“Nobody but a Southerner knows the wrenching rinsing sadness of the cities of the North.”

“I feel the sense of possibilities
I feel the wrench of hard realities
The focus is sharp in the city
-- The Camera Eye (1981)”

“In the first few seconds an aching sadness wrenched his heart, but it soon gave way to a feeling of sweet disquiet, the excitement of gypsy wanderlust”

“Somebody once said that Washington was a city of Northern charm and Southern efficiency.”

“A song nobody likes is a sad thing. But a love song nobody likes is hardly a thing at all.”

“The Southerners understand how to treat the Negro — with firmness and with kindness — and the Negroes are liked below the Mason and Dixon line so long as they keep to their proper relation to the Whites, but in the North the blocks of Negroes in the large cities, migrating from the South, have introduced new complications, which are certain to produce trouble in the future …”

“Florida's Southern all right. Why North Florida and South Georgia are about the same, same folks, same ways, same ways of making a living. Florida is a Southern state sharing the fate of the South. Of course, North Florida and South Florida are different. There are a lot of Northerners in the South and they're different from the old farm and plantation folks in the North. They usually say down here that Ocala is about the dividing line.”

“The vast majority of white southerners, supported vociferously by the Democratic Party of the north, were deeply opposed to any equality for the former slaves.”

“Sad is Eros, builder of cities,
And weeping anarchic Aphrodite.”

“…resignation is like the rain in Mexico City, sometimes sad, arbitrary and inopportune.”