Rural South Quotes

In the rural South, the only interesting people were the sexual deviants. Everybody else was able to be part of the mainstream, and could find a way somehow.

I tell people I live in Atlanta. Georgia's outside of Atlanta, absolutely. But my family's from the very rural south. My family's from Tuskegee, Alabama. And they're from Eatonton, Georgia. Places like Greenwood, Georgia, my family is from... so I've seen it both ways.

Having come from a working-class family in the rural South, the fashion industry opened my eyes to culture, arts, and the world.

Coming from the cotton plantation, the southern regions, I was brought up with real nice kids, mannered kids, who would go to church on Sunday.

Yeah, I spent my teen years in West Virginia, and when I was a kid, in Louisiana. I definitely have that exposure to two different sorts of rural: the South and Appalachia.

Growing up on the plantation there in Mississippi, I would work Monday through Saturday noon. I'd go to town on Saturday afternoons, sit on the street corner, and I'd sing and play.

Early on, I was so impressed with Charles Dickens. I grew up in the South, in a little village in Arkansas, and the whites in my town were really mean, and rude. Dickens, I could tell, wouldn't be a man who would curse me out and talk to me rudely.

I grew up in the country in the rural South, and I have a brother a year older than me and a sister a year younger.

I understand the rural south because I spent a lot of time in it when I was a kid and my grandfather’s brothers were farmers and I spent time on the farm when I was a kid with them walking through the fields and working and hanging out.

Most people just aren't clear-eyed about the rural South. We think that the urban centers are the problem, and the rural areas across the country are idyllic, suffused with good old American values, social values, religious values, moral values. It's what we tell ourselves to keep this political power structure in place, and it's what we see in pop culture, too.

Living in the rural South, you sometimes feel trapped, like you don't have any options. It grinds people down, and of course it leads to substance abuse. I see it all around me. So many people in my family, probably more than 50 percent, have had substance abuse problems, either currently or in the past. It's so personal and immediate to me.