Top 33 Appalachia Quotes & Sayings

I don't really think the outburst is recent; there have always been writers in Appalachia.

There is extreme poverty in Appalachia, where I was, and increasingly poverty is not just an urban thing.

It's not enough to celebrate the ideals that we're built on, liberty and justice and equality for all. Those just can't be words on paper, the work of every generation is to make those words mean something, concrete in the lives of our children. And we won't get there as long as kids in Baltimore or Ferguson or New York or Appalachia or the Mississippi delta or the Pine Ridge reservation believe that their lives are somehow worthless.

Appalachia is still, for American musicians, a kind of fountain of youth we always go back to, the old home place to a group of artists who represent the quintessence of American independence, fortitude, genius, and madness.

Go walk the streets of Beijing. It's pretty hard to argue it isn't a modern city. Now, if you go outside [of Beijing], in the rural areas, that's true. But rural America, you can say the same thing, in Appalachia there's an awful lot of poverty and lack of education.

I grew up in Appalachia, and I've seen people milk cows and slaughter pigs and plow with a big-footed horse. It's not like I was a city child.

You can't have nine children and not be organized. Otherwise it just looks like Appalachia.

Appalachia, my state, eastern Kentucky, has a large amount of poverty.

Because they [Americans] want to be thought of as a rich nation, they are very ashamed of this place [Appalachia] that has come to represent poverty, even though poverty exists all over the country, and exists as much in urban areas as it does in rural, if not more.

My parents were not affluent people and were not - didn't come from the extremities of education. My mother had a high school diploma. I often think I so wish she'd come out of the hills in Appalachia and been able to go on to college. I think she would have made a wonderful teacher.

I live in southern Appalachia, so I'm surrounded by people who work very hard for barely a living wage. It's particularly painful that people are working the farms their parents and grandparents worked but aren't living nearly as well.

Trump could also only win the presidency without a popular-vote majority because a large region of the country, the greater Rust Belt and Appalachia, had been neglected by both parties' policies over the preceding decades, leading to a slow-building social crisis that the national press only really noticed because of Trump's political success.

But overall, Obama's record on the environment has been uninspired - and that's putting it kindly. He hasn't stopped coal companies from blowing up mountaintops and devastating large regions of Appalachia.

Historians will come to their own judgments about President Kennedy. Here is how I choose to remember him. He was an heir to wealth who felt the anguish of the poor. He was an orator of excellence who spoke for the voiceless. He was a son of Harvard who reached out to the sons and daughters of Appalachia. He was a man of special grace who had a special care for the retarded and handicapped. He was a hero of war who fought hardest for peace. He said and proved in word and deed that one man can make a difference.

In some parts of Appalachia, actors and acting are still not considered quite decent.

I grew up in southwestern Virginia. I was born in South Carolina, but only because my parents had a vacation cabin or something there on the beach. I was like a summer baby. But I did grow up in the South. I grew up in serious, serious Appalachia, in a very small town.

When the power grid gets compromised the coal from Appalachia can be trucked to our power plants so they can be put back on line as quickly as possible.

Race has clearly played a role in Kentucky's Obama-phobia, as it has in other swaths of Appalachia. The Obama administration's supposed 'war on coal' is a big factor too.

I'd lived in West Virginia on and off for four to five years growing up. I'm familiar with Bible Belt, with Appalachia, 'Hillbilly Elegy.'

Yeah, I spent my teen years in West Virginia, and when I was a kid, in Louisiana. I definitely have that exposure to two different sorts of rural: the South and Appalachia.

Think of all the mesquite in Texas, the pinyon pines, the acorns in Appalachia, every place has the possibility of mass production. It's an infrastructural system so nestled in ecology, it's a more beautiful ecology.

It didn't help my career to be living in Appalachia.

The end of coal in Appalachia doesn't mean that America is running out of coal (there's plenty left in Wyoming). But it should end the fantasy that coal can be an engine of job creation - the big open pit mines in Wyoming employ a tiny fraction of the number of people in an underground mine in Appalachia.

There's a roots nature to Appalachia - the origins of folk and bluegrass. I know guys there who are some of the best players I've ever heard but are playing on their porch tonight because they've never chased success. There's simplicity to how they live and what they care about.

What's popular in places considered ghettos - whether that's the inner city or Appalachia - is having a decent quality of life.

I went to a large consolidated school in Appalachia. And I wrote the story when I was in the second grade and I took it up to the third floor to the school newspaper office that was written and edited by juniors and seniors.

We can decide that the presence of cancer-causing substances in our air, water, and food is too expensive. A 2009 study, for example, has found that coal miners in Appalachia costs the region five times more in premature deaths, including from cancer, than it provides to the region in jobs, taxes, and economic benefits. In California, the production and use of hazardous chemicals cost the state $2.6 billion in 2004 alone in lost wages and health-care expenses to treat workers and children with pollution-linked diseases.

The tropical island of Puerto Rico couldn't be more different than America's rust belt or the mountains of Appalachia, but here too live Americans who feel forgotten by our leaders and left behind by our economy.

For better or worse, the bulk of coal industry jobs are in Appalachia - and when that coal is gone, so are the jobs.

From my perspective, we actually have to have a stronger, bolder economic message that's not just for white working-class voters, but for people who don't go to college who are white, black, Latino, or wherever. We have to communicate that we care about Detroit and Appalachia, and people suffering in both are problems for the country and a problem for the Democratic Party, not just one or just the other.

I was born in Mullens, West Virginia, and lived in a community called Iroquois in Appalachia. We faced heavy pollution. Our water came from the Sweeney Watershed, which meant we essentially drank acid mine drainage.

When my father started talking about strip mining in the Appalachia back in the '60s, I remember a conversation I had with him where he said, you know, this is the richest state in the country if you look at the resources and the land, but the poorest people after the state of Mississippi: the 49th poorest people in the country.

The environmental catastrophes we're presently seeing are considered "normal" though they're horrific. Fracking has made drinking water flammable, families are dying from planned lead poisoning in Flint, Michigan, mountaintop removal is killing families throughout Appalachia, and oil/mining companies continue to denigrate Native American and indigenous rights throughout the world (see North Dakota Pipeline presently). This is horrific - and yet we somehow consider it normal.