West Virginia Quotes

“May your glass always be full, may there always be a roof over your head, and may you dirty sinners be in heaven a half hour before the devil knows you're dead.”
― Jason Jack Miller, HELLBENDER

“And the kiss?” Her frown was deep, sorrowful. “That was the script, too. I know. But I don’t see any difference. You held her like you held me. You even looked at her the same.”
“I was acting.”
“I know.” Tears brimmed her eyes. “That’s what I’m afraid of.”
― Willowy Whisper, Angel Gate

“Nothing else in the whole wide world matters as much as avenging your sister.”
― Jason Jack Miller, HELLBENDER

“I couldn’t describe the smells of West Virginia, even if I tried. It has something to do with the leaves composting in the woods, the cold trickle of little creeks and waterfalls, the ferns greening up everything. But somewhere deep below, I can smell the rock and the coal this state is built on.”
― Heather Day Gilbert, Miranda Warning

“Want to go to West Virginia and risk life and limb with me?"

Zane smirked and gave a single nod. "Sounds like fun.”
― Abigail Roux, Stars & Stripes

“It's Coke, my man. You really think I'm going to let you pour any more alcohol into your body tonight?”
― Jason Jack Miller, HELLBENDER

“At the end of the school day, we walked the long, cold way home feeling happy and hungry. There we found a warm fire, country ham with gravy and hot biscuits, and a mother to hug us! If snow blew under the doors that night, what did it matter? Christmas time was just around the corner.”
― Jenny Lee Ellison, Sand Knob through the Eyes of a Child

“We crossed the Mississippi and on to Illinois. At Starved Rock, 100 miles south of Chicago, we followed 40 or 50 bikers with ‘Bikers against Child Abuse’ as their colours. Next was Indiana, with foggy river towns and vast farmlands, Amish homes in Ohio with smoke curling from the chimneys, then 43 miles of unbroken forests and prime trout-water rivers in West Virginia. We stayed overnight and ate fresh game pie, although whether we were eating possum, rabbit or raccoon we never discovered.”
― Karl Wiggins, Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe

“Henry,that's how you get rid of fleas. You keep them from laying eggs. You go to war with them.”
― Jason Jack Miller, HELLBENDER

“In the false American imagination, West Virginia is a joke or else it's a charity case; but more than anything it is unseen, an invisible architecture of labor and struggle; and incarceration shares this invisibility, hidden at the center of everything; our slipshod remedy for an abiding fear, danger pinned to human bodies and then slotted into bunk beds you can't see from any highway.”
― Lauren F. Winner, Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis

“West Virginia was mysterious and it liked to keep to itself. It hid in the folds of mountains, resting in the cool shade. It was sweet, beautiful, and bashful. Its woods held its secrets or at least it seemed that way to May.”
― Jodi Lynn Anderson, May Bird and the Ever After

“Yeah, but a hellbender never dies. You ever see a dead one?”
― Jason Jack Miller

“The defendant removed his gloves and started toward the victim. Mr. Farley, still teasing, said: “Ooo, he's taking his gloves off.” The defendant then pulled a knife from his pocket and stabbed the victim in the neck. He also stabbed Mr. Farley in the arm as he fell to the floor. Mr. Farley looked up and cried: “Man, I was just kidding around.” The defendant responded: “Well, man, you should have never hit me in my face.”
― Justice Franklin Cleckley

“Sometimes I feel so entangled with the West Virginia seasons, it's like I'm breathing through them.”
― Heather Day Gilbert, Trial by Twelve

“Nelson, do you remember the spring day when we climbed the barn gable so we could see the seagulls that mysteriously blew into our clay hills-- swept from an ocean neither of us had ever seen though it was scarcely a hundred miles away, each bird a genuine miracle high above the green barley? The time we saw that panther in the sycamore tree and Maw said it was the sign of war? Nelson, I am sixty-three years old, the same age that both Maw and Daddy were when they died. I have written this in testimony. With this book, I presume to be done now with such remembrance. But somehow I suspect it will go on, this peering down old wells, this excavation of memory and its shades.”
― Joe Bageant, Rainbow Pie

“Who is destroying the mountains of eastern Kentucky and West Virginia?...It isn't the coal companies. It's us...You did this. Okay, forget the guilt. How can we change that?”
― Erik Reece, Lost Mountain: A Year in the Vanishing Wilderness Radical Strip Mining and the Devastation of Appalachia

“It's a long drive. It's pretty, actually, if you go through West Virginia, but of course then you're in West Virginia.”
― T. Kingfisher, The Twisted Ones

“West Virginia, oh my home.
West Virginia, where I belong.
In the dead of the night, in the still and the quiet I slip away like a bird
in flight
Back to those hills, the place that I call home.

Home, home, home. I can see it so clear in my mind.

Home, home, home. I can almost smell the honeysuckle vines.”
― Hazel Dickens, Working Girl Blues: The Life and Music of Hazel Dickens

“Gran always said our West Virginia mountains is like the bosom of the Almighty, keeping us protected and still in Him.”
― Marilyn Sue Shank, Child of the Mountains

“The boulderfields, the spaces empty of people--a lonesomeness city-dwellers could never comprehend. Sometimes it seems like you know animals more intimately than people. Beaver heads cutting wake in the water, bear shit jeweled with seeds, deer quenching themselves in the river's cool. Her family has lived here for three hundred years. But the place is wretchedly poor and backward and may never be right.”
― Matthew Neill Null, Allegheny Front

“Death happened often enough that a certain melancholy existed between the young men and women of the little West Virginia town when they made their daily farewells”
― Homer Hickam, Carrying Albert Home: The Somewhat True Story of A Man, His Wife, and Her Alligator

“Granddad always said the best things about fishing were beyond the senses. He said the mountains, rivers and fish were the center of why you were there, but not the heart, that the heart was in those pure moments in and around the fishing, or rather what was on the other side of those moments that can only be felt, not told because words were not up to the job. That’s what hooked your soul.”
― J.C. Bonnell, Burnt Tree Fork

“Last summer they came to visit us in West Virginia, and Julie and I spent a week perfecting the peach pie. We made ordinary peach pie, and deep-dish peach pie, and blueberry and peach pie, but here is the best peach pie we made: Put 1 1/4 cups flour, 1/2 teaspoon salt, 1/2 cup butter and 2 tablespoons sour cream into a Cuisinart and blend until they form a ball. Pat out into a buttered pie tin, and bake 10 minutes at 425*. Beat 3 egg yolks slightly and combine with 1 cup sugar, 2 tablespoons flour and 1/3 cup sour cream. Pour over 3 peeled, sliced peaches arranged in the crust. Cover with foil. Reduce the oven to 350* and bake 35 minutes. Remove the foil and bake 10 minutes more, or until the filling is set.
I keep thinking about that week in West Virginia. It was a perfect week. We swam in the river and barbecued ribs and made Bellinis with crushed peaches and cheap champagne.”
― Nora Ephron, Heartburn

“Moo inhaled, his nostrils flaring. It was decided then. Slowly, deliberately, he rose from the saddle and began to dismount. He had not sailed seven thousand miles across the world, traveled up the Mississippi River on a riverboat full of knife-wielding Kaintucks, and graduated from the University of Kentucky College of Medicine with top marks, carving a position of respect for himself and his family out of the very flesh, blood, and bone of these hills to be bullied by a trio of chubby sons of bitches in khaki shirts and armbands.

He stepped to the ground before them and thumbed the three-barred cross at his throat, looking from man to man. His eyes wide open, blazing like spot lamps. "Allah maei," he said. God is with me.

The first man stepped forward, cocking his fist back. "The fuck you say?”
― Taylor Brown

“Appalachia is often portrayed as a place separate and apart from the rest of America. Among other things, this allows Americans to absolve themselves of any accountability or relation. But Appalachia is America, even if those who live outside the region do not want to admit it.”
― Charles B. Keeney, The Road to Blair Mountain: Saving a Mine Wars Battlefield from King Coal

“The great lumber and coal companies acted as giant hunter-gatherers when they raked their collective hands across the mountains, stripping them of their natural wealth, leaving behind a scarred, burnt-out wasteland no longer their concern.”
― Pete Kosky, Mountain Tales and River Stories