"The North isn't a place. It's just a direction out of the South."

Some quotes on one of my favourite subjects: the South.

"The biggest myth about Southern women is that we are frail types--fainting on our sofas...nobody where I grew up ever acted like that. We were about as fragile as coal trucks."
--Lee Smith

"...People just showed up and were always made welcome. To stay less than an hour was an insult, and there was always a meal...and nobody was ever let out of the house without the goodbye ritual..."
----Shirley Abbot

"Southerners have a genius for psychological alchemy...If something intolerable simply cannot be changed, driven away or shot they will not only tolerate it but take pride in it as well."
-- Florence King

"Recognizing that it certainly isn't true of all of us, I would propose that a Southerner is distinguished by a sense of neighborliness, a garrulous quality, a wish to get together a lot."
--from Charles Kuralt in "Southerners: Portrait of a People"

"Within the South itself, no other form of cultural expression, not even music, is as distinctively characteristic of the region as the spreading of a feast of native food and drink before a gathering of kin and friends."
-- John Egerton, from "Southern Food, at Home, on the Road, in History"

"What can be more Southern than to obsess about being Southern?"
--Elizabeth Fortson Arroyo

"Southerners can't stand to eat alone. If we're going to cook a mess of greens we want to eat them with a mess of people."
--Julia Reed

"In the South, the breeze blows softer...neighbors are friendlier, nosier, and more talkative. (By contrast with the Yankee, the Southerner never uses one word when ten or twenty will do)...This is a different place. Our way of thinking is different, as are our ways of seeing, laughing, singing, eating, meeting and parting. Our walk is different, as the old song goes, our talk and our names. Nothing about us is quite the same as in the country to the north and west. What we carry in our memories is different too, and that may explain everything else."
--Charles Kuralt in "Southerners: Portrait of a People"

"Those politicians are going up fool's hill on the slippery side."

"Be careful not to run your mouth before you put your mind in gear. You can apologise all you want afterwards, but it's like shutting the barn door after the horse gets out."

"Hungry is a mighty fine sauce."

"Folks who get all caught up in themselves sure do make small packages."

"It is easy to pick up and move when the culture you know is all McDonald's. But if you grow up the way I did in Louisiana, you don't in your travels find anything like it. Some of it is the cuisine, but mostly it is a mind-set." --Glenn Petre