Top 1200 Southern Quotes & Sayings

I grew up in a small Southern town, kind of a counterculture to a small Southern mentality.

I tend to play every color in the Southern rainbow, and the challenge is to make each character different so I'm not doing any generic 'Southern acting.'

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

I've had battles with writers who live in L.A. and were writing southern characters, because they felt like if they wrote 'Sugar' and 'Honey' at the end of every sentence, that would make it southern.

I remember my father had a sermon he used to preach when we were in Florida, in which he gave a reference to the Southern Cross-about the stars, the colors, in the Southern Cross, which thrilled me very much. I must have been around 5 years old. ... Now, it turns out that the Southern Cross itself does have one red star, together with three blue ones.

The Southern past, the Southern present, the Southern future, concentrated into Gertrude's voice, became one of red clay pine-barrens, of chain-gang camps, of housewives dressed in flour sacks who stare all day dully down into dirty sinks.

We need to secure our southern border. Clearly, the southern border is now a nexus between immigration and national security. It's a sieve.

The truth is this: I am a Southern Baptist, and the great majority of Southern Baptists are lost.

Going to the Huntington gardens and libraries was radically important for me. They have one of the best collections of 18th- and 19th-century British portraiture that you can imagine in Southern California. One doesn't think about Southern California as being the capital of great art.

I'm very Southern in the way I walk in the world. I love to laugh. I love to eat. I love to hug people. But if somebody makes me mad, my neck may roll. I can be aggressive with a Southern twang.

The Southern Poverty Law Center is a hate group rivaled only by the Democrat Party. The Southern Poverty Law Center... Folks, if there's anything you should ignore - and there are a lot of things you should ignore - put the Southern Poverty Law Center on the list.

My mother, Southern to the bone, once told me, “All Southern literature can be summed up in these words: ‘On the night the hogs ate Willie, Mama died when she heard what Daddy did to Sister.’” She raised me up to be a Southern writer, but it wasn’t easy.

The South is about the abundance, beauty, and richness of Southern culture, but also its dark underside. The history of Southern food reflects the history of slavery, of poverty, of the negotiation of power.

But the Constitution was made not only for southern and northern states, but for states neither northern nor southern, namely, the western states, their coming in being foreseen and provided for.

The Southern Progress Fund will bring much-needed resources into multiple Southern states where Democrats must identify up-and-coming leaders and build a bench of strong potential candidates up and down the ballot.

It's hard to describe one's own alchemy that makes one into a writer, but I definitely think American language is so interesting, and specifically Southern language and black Southern language; it's hard to separate Southern language from black language.

I don't necessarily think of it as Southern comedy. I just think I'm a comedian and I have a Southern accent.

My theory is the root of a country artist is truth and honesty. For me, I look at Sam Hunt. The truth and the honest thing is we have southern roots, we were raised in a southern way, but we listen to Drake and other stuff, too.

The true Southern watermelon is a boon apart, and not to be mentioned with commoner things. It is chief of this world'd luxuries, king by grace of God over all the fruits of the earth. When one has tasted it, he knows what the angels eat. It was not a Southern watermelon that Eve took: we know it because she repented.

I was always a friend of southern rights, but an enemy of southern wrongs.

For me, I love the flavors of Southern food, and people usually think of Southern food as heavy and fattening, but it doesn't have to be.

I remember, when I went away to college at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, my aunt sent me a book with the rules of being a Southern Belle. One of the rules was to never wear white after Labor Day. Fashion has a lot to do with confidence and making up your own rules.

When you say, 'Southern,' or you speak about a southern accent, there's always that drawl, and usually from white people. That's what people associate with the South. But we're all different. The black southern accent is different.

Southern food that appears in contemporary popular culture is so exaggerated that it's hardly recognizable to most Southerners. This enriching of Southern food - fatter, richer, more over the top - is what we typically see on TV, in Hollywood films, and in Southern-style or country-themed chains like Cracker Barrel. Southern food becomes a caricature, like characters and props in a reality TV show.

Slavery destroys, or vitiates, or pollutes, whatever it touches. No interest of society escapes the influence of its clinging curse. It makes Southern religion a stench in the nostrils of Christendom; it makes Southern politics a libel upon all the principles of republicanism; it makes Southern literature a travesty upon the honorable profession of letters.

If you go to Paris, try to speak French. If you go to the South, try to speak Southern. Southern isn't stupid. Southern is narrative; Southern is family.

Several southern actors are coming to Mumbai. Likewise, many Bollywood actors are appearing down South or borrowing ideas from southern films.

We were bunched up with Southern bands, and there's nothing wrong with that at all. We just wanted to make it clear we weren't a Southern band.

Maybe the example of Southern fiction writing has been so powerful that Southern poets have sort of keyed themselves to that.

I'm happy that I know how to speak 'Southern.' I spent a lot of time in Alabama throughout my life. I even lived there for part of junior high and high school, so I learned the true beauty and mastery of the Southern dialect. 'Y'all' is one of the greatest and most useful words ever invented.

More even than Southern Presbyterians and Southern Methodists, the Baptists provided the great mass of Confederate enlisted men.

William Ferris has long reigned as the unimpeachable source of the entire southern experience. His work on southern folklore and the composition of the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture have made him both legendary and necessary. His book, The Storied South , is a love song to the South Bill helped illuminate. It's a crowning achievement of his own storied career.

There are things I like about fancy Southern food and there are things I really love from just down-home Southern cooking. So mixing those two together would probably be right up my alley.

People come to Nashville where I live and they say, 'What's a great Southern restaurant?' Well, you got to know the right grandmother, because there's a lot of magic to good Southern cooking.

Jimmy Carter, of course, was beloved. Peanut farmer. Came out of nowhere, governor of Georgia. Normally Democrats hate Southern accents, 'cause Southern accents equals Deliverance, equals hayseed, equals idiot. But if it's one of them... But you had to look the other way with Jimmy Carter and then here came Bill Clinton later. So depending on where the Southern accent's from, they'll make an exception and not be prejudicial about it. But for the most part, a Southern accent may as well be a slave owner as far as Democrats are concerned; they want no part of it.

I think that my interpretation of Italian was a lot more southern than what my husband cooks. You know, I grew up in Queens and in Brooklyn, and we - really, it's more southern. It's Naples and Sicily. It's heavier. It's over-spiced. And like most Americans, I thought spaghetti and meatballs was genius.

I grew up on a farm in eastern Tennessee with a very southern lifestyle, so my roots are super country and southern, but my first concert was Britney Spears. I think that you can hear both of those influences in my music.

The time for compromise has now passed, and the South is determined to maintain her position, and make all who oppose her smell Southern powder and feel Southern steel.

I'm really drawn to comedy. I grew up in the South, so I'm drawn to all things southern, so my role in 'Getting On' has been fun for me to play something southern - I always feel like I understand those characters more because of where I was raised.

My family are very, very religious in Texas. They're Southern Baptists. I left to go to New York when I was 17 and I realised I wasn't Southern Baptist. That's not how I am inclined.

I don't like to be described as a Southern writer. The danger is, if you're described as a Southern writer, you might be thought of as someone who writes about a picturesque local scene like Uncle Tom's Cabin, Gone With the Wind, something like that.

Just short of my 40th birthday, I told my wife, Beth, I was going to build us a little weekend place in...well, in the uh, Southern Hemisphere. The deep Southern Hemisphere, actually. New Zealand, maybe. Or Argentina. Possibly Chile. She suggested medication.

I probably had something to do with being southern. For some reason, over the last few years I've been much more conscious of that. It's probably because my friend Jack Womack has a thesis that he and I write the way we do because we're southern and we experienced the very tail end of the premeditated south.

One of the most singular facts about the unwritten history of this country is the consummate ability with which Southern influence, Southern ideas and Southern ideals, have from the very beginning even up to the present day, dictated to and domineered over the brain and sinew of this nation.

If there are greater activities in Vesuvius or Pelee, then the southern coast of California and the areas between Salt Lake and the southern portions of Nevada, we may expect, within the three months following same, inundation by the earthquakes. But these are to be more in the Southern than the Northern Hemisphere.

There's something about Southern women that is so unique yet so universal. Strong southern women are allowed to be soft and feminine and have a sense of humor. But what I love about Southern women in particular is their universality.

I'm ready to do some classics. Maybe I wasn't in the beginning. I weighed 179 pounds when I got to New York, and I had that thick Southern accent. I still talk Southern, but I can do without it.

Lots of people have expressed consternation that I haven't gotten rid of Southern accent, but I just never saw any reason to lose the flavor that I grew up with. I enjoy saying some things with a Southern accent.

Southern girls are God's gift to the entire male population. There is absolutely no woman finer than one raised below the mason-dixon line and once you go southern may the good Lord help you - you never go back

Southern change gonna come at last! Now your crosses are burning fast, Southern Man.

Is it to be expected that the Southern States will deliver themselves bound hand and foot to the Eastern States? A few rich merchants in Philadelphia, Boston, and New York could thereby monopolise the staples of the Southern States and reduce their value.

People may think of Southern humor in terms of missing teeth and outhouse accidents, but the best of it is a rich vein running through the best of Southern literature.

I'm all into Jazz; I'm into New Orleans type music. There is country, there is southern gospel. I'm a huge southern gospel fan.

Memories of my Southern upbringing in Richmond, Virginia, always include the smell of good southern food: fried chicken, cheese grits, Smithfield ham, and buttermilk biscuits.

I was raised by very traditional Southern parents with Southern manners. You don't air your dirty laundry to people that aren't your family or your friends. Why would I ever want to portray myself as anything other than together?

I like health-conscious cooking, but growing up in the South, I do love southern cooking; southern France, southern Italy, southern Spain. I love southern cooking.

I grew up with fantastic Southern food. In Southern California.

I doubt if the texture of Southern life is any more grotesque than that of the rest of the nation, but it does seem evident that the Southern writer is particularly adept at recognizing the grotesque; and to recognize the grotesque, you have to have some notion of what is not grotesque and why.

I also grew up on a farm in east Tennessee, so my roots are just naturally super southern, so I've always had that southern country lifestyle.

I think people in the north and the south and the east and the west, anywhere they come from, are just as interesting, and they're humans. They have the same realm of emotions that we all have. But I'm just more drawn to the Southern character and the different types, and Southern literature is so lyrical and so wonderful.