"Living in the South often means slipping out of temporal joint, a peculiar phenomenon that I find both nourishes and wounds. To identify a person as a Southerner suggests not only that her history is inescapable and formative but that it is also impossibly present. Southerners live uneasily at the nexus between myth and reality, watching the mishmash amalgam of sorrow, humility, honor, graciousness, and renegade defiance play out against a backdrop of profligate physical beauty."

— Sally Mann, Deep South

6:33 pm  •  2 November 2009  •  12 notes  •  view comments
Filed Under: books deep south myth quote sally mann southerners the south a southerner

“The long and the short of it is she needs a companion. The very night I left New York she said to me: now you listen here—while you are in your American South, you make it your business to find me a nice Southern girl—you know the kind I have in mind. Of course the kind she had in mind is the Southerner who is so curiously like the old-style Russian gentry. I thought no more about it until last night as I watched Kate go up the steps. My God, I said, there goes Natasha Rostov. Have you ever noticed it?”

10:59 pm  •  18 August 2009  •  1 note  •  view comments
Filed Under: books leo tolstoy literature natasha rostov quotes the moviegoer walker percy war and peace writing a southerner