Top 50 Southerner Quotes

There’s something sort of intrinsic in being a Southerner that doesn’t go away. You can’t get rid of it, but it’s not something that’s terribly obvious.

I would have to say my favorite thing about hosting ‘Redneck Island 4’ was the cast. They were the most genuine, fun, and down-to-earth Southerners. They just reminded me of the kids I went to school with.

In addition I wanted to write a Southern novel, because I’m a Southerner.

I’m a very big Faulkner fan ’cause I’m a Southerner.

I do play a lot of Southerners because I grew up in the South, but they’re still diverse.

The Mormons’ passage from bugbears of the Republican Party to its stalwarts may be analogized to a similar move among middle-class white Southerners, to whom the Republican Party was anathema until the 1970s and ’80s, after which it became almost the sole representative.

For generations, even many otherwise decent white Southerners learned to despise black people.

It’s really hard for me to sometimes put myself out there, like ‘Hey, how do you feel about making music together?’ because maybe I’m afraid of rejection or I don’t want to put anybody out. It’s the Southerner in me, like, ‘I don’t mean to bother you but do you mind making a song?’

As a Southerner and as a Mormon you approach life in this aspirational way: ‘I will rise above my station.’

For nearly a century, the South made itself believe that Negroes and white people were really communicating. So convinced of this were the white Southerners that they almost made the nation believe that they, and only they, knew the mind of the Southern Negro.

My great-grandfather and his two brothers fought at Gettysburg. They were in artillery, and they survived the war, thank goodness. So I revere what they did. I think their motivations were honorable when they undertook the war and participated in it along with other Southerners.

No self-respecting Southerner will eat something baked, broiled, grilled, stewed, poached, sauteed, or flambeed when it can be deep fried.

Southerners are also like ethnic groups in that they have a sense of group identity.

King thought he understood the white Southerner, having been born and reared in Georgia and trained a theologian.

We could say that people who eat grits, listen to country music, follow stock-car racing, support corporal punishment in the schools, hunt ‘possum, go to Baptist churches and prefer bourbon to Scotch are likely to be Southerners.

What a thing, Europe. Europe! The cultured Europe! We are the barbarians, the Indians, the blacks, the southerners. How cynical is Europe. Chavez the tyrant! Chavez the strongman! Chavez, who wants to stay forever. While there, they have kings, my friend!

Nothing is worse than a Yankee telling a Southerner that his monuments don’t matter.

The Southerner is usually tolerant of those weaknesses that proceed from innocence.

Among the American contemporaries I read with most enjoyment are several North Carolinians. I think the best poetry being written these days is being written by Southerners.

Basically there is no difference between whites and blacks, browns and yellows. I decided to think no more of people as Northerners and Southerners.

Every Southerner, I think, knows people like Bill Clinton, maybe not quite as smart and maybe not quite as liberal, but kind of a glad-handing, country-club yuppie Southerner. The problem is we don’t have labels for middle-class Southerners.

I was born in a hurricane in Pensacola, Florida… my dad was in the military, so we moved all over the place. But I consider myself a southerner from Louisiana. I’ve lived in Texas for most of my adult life.

Being a Southerner, I’m interested in sex, violence, religion and all the things that make life interesting.

The educated Southerner has no use for an ‘r’, except at the beginning of a word.

I’m glad I’m Southern. I’m the Southerner who’s very Southern in that she left to move to New York.

Writing about where I was from and the people I knew was not something that would have occurred to me early on, because like so many Southerners of that period – the Sixties – I rejected those things when I went north.

I’m a Southerner. We dream of having the family and the kids, and the parents want grandkids, that’s all they care about, give me some grandbabies.

I’m sort of a Southerner because those are my roots, but my parents are from Iowa.

Any Southerner is spoiled when it comes to food.

My father served as an Army doctor in West Germany in the late ’50s and early ’60s. As a result, he and my mother – both native southerners – were acutely aware of what had happened during the Holocaust.

I had in mind a message, although I hope it doesn’t intrude too badly, persuading Americans, and especially Southerners, of the critical importance of land and our vanishing natural environment and wildlife.

Even for southerners, Arkansans are amazingly friendly and extend hospitality to all strangers with astonishing openness. You couldn’t find a pretension in that state if you hunted from Jonesboro to El Dorado.

I am proud to be a Southerner. I think Southern hospitality is very… I don’t think it’s just a term. I think it really exists. You can come to Savannah, and the people are so sweet and so nice.

Southerners smile more than other Americans.

Even in the ’80s and ’90s, many white Southerners were still bitter about court decisions that required racial integration of the schools. It wasn’t that they were outwardly opposed to white and black people attending school together, it was that the rulings threatened their proud identity as independent Southerners.

I grew up partially around Stone Mountain, Georgia, and in that part of the country, there was always this aura of mythology and palpable sense of otherness about being a Southerner.

I came from a big family… a big family of Southerners.

If you care to define the South as a poor, rural region with lousy race relations, that South survives only in geographical shreds and patches and most Southerners don’t live there any more.

Southerners can never resist a losing cause.

All the Southerners think we’re Yanks, and all the Yanks think we’re Southerners, and all the Midwesterners think we’re East. Everybody’s always wrong about Louisville. That’s kind of why I love it so much.

To Southerners like my mother, ‘Gone With the Wind’ was not just a book; it was an answer, a clenched fist raised to the North, an anthem of defiance.

I’m a Southerner – I never take satisfaction in touching a nerve. I guess if I’m forced to find a good side, I’m glad that people are talking about an issue that hasn’t really been discussed all that much. I’m glad that people are talking about it from the black perspective and the white perspective.

Southerners pride themselves on being polite. This is why we always use euphemisms to express ourselves.

It takes a willful disregard of history to appreciate how white Southerners could look at the Confederate battle flag and see states’ rights or a way of life or a tradition – and not one human being whipping another, which was a common occurrence.

As a Southerner, I love obstacles for my characters.

White Southerners created an entire cosmetics industry equating beauty with whiteness and trained a string of winning Miss Americas who embodied their racial ideal in a national representative.

Even as a Southerner, there’s only so much corn-pone shucking and jiving about mama-and-gravy talk I can take.

New Yorkers tend to have a wall up. Being from the South, I didn’t have that. It helped me meet a lot of people. And, as a Southerner, I love wearing color. New York is a sea of black. My popping out in pink was definitely noticed.

It’s a touchy subject, but as a Southerner, you can’t ignore our history any more than a Renaissance painter can ignore the Virgin Mary. And it’s impossible to drive down a road or eat a vegetable or pass a church without being reminded of slavery.

I grew up in the age of discount air fare, and for me, the act of joining a culture was a great way about learning about that different culture. So I grew up in the South, and went to college in the North, and found out that I learned about myself as a Southerner by leaving the South and going to the Northeast.