Southern Writers Quotes

“Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

“Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one.”
― Flannery O'Connor

“Well, there are people who eat the earth and eat all the people on it like in the Bible with the locusts. Then there are people who stand around and watch them eat it. (Softly) Sometimes I think it ain't right to stand and watch them do it.”
― Lillian Hellman, The Little Foxes

“My mother’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.”
― Brenda Sutton Rose

“{Summertime she speaks of winter, she eats ham, but speaks of beef, got a good man but, flirts with another. She might as well go to hell, cause she ain't gonna be happy in heaven either!}”
― Nancy B. Brewer

“Many people, after spending a long weekend being stealthily seduced by this grand dame of the South, mistakenly think that they have gotten to know her: they believe (in error) that after a long stroll amongst the rustling palmettoes and gas lamps, a couple of sumptuous meals, and a tour or two, that they have discovered everything there is to know about this seemingly genteel, elegant city. But like any great seductress, Charleston presents a careful veneer of half-truths and outright fabrications, and it lets you, the intended conquest, fill in many of the blanks. Seduction, after all, is not true love, nor is it a gentle act. She whispers stories spun from sugar about pirates and patriots and rebels, about plantations and traditions and manners and yes, even ghosts; but the entire time she is guarded about the real story. Few tourists ever hear the truth, because at the dark heart of Charleston is a winding tale of violence, tragedy and, most of all, sin.”
― James Caskey, Charleston's Ghosts: Hauntings in the Holy City

“If I weren't so screwed up, I would've sold my soul a long time ago for a handsome man who made me feel pretty or who could at least treat me to a Millionaire's Martini. Instead I lingered over a watered down Sparkling Apple and felt sorry about what I was about to do to the blue-eyed bartender standing in front of me. Although I shouldn’t, after all, I am a bail recovery agent. It's my job to get my skip, no matter the cost.If I weren't so screwed up, I would've sold my soul a long time ago for a handsome man who made me feel pretty or who could at least treat me to a Millionaire's Martini. Instead I lingered over a watered down Sparkling Apple and felt sorry about what I was about to do to the blue-eyed bartender standing in front of me. Although I shouldn't, after all, I am a bail recovery agent. It's my job to get my skip, no matter the cost. Yet, I had been wondering lately. What was this job costing me? Yet, I had been wondering lately. What was this job costing me?”
― Miranda Parker, A Good Excuse to Be Bad

“Are you aware that Jesus Christ can spell? I get so tired of you spelling every slang and cuss word that crosses your mind, as though you are pulling one over on the Lord.”
― Brenda Sutton Rose, Dogwood Blues

“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

“Humans need each other for equilibrium and support. But writers must pull aside to take a quiet walk alone, not just for the sake of serenity but to hear the Voice inside. That is how the storyteller connects with with others--listen, write, share.”
― Patricia Hickman, The Pirate Queen

“Because of sorrow, my awareness of life's pulse is strongly detectable. It is syncopation while I journey, a lap of ocean in the eyes of every person I meet. This awareness informs the flesh of my stories. Grief has been an odd companion, at first a terror, but now I am all the better having accepted it for its intrinsic worth.”
― Patricia Hickman, The Pirate Queen

“The truth had lacerated him to the bone, had punctured his heart, and had ripped through his soul. The truth had slain him and tended to his wounds. The truth had hated him and loved him. The truth had opened his eyes to his own faults.”
― Brenda Sutton Rose, Dogwood Blues

“Facing the sagging middle when writing a novel, while inevitable, may be
overcome by pre-planning. I divide my collection of proposed scenes into three acts, each scene inciting tension that builds toward the final crisis in Act Three. If by Act Two the emotional river isn't spilling over the banks, I reassess the plot so that once the writing is flowing I don't slide into a dry creek. The central character should be struggling to navigate life well into the end of Act One, even if her fiercest antagonist is only from within.”
― Patricia Hickman, The Pirate Queen

“I began to doubt that I would ever know the truth of what transpired, or who those people really were. But all that changed one rainy August afternoon, when I was surprised by a dead man who had answers.”
― James Caskey, Haunted Savannah: America's Most Spectral City

“While writing the first draft is an exercise in shutting down all of the things we think we know so that the story features come tumbling out, the revision is the end of the joy ride. We pull on the gloves and sort of poke around inside the body. Is that a tumor? Will that limb need amputation? I nearly second-guessed myself into heart failure while learning to self-edit.”
― Patricia Hickman, The Pirate Queen

“Southern is a hot summer day that brings on a violent thunderstorm, cooling the air and bringing up smells of the earth that tempt us to eat the soil.”
― Edna Lewis

“The central character is an incomplete package of yearning that takes the length of the novel to complete. Completion, though, is not to be confused with perfection.”
― Patricia Hickman, The Pirate Queen

“I started out hoping to remind people at some point in the novel that we should be loving and kind. But then the theme usurped my life, spilling over into my novels until love was no longer a small voice, but now my purpose as a writer.”
― Patricia Hickman, The Pirate Queen

“The only way to deal with something crazy is to out crazy, crazy”
― Jordan Harris Poole

“My great-grandmother died almost 20 years before I was born. Hit by a train near Branford, FL. A very Southern Gothic way to go. I grew up with her stories. Pinches of snuff filled her mouth. Pinches left bruises on your arm. She was a witch. The black snakes crawled as she whistled. There were nail covered photos on the side of her barn. Songs to the cypress trees. Her daughter shared these things. All told with Affection. Enthusiasm. Awe. There is a life after life for those who are a good story.”
― Damon Thomas

“Raised on screened porches and greenhouse humidity,
I know how to suck the coolness out of concrete cracks.”
― Paige Johnson

“When the crop that brought wealth under the banner of Christianity is found to destroy human lungs but trees older than Jesus breathe, it makes me think the meek shall inherit the earth.”
― Imani Perry, South to America: A Journey Below the Mason Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation

“The Best gift you can give yourself is the gift of time and the ability to enjoy it.”
― Jordan Harris Poole

“He was driving into a world where the owls roosted with the chickens. Where folks kept Whip-poor-wills for pets and didn't get the Saturday Night Opry till Monday morning.”
― William Gay, I Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down: Collected Stories

“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

“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)