Sela Ward Quotes

If social cohesion is one of the good things about growing up in a small town, the downside is the unchallengeable power of cliques. That sort of thing is in the nature of the teenage beast, but in bigger towns and cities there are usually so many different social groups within a single school or locality that most kids can find others they feel comfortable with. Not so in a small town. If you don't conform, even at the cost of sacrificing your principles and self-respect, you will be an outcast. And if you have a sensitive nature, it will mark you for life.

Los Angeles, in short, is a place of great material and creative wealth, and boundless personal freedom—but also of a certain spiritual and civic poverty. Though there are many wonderful people here, on the whole it’s an anxious, self-involved place, where roots and tradition are largely forgotten, where neighbors don’t know each other and don’t particularly want to. It’s not that L.A. people are bad, but that there’s something about the way life is structured in this sunny paradise that leaves people feeling atomized and powerless to do anything about our common condition. I know it. I feel it myself, and had been feeling it for a long time before I realized how homesick I was. And I want better for my children.

What’s the effect of this attitude of gratitude on Southern children? Well, we think it’s summed up by this description of Mississippi Grits Sela Ward: “Her niceness is genuine, the product of a small-town Southern upbringing that left her with a lasting appreciation for the generosity of spirits that surrounded her as a child. It’s not just about disarming smiles and gracious manners, though they’re part of her charm. It’s more about her openness, her unpretentiousness, and her self-deprecating sense of humor.” We couldn’t have said it better ourselves.

With the possible exception of grits, there’s no food more Southern than greens, whose bitter smell while cooking down in salty fatback amid the jittery hiss of a pressure cooker is a Proustian madeleine for generations of black and white Southerners alike. The

Southern life follows not the rules of logic, but the whims of poetry. The ways of Southern womanhood have always been distinct. After all, nobody’s filming Steel Magnolias about the women of North Dakota, and a Ya-Ya Sisterhood has yet to be discovered in Rhode Island.