"Louisiana in September was like an obscene phone call from nature. The air - moist, sultry, secretive, and far from fresh - felt as if it were being exhaled into one's face. Sometimes it even sounded like heavy breathing."
— Tom Robbins (Jitterbug Perfume)

"He tried to name which of the deadly seven might apply, and when he failed he decided to append an eighth, regret."
— Charles Frazier (Cold Mountain)

"Walking the streets of Charleston in the late afternoons of August was like walking through gauze or inhaling damaged silk."
— Pat Conroy

"You can say a lot of bad things about Alabama, but you can't say that Alabamans as a people are duly afraid of deep fryers."
— John Green (Looking for Alaska)

"Everyone in the South has no time for reading because they are all too busy writing."
— William Faulkner

"Maycomb was a tired old town, even in 1932 when I first knew it. Somehow, it was hotter then. Men's stiff collars wilted by nine in the morning. Ladies bathed before noon after their three o'clock naps. And by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frosting from sweating and sweet talcum. The day was twenty-four hours long, but it seemed longer. There's no hurry, for there's nowhere to go and nothing to buy...and no money to buy it with."
— Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird)

"It was always so hot, and everyone was so polite, and everything was all surface but underneath it was like a bomb waiting to go off. I always felt that way about the South, that beneath the smiles and southern hospitality and politeness were a lot of guns and liquor and secrets."
— James McBride (The Color of Water 10th Anniversary Edition)

"We learn from history that we don't learn from history!"
— Desmond Tutu

"Could you just imagine? If every suicide rose--think of Faulkner's Quentin Compson as a vampire. I don't hate the South I don't I don't. She wondered how they'd have worked it out in Cambridge when Quentin threw himself off the Andersen bridge into the Charles amid the odor of the honeysuckle, not the beer, sweat, rum, and tainted magnolias of this city, precariously beneath the level of the water. The Compson blood had thinned out; at least this way, he's restore it after a fashion."
— Susan Shwartz (Carpetbagger)

"“Have you heard of the illness hysteria siberiana?...I read this somewhere a long time ago...it affects farmers living in Siberia. Try to imagine this. You’re a farmer, living all alone on the Siberian tundra. Day after day you plough your fields. As far as the eye can see, nothing. To the north, the horizon, to the east, the horizon, to the south, to the west, more of the same. Every morning, when the sun rises in the east, you go out to work in your fields. When it’s directly overhead, you take a break for lunch. When it sinks in the west, you go home to sleep...In the winter they stay at home and do indoor work. When spring comes, they go out into the fields again. You’re that farmer. Imagine it...And then one day something inside you dies...Day after day you watch the sun rise in the east, pass across the sky, then sink in the west, and something breaks inside you and dies...You begin walking toward the west. Heading toward a land that lies west of the sun. Like someone possessed, you walk on, day after day, not eating or drinking, until you collapse on the ground and die. That’s hysteria siberiana.”"
— Haruki Murakami

"She was so Southern that she cried tears that came straight from the Mississippi."
— Sarah Addison Allen

"All over Atlanta that fall, in the blue twilights, girls came clicking home from their jobs in their clunky heels and miniskirts and opened their apartment windows to the winesap air, and got out ice cubes, and put on Petula Clark singing 'Downtown', and sat down to wait.

Soon the young men would come, drifting out of their bachelor apartments in Bermuda shorts and Topsiders, carrying beers and gin and tonics, looking for a refill and a a date and the keeping of promises that hung in the bronze air like fruit on the eve of ripeness."
— Anne Rivers Siddons (Downtown)

"Carolina beach music," Dupree said, coming up on the porch. "The holiest sound on earth."
— Pat Conroy (Beach Music)

"I think it is safe to say that while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted."
— Flannery O'Connor

"So I sit there kicked my heels, thinking about New Orleans, and watching a morbid blue-bottle fly attempt to commit suicide by butting his head against the windowpane."
— Thomas Bailey Aldrich (The Story of a Bad Boy)

"'How will I ever get out of this labyrinth!'"
— Garcia Marquez

"I'm not into labels."
— Ashley Davies

""I go out on the side of a hill, maybe hunting deer, and sit there and see the shadow of night coming over the hill, and I can swear to you there is a part of me that is absolutely untouched by anything civilized. There's a part of me that has never heard of a telephone.""
— James Dickey

"There's also way too much religion in the South to be consistent with good mental health.

Still, I love traveling down there, especially when I'm in the mood for a quick trip to the thirteenth century. I'm not someone who buys into all that 'New South' shit you hear; I judge a place by the number of lynchings they've had, overall."
— George Carlin (Brain Droppings)

"“Anathema didn’t only believe in ley-lines, but in seals, whales, bicycles, rain forests, whole grain in loaves, recycled paper, white South Africans out of South Africa, and Americans out of practically everywhere down to and including Long Island.”"
— Terry Prachett & Neil Gaiman

"South Carolina is too small for a republic, and too large for a mental asylum."
— James Pettigrew

"It was easy not to like the other foreigners. I wondered how I'd fallen in with such a band of freaks. There were so many odd, wandering types--a host of bent Australians, warped British, tainted Canadians, tormented runaway Americans. (I considered myself fairly well balanced among this cast, but then look what became of me.) I'd expected it to a certain degree, but I was still surprised. Most of them seemed like misfits. Only a few content. But all of us found teaching work with astounding ease. It didn't matter that, on the whole, we were ragged and suspect because the demand for English in Korea was so great that almost anyone was accepted."
— Cullen Thomas (Brother One Cell: An American Coming of Age in South Korea's Prisons)

"Fincher was the kind of Southerner who will try to address you through a web of deep and antic southernness, and who assumes every body in earshot knows all about his parents and history and wants to hear an update about them at every opportunity. He looks young, but still manages to act 65."
— Richard Ford (The Sportswriter)

"Do I go for the whole, I'm so hot I slept with your girlfriend look, or I'm innocent but I want to bad?"
— Ashley Davies

"It's, umm... art?"
— Spencer

"Triple word score, herpes!"
— Ashley Davies

"Hello, little miss I like girls."
— Ashley Davies

"Discovering this idyllic place, we find ourselves filled with a yearning to linger here, where time stands still and beauty overwhelms."
— Unknown

"The Pacific, greatest of oceans, has an area exceeding that of all dry land on the planet. Herman Melville called it "the tide-beating heart of earth." Covering more than a third of the planet's surface--as much as the Atlantic, Indian, and Arctic oceans combined--it's the largest geographical feature in the world. Its awesome 165,384,000 square km (up to 16,000 km wide and 11,000 km long) have an average depth of around 4,000 meters. Half the world's liquid water is stored here. You could drop the entire dry landmass of our planet into the Pacific and still have room for another continent the size of Asia. One theory claims the moon may have been flung from the Pacific while the world was still young."
— David Stanley (Moon Handbooks South Pacific)

"People who swear on the old Southern traditions don't know what the hell they are. I think of boll weevils and hook worms. [Look Magazine interview 25 April 1961] "
— William B. Hartsfield

"Summer in the deep South is not only a season, a climate, it's a dimension. Floating in it, one must be either proud or submerged."
— Eugene Walter (The Untidy Pilgrim)

"She said that it was a mistake to have made as few superficial friends as I have done in my life, and to have concentrated only on the few things I have concentrated on--her, for one. My children, for another. Sportswriting and being an ordinary citizen. This did not leave me well enough armored for the unexpected, was her opinion. She said this was because I didn't know my parents very well, had gone to a military school, and grown up in the south, which was full of betrayers and secret-keepers and untrustworthy people, which I agree is true, though I never knew any of them."
— Richard Ford (The Sportswriter)