Kentucky Quotes

“Let us have the candor to acknowledge that what we call "the economy" or "the free market" is less and less distinguishable from warfare.”
― Wendell Berry

“You’ve gone far away to a place with no horses and very little grass, and you’re studying how to write a story with a happy ending. If you can write that ending for yourself, maybe you can come back.”
― Jennifer Echols, Love Story

“I am more than just a Serious basketball fan. I am a life-long Addict. I was addicted from birth, in fact, because I was born in Kentucky.”
― Hunter S. Thompson

“The first time I managed to pick up a basketball I knew I was destined to lead the UK to another National championship. ... Even now, so many years later, I still believe Kentucky will go undefeated in March & win everything.”
― Hunter S. Thompson

“The city most believed to be the handsomest in Kentucky never failed to impress .... The streets, lined with booths and wagons from which people displayed their wares, had a festive air.”
― Jan Watson, Troublesome Creek

“Lexington wasn't a great city, like Philadelphia or New York, but around the Courthouse square, and along Main Street and Broadway, brick buildings reared two and three stories tall, and it was possible to buy almost anything: breeze-soft silks from France that came upriver from New Orleans, fine wines and cigars, pearl necklaces, and canes with ivory handles shaped like parrots or dogs'-heads or (in the case of Mary's older friend Cash Clay) scantily dressed ladies (but Cash was careful not to carry that one in company).”
― Barbara Hambly, The Emancipator's Wife: A Novel of Mary Todd Lincoln

“Lexington, Kentucky looks like paradise. Acres of grass as green and tender as a golf course putting green surround hilltop mansions. New Circle Road--a beltway enveloping the city's heartland like a moat--attempts to separate the wealthy landowners from the encroaching strip centers and fast-food joins that are symbolic of the rest of the state .... Combining the traditional feelings of Southerners with the uniquely gorgeous landscape of the bluegrass, Lexingtonians consider themselves and their region the cream of the crop--not only of Kentucky, but also of the nation.”
― Sally Denton, The Bluegrass Conspiracy

“She smiled. “I love that old song about Muhlenberg County; John Denver did it, I think.”
“Him and a dozen others. But John Prine wrote and sang the original. It’s one of our claims to fame.”
She quietly began to sing under her breath, “Daddy…won’t you take me back to Muhlenberg County…”
― James Aura, The Cumberland Killers: A Kentucky Mystery

“Living away from my native place I became more consciously Kentuckian than I was when I lived at home. This is what the experience of exile can do, change your mind, utterly transform one's perception of the world of home.”
― Bell Hooks, Belonging: A Culture of Place

“By ten o'clock, the sidewalk along Vine Street looks like the Fourth of July parade. Mama minds the cash box while Daddy and Mitch go to haul more tomatoes and peppers from the truck. The basket of beans is almost empty, so I fill it up again.”
― Paul Brett Johnson, Farmers' Market

“The longer I live here, the better satisfied I am in having pitched my earthly camp-fire, gypsylike, on the edge of a town, keeping it on one side, and the green fields, lanes, and woods on the other. Each, in turn, is to me as a magnet to the needle. At times the needle of my nature points towards the country. On that side everything is poetry. I wander over field and forest, and through me runs a glad current of feeling that is like a clear brook across the meadows of May. At others the needle veers round, and I go to town--to the massed haunts of the highest animal and cannibal.”
― James Lane Allen, A Kentucky Cardinal

“In the pleasant May of 1958, a group of pioneers, engineers, second-generation Americans, speculators, ne'er-do-wells, and visionaries known as the Chocinoe Management Group gathered by a bubbling spring in the middle fork of Lansill's Creek and talked about creating a settlement to be called Garden Springs. The next month they received a use permit from the Planning Commission of the City of Lexington, and began clear-cutting and bulldozing, in preparation for the excavation of sites where the cement foundations of this subdivision would be laid .... The building of this subdivision was part of the all-important process of Lexington's becoming The Greater Lexington Area, and I take special pride in noting that this general shift away from its tobacco-town heritage was bemoaned by scarcely anyone.”
― Johnny Payne, Kentuckiana

“Lexington is not big enough to have clubs with long lines, but at least they don't have velvet ropes.”
― Lynn Hightower, Fortunes of the Dead

“Dusk settled over our shoulders like a damp purple blanket. The river- the churn and clank of boat traffic, the shush of water, and the tangy smell of catfish and mud- was slowly beaten back by honeysuckle and cicadas and some bird that cooed the same three syllables in a lilting circle.
It was all so familiar and so foreign. I pictured a young girl in a blue cotton dress running down this same road on cinnamon-stick legs. Then I pictured another girl, white and square-jawed, running before her. Adelaide. Mother.
I would've missed it if I hadn't been looking: a narrow dirt drive crowded on either side by briars and untrimmed boughs. Even once I'd followed the track to its end I was uncertain- who would live in such a huddled, bent-back cabin, half-eaten by ivy and some sort of feral climbing rose? The wooden-shake shingles were green with moss; the barn had collapsed entirely.”
― Alix E. Harrow, The Ten Thousand Doors of January

“Kentucky, the Bluegrass State, world renowned home of the best horse-races and fine bourbons, is also a place filled with intriguing mysteries that have defied explanation since the first settlers stepped onto its fertile soil and began exploring its beautifully forested mountains and valleys.”
― Barton M. Nunnelly, Mysterious Kentucky: The History, Mystery and Unexplained of the Bluegrass State

“Change "I'm too old to start (or finish or publish) that novel" to "I'm too alive NOT to start." Sharing your words is the best way to keep on living.”
― Judalon de Bornay, Great Crossing

“I have heard that we are stupid for voting against our self interest,
and I know how hard it is to vote in my state.
I have heard that we are willfully uneducated,
and I have seen our artificially low property taxes
create our underfunded school system.
I have heard criticism from the experts,
but I have seen nothing but classism disguised
as neoliberal conjecture.
You cannot understand where I come from
if you are not also from there. I mean
that words fail
and nuance exists
and the enemy is never who we are taught to hate.”
― Belle Townsend, Push and Pull

“Gusts of snow blew in front of the car as he felt his way toward Man o' War Boulevard .... The snow-covered fields made him think of the desert. Black fences rimmed with snow created a grid against the blank, vanished ground. He saw five snow-blanketed horses huddled under a clump of trees .... He was surprised they weren't lolling on feather beds in their climate-controlled barns. Racehorses got better care than some people, he thought.”
― Bobbie Ann Mason, Zigzagging Down Wild Trail

“Surely slavery was not tolerated in Kentucky, surely not in Lexington, which the captain so often called the Beautiful City. Everything would be different once they arrived in paradise. There'd be neither black nor white--there'd be people. Cynthia had been neither schooled nor conditioned for prejudice.”
― David Dick, The Scourges of Heaven: A Novel

“As far as my part in it is concerned, it began one night in the fall of 1956 in Lexington, Kentucky, when I walked into the Zebra Bar--a musty, murky coal-hole of a place across Short Street from the Drake Hotel (IF YOU DUCK THE DRAKE YOUR A GOOSE!! read the peeling roadside billboard out on the edge of town)--walked in under a marquee that did, sure enough, declare the presence inside of one 'Little Enis,' and came upon this amazing little stud stomping around atop the bar, flailing away at one of those enormous old electric guitars that looked like an Oldsmobile in drag--left-handed!”
― Ed McClanahan, Famous People I Have Known

“Holland surrendered to the Nazis. Belgium surrendered to the Nazis. The Germans marched into Paris. None of these catastrophes managed to shake the general feeling that war in Europe was not in Martin's business. A peacetime draft got the town's attention.”
― Michelle Slatalla, The Town on Beaver Creek: The Story of a Lost Kentucky Community

“The ground had opened up and spit out hell, Nell thought, and the detritus was Shiloh.”
― Kelsey Brickl, Hardtack: A Civil War Story

“Now you must step up to fulfill the obligations of the great social contract of the United States of America and the world. God has blessed you to be lucky enough to be born where you were at the time you were. You were given a great loan at birth now you must pay it back. Every day you wake up in the USA, every time you breathe clean Kentucky air, every night you go to sleep safe and with a full stomach; your debt to the world grows. It may seem hopeless to try and repay an unending debt, but it is your effort that will make all the difference.”
― Zachariah Renfro

“I glanced down at the tattered, bloodstained marriage license. Numb, I pulled myself atop the wagon. There was nothing more to be said. The sheriff, God and Kentucky had said it for me. It had been foolish to dream. I snapped the reins. Dreams were for books.”
― Kim Michele Richardson, The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek

“If you don't know what a hot brown is, let me just put it this way: it takes the perfection of bread, turkey, and bacon, and then sends it all into a different dimension with a Mornay sauce worth trading your waistline for.”
― Bethany Turner, Hadley Beckett's Next Dish

“Nebraska. Seriously? What demon would choose to live in Nebraska of all places?"

"You've got to be kidding me," Micah mutters when he reads the address over my shoulder. "Don't they marry cousins there?"

Shaking my head, I say, "No, that's Kentucky. I don't know if they do anything in Nebraska.”
― Rory Miles, Tainted Power - The Complete Series

“I come from a line of people
who could not discern their exploitation
from someone else’s:
people who will always stop for the car that is pulled over to the side of the road,
but participate in a culture
curated by a ruling class
that individualizes
and disconnects
the marginalized.”
― Belle Townsend, Push and Pull

“My home is full of targets,
and they have been hit. Over and over and over.
Meanwhile, the bullseyes sit in penthouses and mansions,
unaffected, watching us
scramble over the arrows.”
― Belle Townsend, Push and Pull

“And when I moved back to Kentucky,

I forgot about waving to other drivers.
I forgot about taking that one second to acknowledge
who you are sharing a road with.
I forgot about how much
all of us want
so terribly
to be together.”
― Belle Townsend

“Funny how a person hung on to things that weren't of no use at all but then those were the things that pierced the soul when a body lost them.”
― Ann H Gabhart