Southern Literature Quotes

“No matter what a person does to cover up and conceal themselves, when we write and lose control, I can spot a person from Alabama, Florida, South Carolina a mile away even if they make no exact reference to location. Their words are lush like the land they come from, filled with nine aunties, people named Bubba. There is something extravagant and wild about what they have to say — snakes on the roof of a car, swamps, a delta, sweat, the smell of sea, buzz of an air conditioner, Coca-Cola — something fertile, with a hidden danger or shame, thick like the humidity, unspoken yet ever-present.

Often when a southerner reads, the members of the class look at each other, and you can hear them thinking, gee, I can't write like that. The power and force of the land is heard in the piece. These southerners know the names of what shrubs hang over what creek, what dogwood flowers bloom what color, what kind of soil is under their feet.

I tease the class, "Pay no mind. It's the southern writing gene. The rest of us have to toil away.”
― Natalie Goldberg

“We are good at stories. We hoard them, like an old woman in a room full of boxes, but now and then we pull out our best, and spread them out. We talk of the bad years when the cotton didn't open, and the day my cousin Wanda was washed in the Blood. We buff our beloved ancestors until they are smooth of sin, and give our scoundrels a hard shake, although sometimes we can't remember exactly which is who.”
― Rick Bragg

“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

“Because I will always remember that when I told her I needed help burying a body, the first thing she said was, "Let me go get my shovel.”
― Karen White

“Scarlett O'Hara wasn't pretty.”
― Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind

“Potential enemies make the best friends and lovers. Many a blessed union begins in adversity.”
― Randy Thornhorn, The Kestrel Waters

“STAINS
With red clay between my toes,
and the sun setting over my head,
the ghost of my mother blows in,
riding on a honeysuckle breeze, oh lord,
riding on a honeysuckle breeze.
Her teeth, the keys of a piano.
I play her grinning ivory notes
with cadenced fumbling fingers,
splattered with paint, textured with scars.
A song rises up from the belly of my past
and rocks me in the bosom of buried memories.
My mama’s dress bears the stains of her life:
blueberries, blood, bleach, and breast milk;
She cradles in her arms a lifetime of love and sorrow;
Its brilliance nearly blinds me.
My fingers tire,
as though I've played this song for years.
The tune swells red,
dying around the edges of a setting sun.
A magnolia breeze blows in strong,
a heavenly taxi sent to carry my mother home.
She will not say goodbye.
For there is no truth in spoken farewells.
I am pregnant with a poem,
my life lost in its stanzas.
My mama steps out of her dress
and drops it, an inheritance falling to my feet.
She stands alone: bathed, blooming,
burdened with nothing of this world.
Her body is naked and beautiful,
her wings gray and scorched,
her brown eyes piercing the brown of mine.
I watch her departure, her flapping wings:
She doesn’t look back, not even once,
not even to whisper my name: Brenda.
I lick the teeth of my piano mouth.
With a painter’s hands,
with a writer’s hands
with rusty wrinkled hands,
with hands soaked in the joys,
the sorrows, the spills
of my mother’s life,
I pick up eighty-one years of stains
And pull her dress over my head.
Her stains look good on me.”
― Brenda Sutton Rose

“With red clay between my toes,
and the sun setting over my head,
the ghost of my mother blows in,
riding on a honeysuckle breeze, oh lord,
riding on a honeysuckle breeze.”
― Brenda Sutton Rose

“My mama steps out of her dress
and drops it, an inheritance falling to my feet.
She stands alone: bathed, blooming,
burdened with nothing of this world.
Her body is naked and beautiful,
her wings gray and scorched,
her brown eyes piercing the brown of mine.
I watch her departure, her flapping wings:
She doesn’t look back, not even once,
not even to whisper my name”
― Brenda Sutton Rose

“I know this place like I know the calluses on my hands.”
― Brenda Sutton Rose, Dogwood Blues

“Nothing is allowed to die in a society of storytelling people. It is all-the good and the bad-carted up and brought along from one generation to the next. And everything that is brought along is colored and shaped by those who bring it.”
― Harry Crews, A Childhood: The Biography of a Place

“Jediná věc, která se neřídí pravidlem většiny, je lidské svědomí.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“Although I wasn't there to bear witness, I imagine Lot's wife scanned the masses for her children. Perhaps she sought out the curves of their mouths and the shapes of their faces, trying to memorize her children, grown now. She looked back as I and any strong, loving mother would have done.”
― Brenda Sutton Rose, Dogwood Blues

“At 2:00 sharp on the afternoon of his internment, with his body resting in a casket in the front room of his home, the pallbearers--all bridge players--stuck a deck of cards in Mr. Hampton's cold hands, shut the lid over his head, and played bridge.”
― Brenda Sutton Rose, Dogwood Blues

“If John Grisham, Harper Lee, and Larry the Cable Guy were penned up in a remote cabin for a weekend with nothing but good bourbon, fine wine, and a couple of cases of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer, something like Common Pleas (A Tale of Whoa!) might result...”
― J. Randolph Cresenzo, COMMON PLEAS

“That's the measure of friendship, isn't it? Knowing people who will jar your secret and store it in a dark cellar forever. People who know it's never about the secret itself, but the keeping of it.”
― Karen White

“A song rises up from the belly of my past
and rocks me in the bosom of buried memories.”
― Brenda Sutton Rose

“Maybe these dreams of ours just floats away. Here we go again...changin' face.”
― Randolph Randy Camp, False Dandelions

“This was the image Angeline had of him at the time; always moving to the edges of some sort of celebration.”
― Amanda Coplin, The Orchardist

“What is the fire of inspiration that resides within, if not something to follow along a path?”
― Claire Fullerton, Mourning Dove

“I don't really like to go on emotional rides with people. I like to drive.”
― Toni Orrill

“My son, Eddie, an artist, a rock musician, and a song writer, was so darned sensitive that life bounced his heart around like it was a dime-store basketball.”
― DAISY PETTLES, Chickenlandia Mystery

“I want you to learn how to do when you didn’t shoot. It’s after the chance for the bear or the deer has done already come and gone that men and dogs get killed.”
― William Faulkner, The Bear

“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.”
― 'Come Again No More,' David Wesley Williams

“Good puzzle would be cross Memphis without passing a barbecue joint.”
― David Wesley Williams, Come Again No More (forthcoming 2025)

“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)