Southern Fiction Quotes

“Southerners. Such literate, civilized folk, such charm and cleverness and passion for living, such genuine interest in people, all people, high and low, white and black, and yet how often it had come to, came to, was still coming to vicious incomprehension, usually over race but other things too - religion, class, money. How often the lowest elements had burst out of the shadows and hollers, guns and torches blazing, galloping past the educated and tolerant as nightriders, how often the despicable had run riot over the better Christian ideals... how often cities had burned, people had been strung up in trees, atrocities had been permitted to occur and then, in the seeking of justice for those outrages, how slippery justice had proven, how delayed its triumph. Oh you expect such easily obtained violence in the Balkans or among Asian or African tribal peoples centuries-deep in blood feuds, but how was there such brutality and wickedness in this place of church and good intention, a place of immense friendliness and charity and fondness for the rituals of family and socializing, amid the nation's best cooking and best music... how could one place contain the other place?”
― Wilton Barnhardt, Lookaway, Lookaway

“Are you aware that Jesus Christ can spell? I get so tired of you spelling every slang and cuss word that crosses your mind, as though you are pulling one over on the Lord.”
― Brenda Sutton Rose, Dogwood Blues

“The woods are full of regional writers, and it is the great horror of every serious Southern writer that he will become one of them.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

“Humans need each other for equilibrium and support. But writers must pull aside to take a quiet walk alone, not just for the sake of serenity but to hear the Voice inside. That is how the storyteller connects with with others--listen, write, share.”
― Patricia Hickman, The Pirate Queen

“Because of sorrow, my awareness of life's pulse is strongly detectable. It is syncopation while I journey, a lap of ocean in the eyes of every person I meet. This awareness informs the flesh of my stories. Grief has been an odd companion, at first a terror, but now I am all the better having accepted it for its intrinsic worth.”
― Patricia Hickman, The Pirate Queen

“By the standards of a tourist strolling past looking for a quick lunch, the place was a dive. The sign on the window was small and easy to miss, and the antique feel of the place wasn't the prepackaged, old-shit-on-the-wall nostalgia that came with so many chain restaurants. The cafe was just old, and everything about it said old. But Jon liked it that way, if only because it kept the tourists away and spared him from hearing imported ignorance when there was plenty of local ignorance to go around.”
― Scott B. Pruden

“Facing the sagging middle when writing a novel, while inevitable, may be
overcome by pre-planning. I divide my collection of proposed scenes into three acts, each scene inciting tension that builds toward the final crisis in Act Three. If by Act Two the emotional river isn't spilling over the banks, I reassess the plot so that once the writing is flowing I don't slide into a dry creek. The central character should be struggling to navigate life well into the end of Act One, even if her fiercest antagonist is only from within.”
― Patricia Hickman, The Pirate Queen

“The ultimate downfall of the computerized holographic receptionist was that there was no amount of flattery, flirtation or chocolate that could convince one to lie for you.”
― Scott B. Pruden

“The truth had lacerated him to the bone, had punctured his heart, and had ripped through his soul. The truth had slain him and tended to his wounds. The truth had hated him and loved him. The truth had opened his eyes to his own faults.”
― Brenda Sutton Rose, Dogwood Blues

“While writing the first draft is an exercise in shutting down all of the things we think we know so that the story features come tumbling out, the revision is the end of the joy ride. We pull on the gloves and sort of poke around inside the body. Is that a tumor? Will that limb need amputation? I nearly second-guessed myself into heart failure while learning to self-edit.”
― Patricia Hickman, The Pirate Queen

“There were thousands of children just like her in the world. She had walked through the fire and come out the other side scorched, but not consumed by it.”
― J.L. Murphey, The Sacrificial Lamb

“The confessional writer will treat her story like a wailing wall. She kneels, and her story spills out, messy, improper. It isn’t a protest or even graffiti, but her story is an offering of things that she overlooked or notices that others have overlooked. She is in danger of exposure but she remembers when she lived in hiding and that was worse. She cannot turn back now because this is how life has spun out of her, part vexing passage and part prayer.”
― Patricia Hickman, The Pirate Queen

“The conflict each day is whether to immerse in books or writing. I can't do one without the other, but I can't do both at the same time. It is the writer's paradox.”
― Patricia Hickman, The Pirate Queen

“The central character is an incomplete package of yearning that takes the length of the novel to complete. Completion, though, is not to be confused with perfection.”
― Patricia Hickman, The Pirate Queen

“I started out hoping to remind people at some point in the novel that we should be loving and kind. But then the theme usurped my life, spilling over into my novels until love was no longer a small voice, but now my purpose as a writer.”
― Patricia Hickman, The Pirate Queen

“Nothing helps your partner keep his mind on Jesus more than having a sign of His love tanned on your primary erogenous zones.”
― Scott B. Pruden

“I've learned that our past insists on coming back, whether we want it or not. But that doesn't mean it has to dictate who we are now.”
― Terah Shelton Harris, Where the Wildflowers Grow

“Tonight is about being our true selves with no apologies. It's the ultimate middle finger to the reality that'll come tomorrow.”
― Jennifer Peer, Not On Your Latte: A HOT Southern Romance

“Nothing else can satiate the hunger, my craving, that need for contact, except you. At moments, I'm starving in a room full of food. None of it what I need or want.”
― Jennifer Peer, Not On Your Latte: A HOT Southern Romance

“When people ate what Anna O'Brien baked, they smiled wider, laughed louder, and left the bakery she'd inherited with more confidence than when they arrived. Her chocolate chip cookies made Jordan Hillman propose to Julie Farmer on their fourth date. Her OREO brownies caused Roger Jackson to think he could dance the Charleston like he had in the '40's. One sip of her Saturday morning hot chocolate made everyone a good neighbor. People in town swore Anna could make anything better than the original, and they were right. It was a skill she'd been honing since she was big enough to stand on a step stool and help her grandma in the kitchen.
While most children spent their after-school time watching cartoons and their summers flying kites and playing pickup games of baseball, Anna spent almost all her free time helping at Bea's Bakery. Anna had a superior sense for knowing how to combine ingredients and flavors into delicious creations. She also had an unusually strong sense of smell, which gave her an incredible advantage for pairing ingredients in a way that enhanced the eating experience. Each treat she made engaged the eyes, the nose, the tongue, and every pleasing nerve in the body.”
― Jennifer Moorman, The Baker's Man

“And then we had the wake. It was lovely with tears and laughter, roar and uproar. Nobody died. Well, only a little. We all died a little. But death mostly let us be. Death seemed to think there was, for us, a fate worse than it. Which left us alive in the end, and so very, very drunk.”
― David Wesley Williams, Come Again No More (forthcoming 2025)

“The sun played children’s games with the clouds, but the clouds grew tired of such trifling and turned dark.

Two days out of Memphis, a sort of desperation set in aboard the Clementine. Nerves were frayed from the long journey west and patience was as short as the supply of whiskey—a cross look could get you a poke in the eye, a sarcastic remark might prompt a pot shot from one of the cheap pistols that suddenly proliferated on board. Children carried them, even. The snotnoses—armed!”
― David Wesley Williams, Everybody Knows (2023)

“He tried the crank radio, a pirate station out of Memphis. Static and guitar scratch, the straggling notes of a song about home.”
― David Wesley Williams, Everybody Knows (2023)

“Some nights, we have the road to ourselves and the radio sings only for us. We play our shows and tear-ass out. Tonight, it was this little dive bar in a town we took to calling East Motherless. But we play, no matter. We rock and then we roll. The soundcheck and the fury, the power chord and the glory. Then we load our gear into a muddy-brown Merc with a little trailer behind, and we’re off. Slinging gravel, filling sky with road.”
― David Wesley Williams, Long Gone Daddies (2013)

“So out of Arkansas came Johnny Cash, sounding like doom looked. He had a voice of deep, swaggering sadness and wanted to sing gospel, but it was train tracks and prison bars instead.”
― David Wesley Williams, Long Gone Daddies (2013)

“He said they are still alive despite what you see on the outside. You just have to dig below the surface to reach their heart.”
― Terah Shelton Harris

“The soreness you’re experiencing now is the sign of muscles being torn, but when they grow back, they’ll grow stronger than before.”
― Terah Shelton Harris, Where the Wildflowers Grow

“I wasn't anxious anymore. I guess I needed to stop, enjoy the view and let the beauty in.”
― Rhonda McKnight, The Thing About Home: A Lowcountry Novel

“I looked at my empty ring finger, felt the ache of emptiness in my heart, and wondered whether I would ever experience love again.”
― Rhonda McKnight, The Thing About Home: A Lowcountry Novel

“In gardening, there's a process called turning the soil. You do it every year after harvest and before you plant again to prepare the soil for the new seeds. Baby, you need to turn the soil of your heart over. Unprepared soil never grows a good harvest.”
― Rhonda McKnight, The Thing About Home: A Lowcountry Novel