“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.'”— Pat Conroy
“That's the paradox of the south: grace and violence, hospitality and cruelty, living side-by-side, unseen, until they erupt.”— Pat Conroy
“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
“I think it is safe to say that while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted.”— Flannery O'Connor
“The south is a strange place, one that can't be fit inside a movie, a song or a book.”— Rosanne Cash
“It may sound funny, but I love the South. I don't choose to live anywhere else. There's land here, where a man can raise cattle, and I'm going to do that someday.”— Medgar Evers
“I’m a Southerner. It’s part of my DNA. It’s a very rich and fertile ground for a writer.”— Carlisle Floyd
“To be a white Southerner these days is to be a ghost, a phantom, a figment of others' imaginations.”— Jim Goad
“No people in the history of the world have been so misunderstood, so misjudged, and so cruelly maligned as the people of the South.”— John Brown Gordon
“There's an odd bit of reverence for the past in the South, and a sense of timelessness.”— William Joyce