percy

49. "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."
Author: William Faulkner

50. "The speech fascinated him. His ear caught the rhythm of it and he noted their idioms and worked some of them into his patter. He had found the reason behind the peculiar, drawling language of the old carny hands—it was a composite of all the sprawling regions of the country. A language which sounded Southern to Southerners, Western to Westerners. It was the talk of the soil and its drawl covered the agility of the brains that poured it out. It was a soothing, illiterate, earthy language."
Author: William Lindsay Gresham

Southerner Quotes Pictures