Great Southern Quotes by folks born and raised under Southern skies or inspired by the South

“Gimme soaky bread with grits and gravy for breakfast, pinto beans with ham hocks for dinner and cracklin’ cornbread in buttermilk for supper and you’ll have yourself a happy man. – Gene Owens, Columnist – talking about Southern treats.

“They still think differently. And the place keeps producing well beyond its share of great writers.” – Lisa Alther, Southern novelist, on why there are so many great Southern writers.

“In the South, the breeze blows softer… neighbors are friendlier, 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.”–Charles Kuralt in Southerners: Portrait of a People

“What is there to see in Europe? I’ll bet those foreigners can’t show us a thing we haven’t got right here in Georgia.” –Margaret Mitchell 

“If you like cornbread n beans, black-eyed peas n grits, too. Catfish n turnip greens, and Southern barbecue Love sweet, sweet tea and, of course, coke. In the spring n fall, eat salet made from poke, add peach cobbler n buttermilk pie. Love okra, green tomatoes and chicken to fry. Gumbo, biscuits n gravy, blackberry jam and a big old slab of country ham. Made by the hands of a Southern cook, then you must be Southern in my book!” – J. Yeager 

“Southerners know you can’t be considered a serious Southern cook if you don’t know how to make peach cobbler.”  – Trisha Yearwood

“Southerners equate food with love, so if you love what they cook, they’re sure to love you back.” – Kim Holloway

“It was not a Southern watermelon that Eve took: we know it because she repented.” – Mark Twain

“You might be from the South if – you learned how to make noise with a blade of grass between your thumbs” – Jeanette H. Whitfield

“The most beautiful voice in the world is that of an educated Southern woman” – Winston Churchill

“The perfect speech would consist of the diction of the east, the vigor of the midwest and the melody of the South” – Winston Churchill

“In the South, as in no other American region, people use language as it was surely meant to be employed; a lush, personal, emphatic, treasure of coins to be spent slowly and for value” – Time Magazine, September 1976

“We Southerners live at a leisurely pace and sharing our hospitality with our family, friends, and the stranger within our gate is one of our greatest joys.” – Winifred G. Cheney

“From the mountains of Virginia to the Texas Plains there is a Southern way of life and it begins with hospitality and a proper emphasis on good cooking.” – Winifred G. Cheney

“The Southern drawl has many variations, but all are authentic Dixie. Stretch out words, add pauses, drop a “g” from “ing” and sprinkle your speech with Southern phrases like, “looks like somethin the cat drug in” or “like a chicken with it’s head cut off” or “like a duck on a June bug.” – The Politically Incorrect Guide to the South.

“Southerners love to sweeten their foods-from sweet tea to sugar on grits, everything is better when it is sweeter. Southern favorites include fried chicken, sweet corn bread, potato salad & collard greens. The more the food sticks to your ribs, the better. Large picnics, family get togethers and after church meals are all highly popular. If you attend those on a regular basis, you might be Southern.” – Jessica Bold

“Made by the hands of a Southern cook, then you must be Southern in my book!” – J. Yeager

“Cause Dixie is a part of me. My Dixieland.” – J. Yeager

“Johnnie! Susie! Come to supper! The music of iron skillets, the flitting of lighting bugs, are in that antique invocation. Supper, in the South, was the light meal: cereal or sandwiches, sometimes bacon and eggs. No culinary folderol, anyway. All of that belonged to the midday repast known as dinner, when the whole family turned up, from office or school, to feast in solidarity on meatloaf and turnip greens.” – by William Murchison, The Dallas Morning News Columnist 3/13/96

“O magnet-South! O glistening perfumed South! my South! O quick mettle, rich blood, impulse and love! Good and evil! O all dear to me!” – Walt Whitman

“Our Southern homeland, beautiful and so grand. Your laid-back Southern ways, Your long, hot, humid days, Your traditions from long ago and your speech that flows so slow. Your native sons and daughters, too My Dixieland! I love you.~~J. Yeager   In the South, we “sip” sweet tea, mimosas, and mint juleps while “swayin” in the porch swing or “rockin” on the veranda. These things are all guaranteed stress relievers!” – J.Yeager

“I’m a Southern girl. I like when they open the door and pull out a chair. I’m really into a man’s man.” – Brooke Burns

“It’s hi ya’ll did ya eat well. Come on in child. I’m sure glad to know ya.” – Southern Voice Lyrics

“Well it’s way, way down where the cain grows tall. Down where they say, “Y’all” Walk on in with that Southern drawl. ‘Cause that’s what I like about the South. She’s got backbone and turnip greens. Ham hocks and butter beans You, me and New Orleans. An’ that’s what I like about the South” – Bob Wills

“She was so Southern that she cried tears that came straight from the Mississippi, and she always smelled faintly of cottonwood and peaches.” – Sara Addison Allen

“It is so hot in the South tonight, the mosquitoes are carrying canteens. There’s a Southern accent, where I come from. The young’uns call it country, The Yankees call it dumb. I got my own way of talkin but everything is done, with a Southern accent where I come from” – Tom Petty

“A Georgia peach, a real Georgia peach, a backyard great-grandmother’s orchard peach, is as thickly furred as a sweater, and so fluent and sweet that once you bite through the flannel, it brings tears to your eyes.” – Melissa Fay Greene, ‘Praying for Sheetrock’

“Tough girls come from New York. Sweet girls, they’re from Georgia. But us Kentucky girls, we have fire and ice in our blood. We can ride horses, be a debutante, throw left hooks, and drink with the boys, all the while making sweet tea, darlin’. And if we have an opinion, you know you’re gonna hear it.” – Ashley Judd, Actress

“All I can say is that there’s a sweetness here, a Southern sweetness, that makes sweet music. If I had to tell somebody who had never been to the South, who had never heard of soul music, what it was, I’d just have to tell him that it’s music from the heart, from the pulse, from the innermost feeling. That’s my soul; that’s how I sing. And that’s the South.” — Al Green

“True grits, more grits, fish, grits, and collards. Life is good where grits are swallered.”– Roy Blount, Jr.

“About fifteen miles above New Orleans the river goes very slowly. It has broadened out there until it is almost a sea and the water is yellow with the mud of half a continent. Where the sun strikes it, it is golden.” – Frank Yerby, Author

“I was a typical farm boy. I liked the farm. I enjoyed the things that you do on a farm, go down to the drainage ditch and fish, and look at the crawfish and pick a little cotton.” – Sam Donaldson, Reporter and News Anchor from Texas

“About fifteen miles above New Orleans the river goes very slowly. It has broadened out there until it is almost a sea and the water is yellow with the mud of half a continent. Where the sun strikes it, it is golden.” – Frank Yerby, Author