Southern Culture Quotes

“James Ed’s statistics even made me feel guilty,” a businessman said. “Let’s make him a millionaire.”
― Shafter Bailey, James Ed Hoskins and the One-Room Schoolhouse: The Unprosecuted Crime Against Children

“Never let it be said that dialect is a reflection of intellect.
On the contrary, it is a reflection of the deep traditional values of a culture that respects family, God, and a
language system above everything else. I give thanks to my maker that I’m a Southern woman.”
― Patricia H. Graham

“I loved the land that surrounded me but hated the history that haunted that land.”
― Mark Kemp, Dixie Lullaby: A Story of Music, Race, and New Beginnings in a New South

“Those faces on Main Street shaded by wide straw hats are surrounded in my child-memory by hardware and ploughs, seed bags and bales of cotton, the smell of guano and mule lots, hot sun on sidewalks and lovely white ladies with sweet childlike voices and smooth childlike faces, and Old gardens of boxwood and camellias, and fields endlessly curving around my small world. I know now that the bitterness, the cruel sensual lips, the quick fears in hard eyes, the sashshaying buttocks of brown girls, the thin childish voices of white women, had a great deal to do with high interest at the bank and low wages in the mills and gullied fields and lynchings and Ku Klux Klan and segregation and sacred womanhood and revivals, and Prohibition. And that no part of this memory can be understood without recalling it all of it.”
― Lillian Smith

“I refuse to believe that Southern pride stems from the pain we’ve inflicted on others. Southern pride comes from what we’ve built together. In our music and art and innovation.

In the people who honor us by taking our culture out into the world and celebrating it. It comes from people seeking us out, and flocking here to experience all that we know and love.

We are all neighbors. We are all Southerners. This is OUR culture, and it means what WE choose it to mean.

So, yes. I’ll say it again—Southern Pride is good collard greens.

Death to the flag.

Long live the South.”
― Jason Latour, Southern Bastards #3

“The ever-present war in the background lent a pleasant informality to social relations, an informality which older people viewed with alarm. Mothers found strange men calling on their daughters, men who came without letters of introduction and whose antecedents were unknown. To their horror, mothers found their daughters holding hands with these men. Mrs. Merriwether, who had never kissed her husband until after the wedding ceremony, could scarcely believe her eyes when she caught Maybelle kissing the little Zouave, Rene Picard, and her consternation was even greater when Maybelle refused to be ashamed. Even the fact that Rene immediately asked for her hand did not improve matters. Mrs. Merriwether felt that the South was heading for a complete moral collapse and frequently said so. Other mothers concurred heartily with her and blamed it on the war.

But men who expected to die within a week or a month could not wait a year before they begged to call a girl by her first name, with "Miss," of course, preceding it. Nor would they go through the formal and protracted courtships which good manners had prescribed before the war. They were likely to propose in three or four months. And girls who knew very well that a lady always refused a gentlemen the first three times he proposed rushed headlong to accept the first time.”
― Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind

“The myth of Main Street in the South has always been a chaste, puritanical fantasy. The reality is found on back roads and dirt lanes under a sky gone black, in the back seat of rust modeled Buicks and the beds of ramshackled trucks.”
― S. A. Cosby

“Collecting statistics at camp Zachary Taylor after the armistice [WW1 1918], I found that out of two hundred and fifty men from Kentucky and Tennessee, ninety were completely illiterate, several were actual imbeciles, two had syphilitic rheumatism; and any number had married at childhood ages, from twelve - the youngest - to seventeen. They had married girls from nine - the youngest - to fourteen. So I am ready to believe that the Faulkner and Caldwell depictions of ingrown sections of the country are based upon actual conditions....”
― Kay Boyle, Being geniuses together, 1920-1930

“Ah, these old Southern families, how he envied them their heritage. It did not have to lead to this decay. And to think, he did not know the full names of his own great grandparents or where they had been born.”
― Anne Rice , The Witching Hour

“Always Fresh, Never Frozen — a simple motto that helped turn Cook Out from a local burger joint into a Southern fast-food icon.”
― CookOutMenu Team