North Quotes

“A cold wind was blowing from the north, and it made the trees rustle like living things.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones

“Every culture has its southerners -- people who work as little as they can, preferring to dance, drink, sing brawl, kill their unfaithful spouses; who have livelier gestures, more lustrous eyes, more colorful garments, more fancifully decorated vehicles, a wonderful sense of rhythm, and charm, charm, charm; unambitious, no, lazy, ignorant, superstitious, uninhibited people, never on time, conspicuously poorer (how could it be otherwise, say the northerners); who for all their poverty and squalor lead enviable lives -- envied, that is, by work-driven, sensually inhibted, less corruptly governed northerners. We are superior to them, say the northerners, clearly superior. We do not shirk our duties or tell lies as a matter of course, we work hard, we are punctual, we keep reliable accounts. But they have more fun than we do ... They caution[ed] themselves as people do who know they are part of a superior culture: we mustn't let ourselves go, mustn't descend to the level of the ... jungle, street, bush, bog, hills, outback (take your pick). For if you start dancing on tables, fanning yourself, feeling sleepy when you pick up a book, developing a sense of rhythm, making love whenever you feel like it -- then you know. The south has got you.”
― Susan Sontag, The Volcano Lover

“Once upon a time, the Reindeer took a running leap and jumped over the Northern Lights.

But he jumped too low, and the long fur of his beautiful flowing tail got singed by the rainbow fires of the aurora.

To this day the reindeer has no tail to speak of. But he is too busy pulling the Important Sleigh to notice what is lost. And he certainly doesn’t complain.

What's your excuse?”
― Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration

“Let whoever wants to, relax in the south,
And bask in the garden of paradise.
Here is the essence of north—and it's autumn
I've chosen as this year's friend.”
― Anna Akhmatova, The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova

“The ranks opened covertly to avoid the corpse. The invulnerable dead man forced a way for himself. The youth looked keenly at the ashen face. The wind raised the tawny beard. It moved as if a hand were stroking it. He vaguely desired to walk around and around the body and stare; the impulse of the living to try to read in dead eyes the answer to the Question.”
― Stephen Crane - The Red Badget of Courage

“In the South of England northerners were regarded then as uncouth, brutish, undisciplined savages ...”
― Alison Weir, The Princes in the Tower

“The USA demanding that North Korea halt its nuclear program is akin to the fox demanding that the hens open their coup.”
― Steven Magee

“Birmingham has proved that no matter what you're up against, if wave after wave of black people keep coming prepared to go to jail, sooner or later there is such confusion, such social dislocation, that white people in the South are faced with a choice: either integrated restaurants or no restaurants at all, integrated public facilities or none at all. And the South then must make its choice for integration, for it would rather have that than chaos.

This struggle is only beginning in the North, but it will be a bitter struggle. It will be an attack on business, on trade unions, and on the government. The Negro will no longer tolerate a situation where for every white man unemployed there are two or three Negroes unemployed. In the North, Negroes present a growing threat to the social order that, less brutally and more subtly than the South, attempts to keep him "in his place." In response, moderates today warn of the danger of violence and "extremism" but do not attempt to change conditions that brutalize the Negro and breed racial conflict. What is needed is an ongoing massive assault on racist political power and institutions.”
― Bayard Rustin, Down The Line

“The rest of the world points an angry finger at the South. The rest of the world sees the cinders only in the eyes of southerners. The rest of the world refuses to see the soot in its own eyes.

The South, in attitude and in effect, is probably not much worse than the North--only in degree and display. It's simply that the South has always been honest about its hatred and its prejudice. Northern intolerance has been subtle, therefore more pernicious and snaring.”
― Eddy L. Harris, South of Haunted Dreams: A Memoir

“With thousands of years of history frozen in time, it's no wonder that many southerners like me romanticize the north as a place where we can freeze our former selves, thaw, and then bloom anew. Here it’s just you, the land, and your thoughts, and you can't leave until you've wrestled with yourself and emerged a survivor. But then again, the light is much more intense up here and everything looks different because of it. The sun hasn’t set in a couple of months, and you can see things much more clearly when it is light all of the time.”
― Shannon M Mullen, See What Flowers

“To the North of my soul.
To the South of my existence.”
― Talismanist Giebra, Talismanist: Fragments of the Ancient Fire. Philosophy of Fragmentism Series.

“There was not, after all, a great difference between the world of the North and that of the South which she had fled; there was only this difference: the North promised more. And this similarity: what it promised it did not give, and what it gave, at length and grudgingly with one hand, it took back with the other. Now she understood in this nervous, hollow, ringing city, that nervousness of Richard's which had so attracted her—a tension so total, and so without the hope, or possibility of release, or resolution, that she felt it in his muscles, and heard it in his breathing, even as on her breast he fell asleep.”
― James Baldwin

“The most dangerous thing to the USA population is not North Korea, it is the USA government.”
― Steven Magee

“I felt entangled now: this March, this South, this war, history. History could not possibly let the South get away with slavery; history would not possibly let us get away with what we were doing to the South. Somehow or other, we'd both have to pay.”
― Cynthia Bass, Sherman's March

“Western corporate governments are far more likely to damage your health or kill you prematurely than anyone from North Korea.”
― Steven Magee

“I am far more fearful of the police than I am of North Korea.”
― Steven Magee

“I am far more fearful of the USA government than I am of North Korea.”
― Steven Magee

“I do not know if he had a name, but I called him North, an appellation I think Beck would have approved of, for it was the name the Dutch called the Hudson River when they first came here, when men set to changing the world in their image, and gave all the wild things their own names.”
― Alice Hoffman

“Your enemy is not in North Korea or Syria, it is your own corporate controlled government.”
― Steven Magee

“North Mississippi Party rentals proudly serves Corinth, New Albany, Oxford and Tupelo, MS and the surrounding areas. We provide bounce house rentals and more. We also rent water slides, casino gaming tables, tents for events and weddings, table and chair rentals, mechanical bull rentals, fun inflatables, cotton candy machines, concession rentals and more for backyard birthday parties, school functions, church picnics, corporate events and more.”
― North Mississippi Party Rentals

“As an Independent Medicare supplement agency, we search the entire Market for the right North Carolina Medicare supplement plan to fit both your needs and budget. We do not work for an insurance company, we work for you.”
― Medicare Supplement Plans North Carolina

“Aryan Driving School has one mission and that is to make safe drive for every student. we will keep the safer drivers courses and leassons simple to help you learn in a calm at carlingford.”
― Casra Aryan

“The Island of Hawaii has a very strange property market. In the north you will find some of the most expensive homes in the USA and in the south they among the cheapest.”
― Steven Magee

“The north smells different from the city: clearer, thinner. You can see farther. A sawmill, a hill of sawdust, the teepee shape of a sawdust burner; the smokestacks of the copper smelters, the rocks around them bare of trees, burnt-looking, the heaps of blackened slag: I’ve forgotten about these things all winter, but here they are again, and when I see them I remember them, I know them, I greet them as if they are home.”
― Margaret Atwood, Cat's Eye

“A compass calibrated by my greed is a rather shrewd way to legitimize my agenda. However, true north on a compass such as this is a straight line to the edge of a really big cliff.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough

“During the second half of the sixties, the center of the crisis shifted to the sprawling ghettos of the North. Here black experience was radically different from that in the South. The stability of institutional relationships was largely absent in Northern ghettos, especially among the poor. Over twenty years ago, the black sociologist E. Franklin Frazier was able to see the brutalizing effect of urbanization upon lower class blacks : ". . . The bonds of sympathy and community of interests that held their parents together in the rural environment have been unable to withstand the disintegrating forces in the city." Southern blacks migrated North in search of work, seeking to become transformed from a peasantry into a working class. But instead of jobs they found only misery, and far from becoming a proletariat, they came to constitute a lumpenproletariat, an underclass of rejected people. Frazier's prophetic words resound today with terrifying precision: ". . . As long as the bankrupt system of Southern agriculture exists, Negro families will continue to seek a living in the towns and cities of the country. They will crowd the slum areas of Southern cities or make their way to Northern cities, where their family life will become disrupted and their poverty will force them to depend upon charity."

Out of such conditions, social protest was to emerge in a form peculiar to the ghetto, a form which could never have taken root in the South except in such large cities as Atlanta or Houston. The evils in the North are not easy to understand and fight against, or at least not as easy as Jim Crow, and this has given the protest from the ghetto a special edge of frustration. There are few specific injustices, such as a segregated lunch counter, that offer both a clear object of protest and a good chance of victory. Indeed, the problem in the North is not one of social injustice so much as the results of institutional pathology. Each of the various institutions touching the lives of urban blacks—those relating to education, health, employment, housing, and crime—is in need of drastic reform. One might say that the Northern race problem has in good part become simply the problem of the American city—which is gradually becoming a reservation for the unwanted, most of whom are black.”
― Bayard Rustin, Down The Line

“She also said that Esmenda Jenkins Dube
would have wanted a northern life,
as far north as north can be, limits of north
where it was so cold nothing there understood hellfire,
and the mountains were white, like full-hipped women
sleeping undisturbed, women of the cold clouds
breathing out more cold clouds that departed their mouths
when they whispered heaven in their northern dreams.”
― Thylias Moss, Slave Moth: A Narrative in Verse

“But I do earnestly desire to arouse the women of the North to a realizing sense of the condition of two millions of women at the South, still in bondage, suffering what I suffered, and most of them far worse. I want to add my testimony to that of abler pens to convince the people of the Free States what Slavery really is. Only by experience can any one realize how deep, and dark, and foul is that pit of abominations.”
― Harriet Ann Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

“The conjunction of the ' straightest', most austere product of the Northern hemisphere - the presbyterian, the Anglo-Saxon, the quintessential hyperborean, in his pride and his theology - and the most primitive, regressive, impotent and also the most unselfconscious element that the Antipodes concealed under the sun: the Aboriginals. The clash resulted in the quasi-total extermination of the Antipodean, but the Southern hemisphere has not perhaps pronounced its last word yet.

The Aboriginals were certainly had. They were led to claim for themselves stretches of land which in the days when they had been left alone they had roamed through as nomads with never a thought of ownership. Their claim was directed towards an object they had never possessed and which they would have thought it contemptible and sacrilegious to possess. Typical Western cunning. In return they have palmed off an even deadlier virus on to us - the virus of origins.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories

“...Don't tell me ofays don't own the world."

"That doesn't necessarily mean they are going to keep it forever," I said, competing with the music on the juke box and the noise at the bar. "The colonial system is bound to come to an end."

"When?" asked Simple.

"Before long. The British Empire is on its last legs. The Dutch haven't got much left."

"But the crackers still have Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama, and Washington, D.C.," said Simple.

"I admit that, but when we start voting in greater numbers down South, and using the ballot as we ought to up North, they won't be as strong as they might have been.”
― Langston Hughes, The Return of Simple