Category: the-south
Quotes of Category: the-south
Okay, let's pretend to be friends. Just two friends having dinner." "That doesn't work in the South. A male friend cannot have dinner with a female friend if the male friend has a wife. It just doesn't work down here." "Why not?" "Because men don't have female friends. No way. I don't know of a single man in the entire South who is married and has a female friend. I think it goes back to the Civil War." "I think it goes back to the Dark Ages. Why are Southern women so jealous?" "Because that's the way we've trained them. They learned from us. If my wife met a male friend for lunch or dinner, I'd tear his head off and file for divorce. She learned it from me." "That makes absolutely no sense." "Of course it doesn't." "Your wife has no male friends?" "None that I know of. If you learn of any, let me know." "And you have no female friends?" "Why would I want female friends? They can't talk about football, or duck hunting, or politics, or lawsuits, or anything that I want to talk about. They talk about kids, clothes, recipes, coupons, furniture, stuff I know nothing about. No, I don't have any female friends. Don't want any." "That's what I love about the South. The people are so tolerant." "Thank you. book-quotemen-and-womenthe-southgrishamI am consoled only to see that I was not mistaken: Chicago is just as I remembered it. I was here twenty five years ago. My father brought me and Scott up to see the Century of Progress and once later to the World Series. Not a single thing do I remember from the first trip but this: the sense of the place, the savor of the genie-soul of the place which every place has or else is not a place. I could have been wrong: it could have been nothing of the sort, not the memory of a place but the memory of being a child. But one step out into the brilliant March day and there it is as big as life, the genie-soul of the place Which, wherever you go, you must meet and master first thing or be met and mastered. Until now, one genie-soul and only one ever proved too strong for me: San Francisco-up and down the hills I pursued him, missed him and was pursued, by a presence, a powdering of fall gold in the air, a trembling brightness that pierced to the heart, and the sadness of coming at last to the sea, the coming to the end of America. Nobody but a Southerner knows the wrenching rinsing sadness of the cities of the North. Knowing all about genie-souls and living in haunted places like Shiloh and the Wilderness and Vicksburg and Atlanta where the ghosts of heroes walk abroad by day and are more real than people, he knows a ghost when he sees one, and no sooner does he step off the train in New York or Chicago or San Francisco than he feels the genie-soul perched on his shoulder. book-quoteghoststhe-south
