“
Yes, peasants,” he repeated slowly. “The lowliest of the low among humans.” Then he enunciated, “Exceedingly backward and vulgar hillbillies.”
“Been called worse, mister.” At his raised brows, she exhaled impatiently. “Bootlegger, moonshiner, Elly May Clampett, mountain mama, redneck, backwoods Bessie, hick, trailer trash, yokel, and, more recently, death-row con.”
“No references to mining? I’m disappointed.
”
”
Kresley Cole (Lothaire (Immortals After Dark, #11))
“
I know what you're thinking. ‘How the hell does this broke ass piece of trailer trash know words like caveat,’ right? Well guess what? I've read every single book on the New York Times list of 'Top 100 Literary Classics,' not to mention every Jane Austen, Sylvia Plath or Bronte sisters’ book ever written. And fuck you very much for judging me, by the way.
”
”
Isobel Irons (Promiscuous (Issues, #1))
“
It didn’t occur to me that I was glistening with sweat and wearing a bikini top until they turned off the bikes, pulled off their helmets and turned to scope me out. To make my own personal cliché perfect, Def Leppard’s Pour Some Sugar On Me blasted through the radio. I winced – I must look like a white-trash princess from hell, basking outside my trailer in a bikini to outdated butt rock.
”
”
Joanna Wylde (Reaper's Property (Reapers MC, #1))
“
Winter denial: therein lay the key to California Schadenfreude--the secret joy that the rest of the country feels at the misfortune of California. The country said: "Look at them, with their fitness and their tans, their beaches and their movie stars, their Silicon Valley and silicone breasts, their orange bridge and their palm trees. God, I hate those smug, sunshiny bastards!" Because if you're up to your navel in a snowdrift in Ohio, nothing warms your heart like the sight of California on fire. If you're shoveling silt out of your basement in the Fargo flood zone, nothing brightens your day like watching a Malibu mansion tumbling down a cliff into the sea. And if a tornado just peppered the land around your Oklahoma town with random trailer trash and redneck nuggets, then you can find a quantum of solace in the fact that the earth actually opened up in the San Fernando Valley and swallowed a whole caravan of commuting SUVs.
”
”
Christopher Moore (The Stupidest Angel: A Heartwarming Tale of Christmas Terror (Pine Cove, #3))
“
I wanted Ole Miss to feel special, but mostly I felt that the Ole Miss crowd looked at me like I was just white trash from a town full of trailers.… All was not lost. I saw the movie All The President’s Men, mostly because Robert Redford was the star. The fast-paced world of the Washington Post…captivated me. Sitting in a dark theater that afternoon, I fell in love with the idea of becoming a reporter. That was the movie that clinched my plan to major in journalism and political science…. I'd started Ole Miss as a Lady Rebel but left more rebellious than ladylike.
”
”
Karen Hinton (Penis Politics: A Memoir of Women, Men and Power)
“
Devon was even more of a piece of shit trailer trash than I was, but holy shit did I love him. Like, heart completely consumed, wanted him for life, ride or die type of loved him. He was mine and I was his, and even though we fucked shit up more often than not, I couldn’t imagine going through this clusterfuck of a life without him now.
”
”
Nordika Night (Lot 62 (From Nothing, #2))
“
I know i don't get the happily ever after. My knight and shinning armor took the highway detour around this godforsaken shit hole. I've made peace with that. That doesn't mean i'm going to lie down like a doormat and let every cocky prick in the trailer have his way with me." - White Trash Beautiful
”
”
Teresa Mummert (White Trash Beautiful (White Trash, #1))
“
At thirteen I wanted monsters that ate whole cities, radioactive corpses that came out of the ocean and ate surfers, and girls in black bras who looked like trailer trash.
”
”
Stephen King (On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft)
“
I wanted monsters that ate whole cities, radioactive corpses that came out of the ocean and ate surfers, and girls in black bras who looked like trailer trash. Horror movies, science fiction movies, movies about losers on motorcycles- this was the stuff that turned my dials up to ten.
”
”
Stephen King (On Writing)
“
The greatest spiritual leaders in history have all preached love for others as the basis for all happiness, and never did they accompany such mandates with a list of unlovable actions or deeds. They never said, love everybody except for the gays. Love everybody except for the homeless. Love everybody except for the drug users. Love everybody except for the gang members, or those covered in ink, or the spouse abusers. They didn’t tell us it was okay to love everybody with the exception of the “trailer trash,” those living in poverty, or the illegal immigrants. They didn’t tell us it was okay to love everybody except for our ex-lovers, our lovers’ ex lovers, or our ex-lovers’ lovers. The mandate was pretty damn clear, wasn’t it?
Love others.
Period.
”
”
Dan Pearce (Single Dad Laughing: The Best of Year One)
“
STEVE CARELL IS NICE BUT IT IS SCARY
It has been said many times, but it is true: Steve Carell is a very nice guy. His niceness manifests itself mostly in the fact that he never complains. You could screw up a handful of takes outside in 104-degree smog-choked Panorama City heat, and Steve Carell’s final words before collapsing of heat stroke would be a friendly and hopeful “Hey, you think you have that shot yet?”
I’ve always found Steve gentlemanly and private, like a Jane Austen character. The one notable thing about Steve’s niceness is that he is also very smart, and that kind of niceness has always made me nervous. When smart people are nice, it’s always terrifying, because I know they’re taking in everything and thinking all kinds of smart and potentially judgmental things. Steve could never be as funny as he is, or as darkly observational an actor, without having an extremely acute sense of human flaws. As a result, I’m always trying to impress him, in the hope that he’ll go home and tell his wife, Nancy, “Mindy was so funny and cool on set today. She just gets it.”
Getting Steve to talk shit was one of the most difficult seven-year challenges, but I was determined to do it. A circle of actors could be in a fun, excoriating conversation about, say, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, and you’d shoot Steve an encouraging look that said, “Hey, come over here; we’ve made a space for you! We’re trashing Dominique Strauss-Kahn to build cast rapport!” and the best he might offer is “Wow. If all they say about him is true, that is nuts,” and then politely excuse himself to go to his trailer. That’s it. That’s all you’d get. Can you believe that? He just would not engage. That is some willpower there. I, on the other hand, hear someone briefly mentioning Rainn, and I’ll immediately launch into “Oh my god, Rainn’s so horrible.” But Carell is just one of those infuriating, classy Jane Austen guys. Later I would privately theorize that he never involved himself in gossip because—and I am 99 percent sure of this—he is secretly Perez Hilton.
”
”
Mindy Kaling (Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns))
“
Is this how normal people feel all the time? Tabitha wondered, struggling to not feel overwhelmed before she even made it to her first class. Like they’re the protagonists of their story? Was I not even the main character of my own fucking story, last lifetime?
”
”
FortySixtyfour (RE: Trailer Trash: A Do-Over Story)
“
Right, so, quick, I mentioned Hawk. He’s a scary-ass, motherfucking commando. When I say that, I do not lie. So I’ll repeat, he’s a scary-ass, motherfucking commando. So, when your mind conjures up a vision of a commando, that’s Hawk. And Hawk likes kids. But he don’t like kids bein’ scared and bein’ used for bullshit family dramas. I tell him this, which, by the way, I’m totally tellin’ him this, even though he don’t know those kids, like, at all, he’s gonna go psycho badass, motherfucking commando. And the Trailer Trash Twins won’t know what hit ’em.
”
”
Kristen Ashley (Law Man (Dream Man, #3))
“
But today’s trailer trash are merely yesterday’s vagrants on wheels, an updated version of Okies in jalopies and Florida crackers in their carts. They are renamed often, but they do not disappear.
”
”
Nancy Isenberg (White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America)
“
Next day, as the Ferris wheel was being taken apart and the race horses were being loaded into vans and the entertainers were packing up their belongings and driving away in their trailers, Charlotte died. The Fair Grounds were soon deserted. The sheds and buildings were empty and forlorn. The infield was littered with bottles and trash. Nobody, of the hundreds of people that had visited the Fair, knew that a grey spider had played the most important part of all. No one was with her when she died.
”
”
E.B. White
“
I always wondered, though, what the fathers felt as they drove up the street they used to drive down every night, and whether they really saw their former houses, whether they noticed how things got frayed and flaky around the edges now that they were gone. I wondered it again as I pulled up to the house I’d grown up in. It was, I noticed, looking even more Joad-like than usual. Neither my mother nor the dread life partner, Tanya, was much into yard work, and so the lawn was littered with drifts of dead brown leaves. The gravel on the driveway was as thin as an old man’s hair combed across an age-spotted scalp, and as I parked I could make out the faint glitter of old metal from behind the little toolshed. We used to park our bikes in there. Tanya had “cleaned” it by dragging all the old bikes, from tricycles to discarded ten-speeds, out behind the shed, and leaving them there to rust. “Think of it as found art,” my mother had urged us when Josh complained that the bike pile made us look like trailer trash. I wonder if my father ever drove by, if he knew about my mother and her new situation, if he thought about us at all, or whether he was content to have his three children out there in the world, all grown up, and strangers.
”
”
Jennifer Weiner (Good in Bed (Cannie Shapiro, #1))
“
'And I promise not to keep assuming that living in the sticks means you're inbred trailer trash if you'll stop supposing that I'm an asshole just because I grew up in a place big enough for traffic lights.'
A hint of a smile played at the corner of Chris's mouth. 'Can I still think you're an asshole for other reasons?'
”
”
Kim Fielding (Good Bones (Bones #1))
“
Grundy Dopps, a sour-looking little pinch of white trash, waddled out of his trailer that morning somehow knowing it wasn’t going to be his day.
”
”
Michael Stone (Streeter: All Four Novels (A Streeter Thriller Book 5))
“
She looked at me like I was suddenly her whole world. I felt that look sear right into my heart. Ain’t no one ever looked up on me with such grace, with such trust before, and I felt humbled that she chose to gift it to me
… All anyone ever saw when they looked at me was the white trash ex-gang member from the Heighter-famed trailer park across town.
But not her.
Fuck knows why, but Pix only ever saw more.
”
”
Tillie Cole (Sweet Fall (Sweet Home, #2; Carillo Boys, #1))
“
They came with nothing, and for a complicated set of reasons, many of them still have nothing. The slurs stick to me, standing on these graves. Rednecks . Trailer-park trash. Racists. Cannon fodder. My ancestors. My people. Me.
”
”
James Webb (Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America)
“
Because… it would be different if he cheated on her with someone worthy, you know? I’m trailer trash who washes dishes at a truck stop.” She laughs, but it’s filled with so much sadness it creates a sudden, forceful ache in my chest. I stare at her, right into her eyes, and I can see all the broken fragments of a girl who refuses to see her worth. I’ve stared into similar eyes my entire life: my mom and Mia. “I can’t even imagine her shame,” she says, her words uneven. I don’t look away, and neither does she, not even when I can see her discomfort set in. “I mean, just look at her… and look at me.
”
”
Jay McLean (Pieces of You (Pieces Duet #1))
“
such ingratitude. those drinks were expensive.”
“i hate you.”
“take a number and get in line with the rest of this team. i won’t lose any sleep over it.”
“don’t sleep. i’ll kill you.”
“will you? will you do it yourself, or will you pay someone else to handle the mess? you certainly have enough money to outsource it to a proper hit man. one wonders what a no one like you is doing with such a fortune.”
“i found it on the sidewalk.”
“really. is that why you won’t spend it, or do you just like looking like a homeless person? the team is split, you know. most of them think you’re trailer trash like dan. renee knows better. so do i. i think you’re something a little more like us.” andrew leaned toward neil and enunciated every syllable. “a runaway.”
- andrew & neil
”
”
Nora Sakavic (The Foxhole Court (All for the Game, #1))
“
Starbucks’s truly beautiful idea was the simple realization that Americans wanted to spend more money for a cup of coffee, that they’d feel much better about themselves if they spent five dollars for a cup of joe rather than buy that cheap drip stuff that shows such as Friends suggested only fat white trash in housecoats (or people who actually worked for a living) drank anymore—in their trailer parks or meth labs or wherever such people huddled for comfort.
”
”
Anthony Bourdain (Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook)
“
Good-bye!" she whispered. Then she summoned all her strength and waved one of her front legs at him.
She never moved again. Next day, as the Ferris wheel was being taken apart and the race horses were being loaded into vans and the entertainers were packing up their belongings and driving away in their trailers, Charlotte died. The Fair Grounds were soon deserted. The sheds and buildings were empty and forlorn. The infield was littered with bottles and trash. Nobody, of the hundreds of people that had visited the Fair, knew that a grey spider had played the most important part of all. No one was with her when she died.
”
”
E.B. White
“
For several years, I struggled to pass as a native, fell silent when I had no cultural capital to contribute to the conversation, which was most of the time. People called me shy, and I thought of myself that way. But I wasn't. Rather, I was incognito, unknowable -- strategically so, and it was a strategy born of shame and desperation, of the felt sense that who I really was would disturb people too much to let me stay. I was a stranger in a strange land, a trailer-trash girl from a fucked-up background whose test scores and polite smile and diligence let her slip inoffensively upward.
”
”
Lorraine López (An Angle of Vision: Women Writers on Their Poor and Working-Class Roots (Class : Culture))
“
after you tried to kill me?” “So what? Now I have to live downstairs in the servants’ quarters? Give me a break.” “No, I thought that was too good for you. Since you’re really nothing but trailer trash without the trailer, I had Rosa rent one in Newark. All your things are being transported there as we speak. I hope you don’t mind. Nora wanted to pack them in suitcases, but I told her to keep your Louis Vuitton for herself and use some of those dark green
”
”
Fern Michaels (Return to Sender)
“
He lifted a hand and softly brushed a stray hair from my face. “Is it so hard to believe someone could care enough to be that person for you?” “Yes.” Sadness filled his eyes. “Then you need me even more than I thought.
”
”
Denise Grover Swank (Trailer Trash (Neely Kate Mystery #1))
“
If I had a nickel for every pretty story I’d been told, I’d be living in a mansion.
”
”
Denise Grover Swank (Trailer Trash (Neely Kate Mystery #1))
“
You remember the time Joseph Pinter called Kris ‘white trash’ when he found out her and her mom live in a trailer park? And Mr. Yacoubian was standing right there and didn’t say anything? He’s a teacher and he just let it happen because Joseph Pinter has a white picket fence and Kris doesn’t.
”
”
Ashley Flowers (All Good People Here)
“
So, what’s your name, trailer trash?” “Skylar.” “Very cool. Boy name for a girl. I sometimes wish I would have been named Cody but spelled with an I. Just seems cooler,” she admits as she thrusts her hand out to me. “I’m Brieanna, but you can call me Brie.
”
”
Ayden Perry (Heart of a Killer (The Butterfly Effect Duet #2))
“
Yet, there is a paradox in the fine line between the Wal-Mart white trash who so often come from trailer parks, but give that trailer an engine, granite worktops, a smaller dog and a tree-lined parking spot, and suddenly the inhabitants are propelled from the status of lazy and unemployable to permanent vacationers. I
”
”
Graham Field (Different Natures: and the spaces in-between (Diaries of a journey through life.))
“
Gosh, you could spend two million in a day, if you put your mind to it,” Julia had said. She was right, of course. Inheriting his two million had been like winning the lottery (“ Trailer-trash money,” Julia called it). Real money was old money, the kind of money that you could never get through no matter how hard you tried. It was passed down from generation to generation and hoarded. It came from enclosing your peasants’ fields, from getting in on the ground floor of the Industrial Revolution, and from buying slaves to cut down your sugarcane. The people with real money ran everything.
”
”
Kate Atkinson (One Good Turn (Jackson Brodie, #2))
“
Her mother said, “I hear a lot of bad things about these trailer camps. I ask questions. There are beatniks in some of them. And women who are just like trash. Is this how it is in your place?
”
”
Loren Beauchamp (Sin on Wheels: The Uncensored Confessions of a Trailer Camp Tramp (PlanetMonk Pulps Book 21))
“
Monica and I are more like Trailer Trash Barbie. We cuss, eat tons of carbs, and believe that exercise is a form of mind control that we must resist.
”
”
Katie Graykowski (Just One Piece (PTO Murder Club Mystery, #3))
“
Always leave the other guys believing they had negotiated the better deal. And let them feel their support was essential.
”
”
Bev Pettersen (Thoroughbreds and Trailer Trash (Hearts and Hoofbeats, #1))
“
What a strange couple the Clintons became: the feminist president who was a serial groper and ace harasser; the feminist secretary of State who chortled in recall [12] about an old sexual battery case in which she got a rapist off easy, and whose advisors reduced Bill’s liaisons to trailer trash or nuts; the two populists who cashed in; the middle-class defenders who fawned over Wall Street; and on and on.
”
”
Anonymous
“
When James Garner called Howard Stern “the epitome of trailer trash,” Stern responded, in his typically scatological fashion, “I can’t believe this guy wants a war with me. He should be busy worrying if he’s gonna have a solid bowel movement.” We know, of course, from Stern’s now two best-selling memoirs that neither his parents nor his own Long Island suburban family live in a trailer. His non-trash origin goes to show that you do not have to be white trash to use white trash sensibilities as a weapon of cultural war, although the fact that white trash’s rocket scientist, Roseanne, grew up so solidly trashy, reinforces the argument that early training counts.
”
”
Annalee Newitz (White Trash: Race and Class in America)
“
The whole country looks more like a trailer park every day. As our lived economy gets worse, more jobs are becoming temporary, homes less permanent or more crowded, neighborhoods unstable. We’re transients just passing through this place, wherever and whatever it is, on our way somewhere else, mostly down. “I get really scared sometimes,” my mom tells me, “that the old days are coming back.” She means the Great Depression days she knew in her childhood, and the trailer park days I knew in mine.
”
”
Annalee Newitz (White Trash: Race and Class in America)
“
Dr. Sullivan never asked me about Carl. Even if he had, I would have given him the same filtered explanation that any other child would have. Children are often like hostages under the care of authority, with spankings and groundings nudging them like guns pointed at their skulls, threatening to shoot if the wrong words are uttered.
Even if I had trusted Dr. Sullivan, I didn’t have a grip on the reality of Carl. My stepfather wasn’t a villain. Yes, he was an alcoholic. He was chronically selfish and flamboyant with his money. He was negligent. He was a cliché trailer salesman with a silver tongue that made trash seem like treasure. He was highly inappropriate in ways that, without him even knowing, would permanently tatter my developing mind. But none of these flaws were potent enough to do the real damage.
Carl never loved me. I think he wanted to. And I think by his standards, he tried. Carl did everything for me that would pass him as a socially acceptable parent. But a child can hear silent rejection.
”
”
Maggie Georgiana Young (Just Another Number)
“
Covered with snow on a clear day, the houses looked cheery and well cared for. They also looked empty. Dusty thought about empty houses in little towns like this all over the world, with men going and gone and no women left inside. Houses without housewives. No cooking and cleaning, no humming and apron-wearing wives and mothers like in the old sitcoms. No rushing minivans driven by lithe women in yoga pants whose children were well behaved and spoke Mandarin. No soap-opera-addicted, overweight, neglectful trailer trash with a dozen kids running around screaming, their mouths always stained with Kool-Aid. Every man in Huntsville remembered another life, expecting to come home every day to find someone there. All the empty houses sat. No one numbered the silent days.
”
”
Meg Elison (The Book of the Unnamed Midwife (The Road to Nowhere, #1))
“
I’m going to see a friend.” “The mean one, or the white trash one?” “Helen.” She replied, “Sorry. I meant Captain Frigid or Trailer-Park Boy.
”
”
Maggie Stiefvater (The Raven Boys (The Raven Cycle, #1))
“
from fathers cohabiting with daughters, to husbands selling wives, to mothers conniving illicit liaisons for daughters. The danger came from a growing population that had stopped disappearing into the wilderness. Reid was appalled by the filthy refugees living in railroad cars, an uncomfortable foreshadowing of twentieth-century trailer trash.
”
”
Nancy Isenberg (White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America)
Janice Ivy (Taking Out the Trailer Trash)
“
but born in the mobile home, so that’s like the Eagle Scout of trailer trash.
”
”
Barbara Kingsolver (Demon Copperhead)
“
When it comes to kids, silence is way more suspicious than noise.
”
”
Marie Sexton (Trailer Trash)
“
What do you think I mean, genius? Do you want a ride to school?” “I’m totally out of your way.” “Cody, the town is two blocks wide. There’s no such thing as ‘out of my way.’” He was exaggerating, but not by much.
”
”
Marie Sexton (Trailer Trash)
“
America is a third world country. Trailer parks are America's favelas.
”
”
Oliver Markus Malloy (American Fascism: A German Writer's Urgent Warning To America)
“
Most days Florence would proudly sport a halter top sans a brassiere and briskly march across her yard in crudely trimmed cut-off-jeans —her cheap flip flops flailing off her feet and her sagging breasts bouncing in cadence to her determination to find escape through a good time.
”
”
Angie Cavallari (Trailer Trash: an '80s Memoir)
“
Simon was, for a long time, the “Brown-Haired Smoker.” I keep a notebook next to the door, in the cardboard box. In it, I have a page dedicated to every resident on our floor, including myself. There were fifteen ‘Sixers,’ as I like to refer to us, and when Simon moved in, “The Brown-Haired Smoker” is what I wrote on the top of the page. He moved in with a girl who, as best I could tell from my peephole, was one step above trailer trash. They were arguing, carrying black trash bags full of crap, and her voice interrupted his twice between the elevator and their door. I started a page for her and titled it “Trailer Trash Tonya.” I later found out her name was Beth, and she worked at Applebee’s. Two weeks after moving in, they got in a fight, she moved out, and I threw away her page. From the words of their parting, she would not be coming back.
”
”
A.R. Torre (The Girl in 6E (Deanna Madden, #1))
“
You think I’m some inbred trailer-trash hick that watches the Springer show?
”
”
Scott Sigler (Contagious (Infected, #2))
“
Sometimes these non-wealthy non-Northeasterners (“white trash”) manage to stumble out of their shantytowns and trailer parks and Napa Valleys in order to vote, but most of the time they occupy themselves with basic cable, pornography, and the occasional trip to the demolition
”
”
C.H. Dalton (A Practical Guide to Racism)
“
Winter denial: therein lay the key to California Schadenfreude—the secret joy that the rest of the country feels at the misfortune of California. The country said: “Look at them, with their fitness and their tans, their beaches and their movie stars, their Silicon Valley and silicone breasts, their orange bridge and their palm trees. God, I hate those smug, sunshiny bastards!” Because if you’re up to your navel in a snowdrift in Ohio, nothing warms your heart like the sight of California on fire. If you’re shoveling silt out of your basement in the Fargo flood zone, nothing brightens your day like watching a Malibu mansion tumbling down a cliff into the sea. And if a tornado just peppered the land around your Oklahoma town with random trailer trash and redneck nuggets, then you can find a quantum of solace in the fact that the earth actually opened up in the San Fernando Valley and swallowed a whole caravan of commuting SUVs.
”
”
Christopher Moore (The Stupidest Angel (Pine Cove, #3))
“
As with other terms that have derogatory histories, reclaiming "redneck," "trailer trash," "hillbilly," and so on is a sort of cultural self-defense, I guess. That is understandable enough. But I never would have put you in a shirt with any of those words on it. If such a trend existed when I was little, Mom wouldn't have put me in one, either.
”
”
Sarah Smarsh (Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth)