Southern Gothic Quotes

Later he saw Jesus move from tree to tree in the back of his mind, a wild ragged figure motioning him to turn around and come off into the dark where he might be walking on the water and not know it and then suddenly know it and drown.

Her hands crept around his neck, tangling in his hair to keep him closer, even though she knew that beautiful boys with expiration dates couldn't be held, only borrowed for a time.

you always felt they were pawns in an indifferent universe, butts of an existential joke with no punch line.

The first thing you notice about New Orleans are the burying grounds - the cemeteries - and they're a cold proposition, one of the best things there are here. Going by, you try to be as quiet as possible, better to let them sleep. Greek, Roman, sepulchres- palatial mausoleums made to order, phantomesque, signs and symbols of hidden decay - ghosts of women and men who have sinned and who've died and are now living in tombs. The past doesn't pass away so quickly here. You could be dead for a long time. The ghosts race towards the light, you can almost hear the heavy breathing spirits, all determined to get somewhere. New Orleans, unlike a lot of those places you go back to and that don't have the magic anymore, still has got it. Night can swallow you up, yet none of it touches you. Around any corner, there's a promise of something daring and ideal and things are just getting going. There's something obscenely joyful behind every door, either that or somebody crying with their head in their hands. A lazy rhythm looms in the dreamy air and the atmosphere pulsates with bygone duels, past-life romance, comrades requesting comrades to aid them in some way. You can't see it, but you know it's here. Somebody is always sinking. Everyone seems to be from some very old Southern families. Either that or a foreigner. I like the way it is. There are a lot of places I like, but I like New Orleans better. There's a thousand different angles at any moment. At any time you could run into a ritual honoring some vaguely known queen. Bluebloods, titled persons like crazy drunks, lean weakly against the walls and drag themselves through the gutter. Even they seem to have insights you might want to listen to. No action seems inappropriate here. The city is one very long poem. Gardens full of pansies, pink petunias, opiates. Flower-bedecked shrines, white myrtles, bougainvillea and purple oleander stimulate your senses, make you feel cool and clear inside. Everything in New Orleans is a good idea. Bijou temple-type cottages and lyric cathedrals side by side. Houses and mansions, structures of wild grace. Italianate, Gothic, Romanesque, Greek Revival standing in a long line in the rain. Roman Catholic art. Sweeping front porches, turrets, cast-iron balconies, colonnades- 30-foot columns, gloriously beautiful- double pitched roofs, all the architecture of the whole wide world and it doesn't move. All that and a town square where public executions took place. In New Orleans you could almost see other dimensions. There's only one day at a time here, then it's tonight and then tomorrow will be today again. Chronic melancholia hanging from the trees. You never get tired of it. After a while you start to feel like a ghost from one of the tombs, like you're in a wax museum below crimson clouds. Spirit empire. Wealthy empire. One of Napoleon's generals, Lallemaud, was said to have come here to check it out, looking for a place for his commander to seek refuge after Waterloo. He scouted around and left, said that here the devil is damned, just like everybody else, only worse. The devil comes here and sighs. New Orleans. Exquisite, old-fashioned. A great place to live vicariously. Nothing makes any difference and you never feel hurt, a great place to really hit on things. Somebody puts something in front of you here and you might as well drink it. Great place to be intimate or do nothing. A place to come and hope you'll get smart - to feed pigeons looking for handouts

When we became teenagers boredom grew like a moth in a cocoon fighting to escape, and the peace created by our parents became a prison. We sought excitement and adventure. We sought anything but the sinless, pure, and average of the faux idyllic.

It wasn’t dying that she feared, it was dying bad: leaving her grandboy alone in the world, unprotected, his wounds unhealed. Death, which walked ever through these mountains, knew she would not go down easy.

The locust has no king Just noise and hard language They talk me over

You got to tell me brave captain, why are the wicked so strong, how do the angels get to sleep, when the devil leaves the porchlight on.

I look out past the corn and the wheat and wonder how many sets of bones are buried, unspoken, keeping their stories to themselves in the dirt. I wonder if they know the sky is bright blue today and the air smells sweet. I wonder if they still listen in.

But somewhere in America, between the freeways and the Food-4-Less, between the filling stations and the 5-o-'clock news, behind the blue blinking light coming off the TV, there is a space, an empty space, between us, around us, inside us, that inevitable, desperate, begs to be filled up. And nothing, not shame, not God, not a new microwave, not a wide-screen TV or that new diet with grapefruits, can ever, ever fill it. Underneath all that white noise there's a lack.

In the molten fire where he lay he could watch the slow machinations of eternity, the cosmic miracle of each second being born, eggshaped, silverplated, phallic, time thrusting itself gleaming through the worn and worthless husk of the microsecond previous, halting, beginning to show the slow and infinitesimal accreations of decay in the clocking away of life in a mechanism encoded at the moment of conception, withering, shunted aside by time's next orgasmic thrust, and all to the beating of some galactic heart, to voices, a madman's mutterings from a snare in the web of the world.

Out west everything has its own space. Every little ramshackle cabin, shack, hut sits perched atop its own little piece of destiny with room to breathe, room to live, room to die. You'll see them, the dead ones, sitting by the side of the road like some faded gray and rotting mystery, thinking about the good ol days before trains and cars and wanting more.

Because I will always remember that when I told her I needed help burying a body, the first thing she said was, "Let me go get my shovel.

Pushing through some viney branches, she comes into a clearing andfinds a sight that makes her hush--and not just her voice but every part of her, like feeling silence in her deep guts... It's something she can feel in the back of her throat, her dislike of the scene--as though what she's looking upon is unholy, the conjunction of chaos and order in a forced fit where everything is stretched and bent in the wrong way like those baby legs.

~ darkness doesn't have to mean evil.

Pay closer attention to road. Try not to look at the woods on either side of you. Try not to stare into the endless vacuum. You know what happens if you stare into those chasms. They envelop you. They become you, and you become a part of them. You become a part of nothing.

And his soul plunged downward, drowning in that deep pit: he felt that could never again escape from this smothering flood of pain and ugliness, from the eclipsing horror and pity of it all. And as he walked, he twisted his own neck about, and beat the air with his arm like a wing, as if he had received a blow in his kidneys. He felt that he might be clean and free if he could only escape into a single burning passion -- hard, and hot, and glittering -- of love, hatred, terror, or disgust. But he was caught, he was strangling, in the web of futility.

I asked about the price of the guitars, reminding him that if expected me to man the cash register, I’d need to know what to charge. He told me, 'There ain’t no set price on these babies. Take what the customer offers you. Even if it’s his soul.

Spanish Moss- A Southern Gothic, a Live Oak Lady, caressing limbs, secret and shady. Wild and pale, curly and thin, She's a tease in the breeze. She sways in the wind.

As kids we went to the Trenton, FL roller skating rink. It is a funeral home now. We all lived a Southern Gothic children's book.

God, I’m trapped in a Southern gothic novel.” “You asked for it.” She finishes off her martini in a gulp. “I hope nobody’s going to ask me to squeal like a pig.

I look at you, Mrs. Emily. I see your eyes smile before your lips. Your hair has a curl that droops onto your forehead when the weather is humid . . . I look at you too, Sabine. I see you.

Many see Southern Gothic literature as just recalling the "bad old days." This is not the case. There are still those places in Florida where you get hookworms by walking barefoot after an afternoon thunderstorm.

Nothing is allowed to die in a society of storytelling people. It is all-the good and the bad-carted up and brought along from one generation to the next. And everything that is brought along is colored and shaped by those who bring it.

I marveled how people managed to work surrounded by all this expansive light and heat and humidity. It felt like I’d stepped into a Southern gothic novel, and all I wanted to do was sit my ass on a rocking chair and drink something cool.

Lady,' Rydell said carefully, 'I think you're crazier than a sack full of assholes.' Her eyebrows shot up. 'There,' she said. 'There what?' 'Color, Mr. Rydell. Fire. The brooding verbal polychromes of an almost unthinkably advanced decay.

The play itself is a rip-roaring piece of Southern Gothic. I used to refer to it as the play Tennessee Williams would have written if he ever tried crack. But then I found out that it was completely possible that Williams had, in fact, tried crack, and the result was not this play.

If you threw Elvis and a scarecrow in a blender, topped the whole thing off with Seagram's 7 and pressed dice, you would make my dad. He's got tar black hair and shoulder blades that cut through his undershirt like clipped wings. He looks like a gray-skinned, skinny-rat cowboy and I would be lying if I didn't say that I am, maybe sorta kinda, keep it secret, in love with him. And you would be, too, you would, if you met him before drink number five or six. Just meet him then. Get lost before things get ugly.

I'd not be shocked if bad water was the source of all the moody Gothic Lit classics. With a few cases of hookworm to add some Southern spunk.

A kid burned down the Scout Hut. That old log cabin in the Cross City park. When asked why he just said he was bored. All I knew could relate. Small town boredom. Rural gloom.

Potential enemies make the best friends and lovers. Many a blessed union begins in adversity.

The quaint side of rural Southern narrative ignores that you'll grow old there and be killing rattlesnakes with your crutches.

I can remember how when I was young I believed death to be a phenomenon of the body; now I know it to be merely a function of the mind—and that of the minds of the ones who suffer the bereavement. The nihilists sat it is the end; the fundamentalists, the beginning; when in reality it is no more than a single tenant or family moving out of a tenement or a town.

That's the measure of friendship, isn't it? Knowing people who will jar your secret and store it in a dark cellar forever. People who know it's never about the secret itself, but the keeping of it.

Southerners are an easygoing race when it comes to aberrations of conduct. They will react with anger if something out of the ordinary is presented as a possible future occurrence; but if an unusual circumstance is discovered to be an established fact, they will usually accept it without rancor or judgment as part of the normal order of things. To have informed the men who hung about the seed and feed stores that two women had bought Gavin Pond and were turning it into the biggest farm in the county would have brought out calls to repeal the voting rights amendment; but when confronted with Grace, the men were perfectly willing to accept her, her cousin Lucille, and Lucille's little boy.

My great-grandmother died almost 20 years before I was born. Hit by a train near Branford, FL. A very Southern Gothic way to go. I grew up with her stories. Pinches of snuff filled her mouth. Pinches left bruises on your arm. She was a witch. The black snakes crawled as she whistled. There were nail covered photos on the side of her barn. Songs to the cypress trees. Her daughter shared these things. All told with Affection. Enthusiasm. Awe. There is a life after life for those who are a good story.

There are situations considered "not fit for children." Many I know grew up with these situations. Eight-year-olds with the Sheriff's Office number memorized. Southernness is raking up countless bags of Magnolia leaves knowing you'll eventually get a few blooms.

My great-grandfather Delmar Thomas is buried beside his wife Lula now. Mount Horeb Cemetery near Bell, FL. As a kid I fell into a fire ant mound. Delmar rescued me. I cried. Covered in bites. He just laughed. Told me that is how you learn. This is what I learned.

I will confess that in the interest of narrative I secretly hoped I'd find a payload of southern gothic: deceit and scandal, alcoholism, domestic abuse, car crashes, bogeymen, clandestine affairs, dearly loved and disputed family land, abandonments, blow jobs, suicides, hidden addictions, the tragically early death of a beautiful bride, racial complications, vast sums of money made and lost, the return of a prodigal son, and maybe even bloody murder. If any of this stuff lay hidden in my family history, I had the distinct sense I'd find it in those twine-bound boxes in the attic. And I did: all of it and more.

Gainesville, FL was soft on teen shoplifters in the 90s. The police were rarely involved. But you got banned from the store. This divided friend groups. Some had to wait outside. They would be beside every record store. Caught with a Sonic Youth CD down their shirt. Waiting. I'd join them. Not because I was banned. I just liked flirting with the Bad Girls.

When I was a kid I had an illustrated "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" book. A yard sale non-Disney version that was already vintage. The dwarfs had no names but got along well. All sharing the same bedroom. Sleeping in a row of beds with their feet out from the covers. Because of this I started sleeping with my feet uncovered as well. And now as an adult it is still the same. Feet out even as it gets cold. We are what we read.

When I was a kid an older guy sat out front of a gas station in Old Town, FL. His favorite story involved roughing up a couple of guys because "you could tell they weren't from around here." The gruesome details were implied as he'd pull out a straight razor and a plastic bag containing Red Devil lye. "Deliverance", the end of "Easy Rider", and every "wrong turn" horror movie would later make more sense because of those childhood stops for gas and a Yoo-hoo.

The Release In those last moments before the platter of salt and dirt lay on his stomach, wax-light had waved across a mute heart, his son waited by the bed. Raised to believe the soul left the body with its last breath, he listened for death's rattle, then pressed his lips like a kiss to his father's lips, and took into his mouth the breath that had given him breath, a life distilled to one stir of air soft as moth wings against palms, held a moment, then let go.

Ever since I could remember reading, I was a fan of Horror Novels, then just an Avid reader of all things dark and deeply written or off the cuff styles and not so bland and sterile as if the grammar police forensically wrote it to be safe, then re-edited it to be even more annoyingly not from an emotion but from a text book, I love dark dark fiction that's why i write it. Some of my favorite writers are Anne Rice, Hunter S. Thompson and Clive Barker, perhaps you can sense this in my writing.

He chose a guitar from one of the oak cabinets. Picking it with his calloused fingers, he squeezed his eyes shut and hummed. Something miraculous poured from his soul, riding in on a lonely train, rising softly from a distant place— a place I’d never been— then louder and louder it came, traveling through my ears, pulsing through my veins. I’d never heard anything like it. When he finished playing, he sat with the guitar cradled in his arms, waiting, the music traveling through the forgotten city of my soul.

When his knock gets no response, Byron leaves the porch and goes around the house and enters the small, enclosed back yard. He sees the chair at once beneath the mulberry tree. It is a canvas deck chair, mended and faded and sagged so long to the shape of Hightower’s body that even when empty it seems to hold still in ghostly embrace the owner’s obese shapelessness; approaching, Byron thinks how the mute chair evocative of disuse and supineness and shabby remoteness from the world, is somehow the symbol and the being too of the man himself.

Down fabled roads reverting now to woods Winer felt himself imprisoned by the dark beyond the carlights and by the compulsive timbre of Motormouth's voice, a drone obsessed with spewing out words without regard for truth or even for coherence, as if he must spit out vast quantities of them and rearrange them for his liking, step back, and admire the various patterns he could construct: these old tales of love and betrayal had no truth beyond his retelling of them, for each retelling shaped his past, made him immortal, gave him an infinite number of lives.

In the morning we shed our blue sheep’s clothing. Our border shirts came out of satchels and onto our backs. We preferred this means of dress for it was more flatout and honest. The shirts were large with pistol pockets, and usually colored red or dun. Many had been embroidered with ornate stitching by loving women some were blessed enough to have. Mine was plain, but well broken in. I can think of no more chilling a sight than that of myself all astride my big bay horse with six or eight pistols dangling from my saddle, my rebel locks aloft on the breeze and a whoopish yell on my lips. When my awful costume was multiplied by that of my comrades, we stopped feint hearts just by our mode of dread stylishness.

I told one of the writers that our fields were so nearly vertical that we planted our corn with a shotgun and had to breed a race of mules with legs shorter on one side than the other for plowing. And when he asked how we transported the corn down off the mountain, I said, in a jug. He appeared to believe me, so I was encouraged to go on and tell him that every church in that corner of the state, except our Indian congregation, either conducted services speaking entirely in tongues or else took up serpents as recommended by Jesus. Both the writer and I had taken a few rounds of Scotch at the time. The story appeared as fact in a well-known national periodical, along with the obligatory descriptions of the beauty and ruggedness and unmatched remoteness and mystery of our mountains.

He found Granny on the porch, asleep. Her chin sat on her chest, rising and falling with her breath. He gathered her up in his arms, light as a girl, and carried her inside to her room. He covered her in her old handed-down quilt. The outer layers were burnished to a luster over decades of sleeping flesh, the inner batting composed of older blankets still. He tucked it under her feet, her elbows and shoulders, and went out into the den and opened the door of the wood stove. A mouth of red coals. He added two lengths of the seasoned white oak they kept stacked on the porch, hot-burning wood for cold nights, and stoked it to a fury before stepping outside.

They rose when she entered— a small, fat woman in black, with a thin gold chain descending to her waist and vanishing into her belt, leaning on an ebony cane with a tarnished gold head. Her skeleton was small and spare; perhaps that was why what would have been merely plumpness in another was obesity in her. She looked bloated, like a body long submerged in motionless water, and of that pallid hue. Her eyes, lost in the fatty ridges of her face, looked like two small pieces of coal pressed into a lump of dough as they moved from one face to another while the visitors stated their errand.

Alabama was not - and I don't think is - an abortion-friendly state. Remember: Birmingham is where a man made the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list by bombing a Southside abortion clinic, killing a security guard. The bomber's brother was so upset by the manhunt that to protest, he cut off his own hand with a circular saw. And he videotaped it. And then he drove himself to the hospital. EMTs were sent to his house to collect the hand, and a surgeon reattached it. This is Southern Gothic country. Our zealots don't play.

My great-grandmother died almost 20 years before I was born. Hit by a train near Branford, FL. A very Southern Gothic way to go. I grew up with her stories. Pinches of snuff filled her mouth. Pinches left bruises on your arm. She was a witch. The black snakes crawled as she whistled. There were nail covered photos on the side of her barn. Songs to the cypress trees. Her daughter shared these things. All told with Affection. Enthusiasm. Awe. There is a life after life for those who are a good story.

And we’d sit in the dry leaves that whispered a little with the slow respiration of our waiting and with the slow breathing of the earth and the windless October, the rank smell of the lantern fouling the brittle air, listening to the dogs and to the echo of Louis’s voice dying away. He never raised it, yet on a still night we have heard it from our front porch. When he called the dogs in he sounded just like the horn he carried slung over his shoulder and never used, but clearer, mellower, as though his voice were a part of darkness and silence, coiling out of it, coiling into it again. WhoOoooo. WhoOoooo. WhoOooooooooooooooo.

From state to state, county to county, I breezed along, and this progress was a way of understanding how lucky I was, because the confinement that Southerners feel, their keen awareness of themselves as stereotypes—provincials and yokels, in literature, in life—is something palpable. No wonder, given the obliqueness of Southern fiction (and one way to know a place is through its writing)—the evasions, the jokes, the showy literary metaphors. No wonder the grotesque preponderance of the gothic and the freaks—the reality was too brutal to state baldly, unbearably so.

That’s why I started writing this story. Those things were just so heavy. It was impossible to carry around all by myself, my real father, Ray’s abuse, your death, so I took them and wrote them down. I edited them and changed the words around, shaping them into something whole. And then I printed them out onto a page, closed the book, and put it on a shelf. And if someone else read my words, then it meant that I wasn’t alone.

It was as if a medieval castle and a Southern-belle, antebellum mansion had a baby and it had been delivered into the world by a gothic wedding-cake decorator.

He was driving into a world where the owls roosted with the chickens. Where folks kept Whip-poor-wills for pets and didn't get the Saturday Night Opry till Monday morning.

That's what they mean by the womb of time: the agony and the despair of spreading bones, the hard girdle in which lie the outraged entrails of events.

A girl sits out-of-doors in her slip./ She turns fourteen, twenty-eight, fifty-six,/ goes crazy.

He had the good sense to grab his parasol before he left; otherwise, he would have been cooking in the afternoon sun, nothing but a puddle in Def Leppard crop-top and skinny jeans.

He turned doctor. One of his first patients was his wife. Possibly he kept her alive. At least, he enabled her to produce life, though he was fifty and she past forty when the son was born. That son grew to manhood among phantoms, and side by side with a ghost.

the southern gothic trappings, the rumors and whispers, were too delicious to ruin with the winter wind of truth.

include the hog IN our organization such as it is...Have you meet our secretary ?

...sure, it's Southern Gothic: Southern Ontario Gothic.