Southerners

Conversation in New York is hurled stones. In the South, it’s moonshine passed slowly to all who care to lift the bottle. –Roy Reed

Southern women hold you up to this thing, which, you know, is your basic male standard. Which is, you gotta be willing to die for things. … Southern women understand male pride. Unlike Yankee women, they want you to have some. –Henry Allen

Remember, there have been only two perfect men in history. One died on the cross for us 2000 years ago, and the other surrendered at Appomattox Court House in April, 1865.

It’s dangerous to practice ordinary courtesy on a Yankee—he’ll think you’re hot for him and follow you home. –Florence King

While it is probably true that a Southern woman will take more bullcrap from her man than other women it’s my impression (based on actual Southern women I know) that she will finally reach a breaking point, and when she does it will be more spectacular than the breaking point of other women. She will bean her man with a frying pan, shoot him point-blank with a pearl-handled revolver, or wait for him in her car, motor running, so that when she catches sight of him backing out of his girlfriend’s driveway she can roar down the street and broadside him at full speed. I consider this breaking-point violence to be a positive trait. Southern women give their men plenty of slack, but it is the fear of that awful breaking point that keeps some of their menfolk in line, some of the time. –John Berendt

As a Southern woman I was taught two things. Never call attention to yourself, and never make anybody uncomfortable. That was the Southern credo. –Sue Grafton

(sayings) Some people, you couldn’t please ‘em if you hung ‘em with new rope.

Yesterday won’t be over till Tomorrow and Tomorrow began ten thousand years ago. –William Faulkner (He also wrote, “[T]he past is never dead. It isn’t even past.”)

I have some theories about southern culture -- I'm entitled to have them, and even express them, whether you like it or not. This is a region that was miserably poor until very recently. All the material progress, the new wealth of the Sunbelt, has been acquired rapidly over the last thirty years or so, and it has been delivered in the form of corporate products: tilt-up buildings, hamburgers, Ford pickup trucks, manufactured "homes," and cornucopia chain stores overflowing with plastic goodies. Building all this stuff and hitching employment rides with these ventures has dragged the cracker class out of the extremest poverty. Nearly universal air conditioning has also changed the picture, giving folks a reason to make an effort to do anything after the sun rises above the windowsills.
The reason their authentic down-home eateries are so bad is because for two hundred years they had a miserable diet of cornmeal, sugar, and pork fat, and a miserable concept of cuisine for presenting it. The reason the decor is so bad is because until fairly recently they lined the walls of their houses with newspapers and sat on benches. Electricity from the TVA also arrived relatively late in the game, and the finer points of interior illumination have not yet developed there. A restaurant dining room in Georgia is lighted the same way as a used car lot. –James Howard Kunstleer

Dear hearts, gathered here to rejoice in the glorious Southland. Joy to the world! The South has always been the South. And I believe the only reason that folks live in the north is because they have jobs up there. –Brother Dave Gardner

A lot of people leave Arkansas and most of them come back sooner or later.
They can’t achieve escape velocity. –Charles Portis

The South, like the United Kingdom, produces more history than can be consumed locally.

A woman checking IDs at the airport saw me coming the other day and said, "Good morning, sunshine." She didn't know me from Adam. She glanced at my driver's license and said, "Have a good flight, darling." This was in the South, of course -- in Austin, Texas, to be exact. Northern women would no sooner address a strange man as Sunshine than they would ask if you wanted to see their underwear. But that woman's Sunshine shone on me for the rest of the day, and a week later I still remember it. --Garrison Keillor

The South has suffered from excessive criticism from the outside and from insufficient criticism from the inside. –William C. Harvard

I heard people at gospel concerts call eyeglasses “helpers” and a gravel road “a dirty road,” and I heard an infant called a “lap baby,” and a gun called “a persuader,” and dying called “making it over,” and an embarrassed person described as “wanting to swallow his teeth,” and a dead person described as someone who was “having his mail delivered to him by groundhogs.”

The Mississippi Delta begins in the lobby of Peabody Hotel in Memphis and ends on Catfish Row in Vicksburg. –David Cohn

Don’t ever trust a man with a southern accent unless he’s black. –Ernest Hemingway

The only doctor in a town of 2,300, Campbell treats patients in one part of his office and arranges burials in another, taking pains not to mix the two. "This is the South," he joked. "We used to have a place here that sold tombstones and fireworks." --Steve Chawkins

… the folk theater of the Southern Courtroom. –Dunne, “Hugo Black and the Judicial Revolution”

North Carolina is a vale of humility between two mountains of conceit (Virginia and South Carolina). –Will Blythe

You get off the tracks when the Southern Express comes through. –Flannery O’Connor (warning writers to avoid Southernesque Faulknerisms)

He has the Southern accent that my ex-wife called, I didn’t screw the goat but I thought about it. Almost everybody in North Georgia talks like that … --Melanie Sumner