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The South Quotes

Browse 33 quotes about The South.

The South Quotes

“Charlestonians had a particularly vicious and cunning game, developed after the War. They treated outsiders with so much graciousness and consideration that their politeness became a weapon. 'Visitors end up feeling as if they're wearing shoes for the first time in their lives. It's said that only the strongest ever recover from the experience. The Chinese never developed a torture to match it, although they're a very subtle people.”

KindnessMannersCharlestonThe SouthChinese Torture
Author:Alexandra Ripley
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“It seemed to me a lot of people had marrying on the mind in Louisiana. As if there was something like an unfinished sentence about a woman of 19 traveling alone. Perhaps, in the south, it was just hard to imagine that, “A woman of 19 travels alone.” was a complete sentence.”

MarriageIndependenceMarriage QuotesGender RolesIndependence QuotesIndependent WomenThe SouthGender Quotes
Book:Can't Stop the Sunrise: Adventures in Healing, Confronting Corruption & the Journey to Institutional Reform
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“She went to the window. A fine sheen of sugary frost covered everything in sight, and white smoke rose from chimneys in the valley below the resort town. The window opened to a rush of sharp early November air that would have the town in a flurry of activity, anticipating the tourists the colder weather always brought to the high mountains of North Carolina. She stuck her head out and took a deep breath. If she could eat the cold air, she would. She thought cold snaps were like cookies, like gingersnaps. In her mind they were made with white chocolate chunks and had a cool, brittle vanilla frosting. They melted like snow in her mouth, turning creamy and warm.”

MagicWinterSnowSouthernCookiesNorth CarolinaThe South
Book:The Sugar Queen
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“Men can't all think alike, and the trouble with the Southern people always has been that they won't tolerate any difference of opinion. If God Almighty had intended all men to think just alike, He might just as well have made but one man....My opinion is that the only true solution for Southern troubles is for the people to accept cordially and in good faith all the results of the war, including the reconstruction measures, the acts of Congress, negro suffrage, etc., and live up to them like men. If they would do this, and encourage Northern immigration, and treat all men fairly, whites and blacks, the troubles would soon be over, and in less than five years, the South would be in the enjoyment of greater prosperity than ever. -- JAMES LONGSTREET, Interview with correspondent from the Indianapolis Journal, September 24, 1874.”

AcceptanceIntoleranceTolerationThe SouthJames LongstreetThe Southern Mindset
Book:Longstreet: The Confederate General Who Defied the South
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“The southern states were demanding a break from the Union for the second time in the history of the country. They wanted fences and walls put up to keep the virus in the north. Some were calling it karma for the American Civil War and for the removal of certain historic statues depicting Confederate heroes of the south. To make matters worse, states in the west also wished to secede from the Union”

ChaosKarmaCivil WarAnarchyJason MedinaThe Manhattanville IncidentAn Undead NovelUnionConfederateThe South
Book:The Manhattanville Incident: An Undead Novel
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“She had seen Southern men, soft voiced and dangerous in the days before the war, reckless and hard in the last despairing days of the fighting. But in the faces of the two men who stared at each other across the candle flame so short a while ago there had been something that was different, something that heartened her but frightened her — fury which could find no words, determination which would stop at nothing. For the first time, she felt a kinship with the people about her, felt one with them in their fears, their bitterness, their determination. No, it wasn’t to be borne! The South was too beautiful a place to be let go without a struggle, too loved to be trampled by Yankees who hated Southerners enough to enjoy grinding them into the dirt, too dear a homeland to be turned over to ignorant people drunk with whisky and freedom. As she thought of Tony’s sudden entrance and swift exit, she felt herself akin to him, for she remembered the old story how her father had left Ireland, left hastily and by night, after a murder which was no murder to him or to his family. Gerald’s blood was in her, violent blood. She remembered her hot joy in shooting the marauding Yankee. Violent blood was in them all, perilously close to the surface, lurking just beneath the kindly courteous exteriors. All of them, all the men she knew, even the drowsy-eyed Ashley and fidgety old Frank, were like that underneath — murderous, violent if the need arose. Even Rhett, conscienceless scamp that he was, had killed a man for being “uppity to a lady.”

AmericaCivil WarHomelandThe SouthConfederacyGone With The WindYankee
Book:Gone with the wind
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“Why had he gone, stepping off into the dark, into the war, into a Cause that was lost, into a world that was mad? Why had he gone, Rhett who loved the pleasures of women and liquor, the comfort of good food and soft beds, the feel of fine linen and good leather, who hated the South and jeered at the fools who fought for it? Now he had set his varnished boots upon a bitter road where hunger tramped with tireless stride and wounds and weariness and heartbreak ran like yelping wolves. And the end of the road was death. He need not have gone. He was safe, rich, comfortable. But he had gone, leaving her alone in a night as black as blindness, with the Yankee Army between her and home.”

The SouthConfederacy
Book:Gone with the wind
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“There can be no discredit to a conquered people for accepting the conditions offered by their conquerors. Nor is there any occasion for a feeling of humiliation. We have made an honest, and I hope that I may say, a creditable fight, but we have lost. Let us come forward, then, and accept the ends involved in the struggle....Let us accept the terms, as we are in duty bound to do. -- JAMES LONGSTREET, Letter to New Orleans Times, March 18, 1867.”

SurrenderCivil WarThe SouthJames LongstreetPeace Terms
Book:Longstreet: The Confederate General Who Defied the South
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“As a child, I ate up the image Carl strived to portray: An inspirational rags-to-riches tale of a go-getter emerging the hell of his sulfur-scented, Podunk Texas upbringing. With a community college dropout education, Carl managed to reach six figures as a mobile home lot manager when the trailer park industry boomed in the early nineties. He decorated his accomplishments with a large house, yachts, and weekly morale shindigs for his salesmen bursting with open bars and filet mignon. However, my mother was by far his prettiest accessory.”

FeministAuthorSouthernMaggie Young QuotesMaggie YoungThe SouthJust Another NumberFeminist AuthorSouthern Childhood
Author:Magda Young
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“I keep hearing all these jokes on TV about how people in Arkansas are still barefoot hillbillies. Sure there are plenty of people living up in the hills and mountains on Arkansas. Why not? The scenery is breathtaking from their million-dollar houses up in those hills. Those people bought Wal-Mart stock early. They paid cash for those homes. -Little Rock resident on how some people from "up North" view Arkansas”

ArkansasHillbillyThe South
Book:New Times In The Old South: Or Why Scarlett's in Therapy & Tara's Going Condo
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“It’s not the sickness that Number 23 reduced me to that frightens me. It’s how long I willingly ingested it. The last time I heard Number 23’s voice, he was telling me that I had a dependency on men, that I’d made him my life raft, that the only reason I put up with him was because I was broken inside. It was the truest thing I’ve ever been told. Although it was my life’s greatest detriment, I was unconscious of it. Unconscious male dependency was the fuel to my Number 23 rebound, a rebound that sent me back to my preteen anorexia, driving me to the vulnerable weakness that sent me crawling back to The South.”

Feminist QuotesMaggie Young QuotesMaggie YoungThe SouthJust Another NumberJust Another Number QuotesMale Dependency
Book:Just Another Number
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“Lucy saw the delighted expressions of the guests and knew they looked like something out an Austen movie. Well, at least Jem did. She giggled a little and cleared her throat. “Something funny?” he murmured out of the corner of his mouth. “Just thinking how you’re just like Captain Wentworth and I’m just like Tina Turner.”

RaceJane AustenRegency EraThe South
Book:Persuasion, Captain Wentworth and Cracklin' Cornbread
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“I lived in a picture perfect subdivision with color coordinated houses and mailboxes, yellow labs prancing within the borders of invisible electric fences, and balding dads on riding lawn mowers. It was the type of community where housewives spent their summers tanning by the pool, half-heartedly watching their Ritalin pumped brat beat another brat with a foam noodle while rehashing Sunday’s Bible study between whispers of Susie’s weight gain and Dan’s canoodling with the babysitter.”

Maggie Young QuotesThe SouthJust Another NumberJust Another Number QuoteSouthern Upbringing
Book:Just Another Number
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“It was nineteen fifty seven, the Little Rock nine were escorted to school by Federal troops under the order of President Eisenhower to counteract the attempt of Arkansas Governor Faubus to prevent it. Southern racial tensions produced a supreme irony: Federal troops against the National Guard. This visible strife between state and nation was one of the evidences of the racial turmoil of the times”

Racial TensionThe South1957Sara Niles Quotes
Book:Torn From the Inside Out
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“I have myself known two southern wives who exhorted their husbands to free those slaves towards whom they stood in a "parental relation;" and their request was granted. These husbands blushed before the superior nobleness of their wives' natures. Though they had only counseled them to do that which was their duty to do, it commanded their respect, and rendered their conduct more exemplary. Concealment was at an end, and confidence took the place of distrust.”

SlaveryAmerican HistoryUs HistorySouthern WomenThe South
Book:Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself
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“As the bus headed into the night, I noticed that the bench seat in the back of the bus was vacant. So I took my blanket and pillow, made my way to the back and stretched out. Rumbling along I was vaguely aware of the stops we made, but the night passed quickly. Eventually it started getting light outside, but looking around I saw that most people were still sleeping, including a Negro woman wearing a Navy uniform. She was a WAVE and must have boarded the bus sometime during the night. I had no idea where we were, but it didn’t matter as long as we were heading west. Slowly the passengers woke up and looked around, including the young Negro lady. I never had a problem talking to people, so, striking up a conversation, I discovered that she was going home to Oklahoma City. I told her about being a cadet at Farragut and that I was now heading to California for the summer. Time always goes faster when there is someone to talk to and we had the entire back of the bus to ourselves. The first inkling that something was wrong came when we got off the bus for a rest stop in Little Rock, Arkansas. The driver told me that it wasn’t fitting to sit in the back of the bus with a Negro. I was dumbfounded, and coming from the North, I didn’t understand. I tried to explain that this woman was wearing the uniform of her country, but it didn’t make any difference. That’s just the way it was in the South! We ran into the same kind of bigotry in the diner at our next rest stop, but before I could make an issue out of it, she hushed me up and explained that she just wanted to go home and didn’t need any problems. The two of us sat in the section for “Negroes Only,” where they served her but not this white boy, which is what I was called, along with other derogatory remarks. Never mind, I shared her sandwich and I guess they were just glad to get rid of us when we boarded the bus again. Behind me, I heard someone say something about my being a “nigger lover”.... Big as life, I sat in the back again! This time no one said anything and everything seemed forgotten by the time she got off in Oklahoma City. Another driver came aboard and took over. Saying goodbye to my friend, I got up and moved back to the seat I had had originally -- the one over the big hump for the rear tires!”

BigotryAmerican HistoryThe SouthSea StoryBus Travel
Author:Captain Hank Bracker, "Seawater One...."
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“There is a certain quality of light to be found only in midsummer in the South, as day, slipping into dusk, acquiesces to the filament, the bulb, the porch light; this seductive light is beautiful when it washes across dry cement, the sidewalk and stoop. The light spilling from the phone booth softens and cleanses all that it touches. It's a forgiving and almost protective light. The Minotaur is drawn to it from across the parking lot.”

LightDuskThe SouthPhone BoothThe Minotaur
Book:The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break
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“The enemy was not the Klan but the inside-outside lock that racism and classism had on the minds of the people: It operated from the inside through self-hate and self-doubt, and from the outside through the police, carnivorous landlords, and the welfare system.”

PoliticsFreedomActivismCivil Rights MovementRacism In AmericaThe South
Book:Unfinished Agenda: Urban Politics in the Era of Black Power
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