Discover the most popular and inspiring quotes and sayings on the topic of Appalachian. Share them with your friends on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, or your personal blogs, and let the world be inspired by their powerful messages. Here are the Top 100 Appalachian Quotes And Sayings by 98 Authors including Carlisle Floyd,Dwight Yoakam,Jason Mraz,Tracy Letts,Renee Fleming for you to enjoy and share.
I've never set out consciously to write American music. I don't know what that would be unless the obvious Appalachian folk references.
I can't escape being born in Pike County, Kentucky, grandson of a miner, Luther Tibbs, and his wife, Earlene, and traveling as a child up and down Route 23 between Kentucky and Columbus, Ohio, where I was raised, experiencing life via working-class people. Nor do I want to escape.
I came from Mechanicsville, Virginia, where you have four seasons.
Hey. Please. This is not the Midwest. All right? Michigan is the Midwest, God knows why. This is the Plains: a state of mind, right, some spiritual affliction, like the Blues.
I've spent hours and hours doing research into Appalachian folk music. My grandfather was a fiddler. There is something very immediate, very simple and emotional, about that music.
They travel through the heartland, past cold factories and drifty towns, to the old, old mountains slumbering east of Tennessee.
In the decline of the day, near Kentucky river, as we ascended the brow of a small hill, a number of Indians rushed out of a thick cane-brake upon us, and made us prisoners.
California: The west coast of Iowa.
somewhere in the mountains with two
Now here I am, living in the land of tall pine trees and red dirt hills
I'm a Midwesterner.
The South Downs of England reminded me a bit of my Old Virginia homeland.
At my core, I'm a Midwesterner.
Sweet Auburn, loveliest village of the plain.
Arkansas is a curious and interesting community ... it is probably the most untouched and unawakened of all American states.
If you live in the mountains, you long for the trees and the lakes.
My mom's side of the family is from Arkansas!
You can't have nine children and not be organized. Otherwise it just looks like Appalachia.
Cadence, n.
I have never lived anywhere but New York or New England, but there are times when I'm talking to you and I hit a Southern vowel, or a word gets caught in a Suthern truncation, and I know it's because I'm swimming in your cadences, that you penetrate my very language.
A cold, miserable little hamlet on the eastern coast of America called Piper's Grave.
I'm a Tennessean at heart, and a New Yorker in spirit.
I think, being from east Tennessee, you're kinda born with a little lonesome in your soul, in your blood. You know you've got that Appalachian soul.
I'm from Maine. I eat apple pie for breakfast.
I grew up at the base of a mountain in Virginia, so my comfort zone is that Appalachian area, where all the dudes wear Carhartt and all the women can put on a beautiful sweater with a snowman applique and nobody raises an eyebrow.
Bluegrass is really a big part of my background.
Breathed was the combination of flower and weed, of the overgrown and the mowed. It was Appalachian country, as only Southern Ohio can be, and it was beautiful as a sunbeam in waist-high grass.
I love the Midwest accent.
In Harlan, Kentucky, we told stories the way some people play music ... In the mountains, storytelling is truly an art form, and as much recreation as communication.
The human heart is a lonely hunter-but the search for us southerners is more anguished ...
I'm such a Southern girl.
I'm a country boy. I'm from Georgia.
At the North Carolina border, the dull landscape ended abruptly, as if by decree. Suddenly the countryside rose and fell in majestic undulations, full of creeping thickets of laurel, rhododendron and palmetto.
I really, really missed the Pennsylvania countryside and hills.
Hill. Yes, that was it. But it is a hasty word for a thing that has stood here ever since this part of the world was shaped.
Under the rough and ridiculous circumstances of life in the Rocky Mountains there was something exciting and vital, full of rude poetry: the heartbeat of the West as it fought its way upward toward civilization.
I'm a Southern girl.
Night Comes to the Cumberland.
My music came up from the soil of North Carolina,
If I could rest anywhere, it would be in Arkansas, where the men are of the real half-horse, half-alligator breed such as grows nowhere else on the face of the universal earth.
We all got a hillbilly bone down deep inside.
Bats and birds taken from those mountains
Mother writes that the Americans are perfectly sweet, as are the Rocky Mountains
Loony hillbillies destabilized by gross quantities of impure corn liquor and generations of profoundly unbiblical sex;
All mountain landscapes hold stories: the ones we read, the ones we dream, and the ones we create.
-from the Editor's Note, The Alpinist (April 1, 2010)
I grew up in a university town in eastern North Carolina - what's called Tobacco Road. It was very rural.
The scenic vistas of North Carolina and Tennessee make you feel like you're looking at a work of art, but crossing through the rural countryside of southwest Virginia and caressing the tall grass with your fingertips, you feel like you're part of the painting.
Come o'er the eastern hills, and let our winds Kiss thy perfumed garments; let us taste Thy morn and evening breath; scatter thy pearls Upon our love-sick land that mourns for thee.
Hay farms, scrub forest, and some bald-looking areas of
I feel very Midwestern at my core.
To a person sitting quietly at home, Rocky Mountain traveling, like Rocky Mountain scenery, must seem very monotonous; but not so to me, to whom the pure, dry mountain air is the elixir of life.
Somewhere nere Ogallala, about six hours into that majestic, maddening prairie, I realize that half an hour has passed since I've seen a vehicle in either direction.
Oh, I think, as I finally see a pair of headlights draw nigh in the eastbound lane, so this must be where the West begins.
I've been to the Mountaintop
I come out of a strong oral tradition in the South,
This gentleman is heading for Mineral County in West Virginia. Near a place called Keyser, not too far from the Maryland line." Which all meant nothing to Reacher, except that West Virginia sounded one step better than regular Virginia.
Plains deceive you; they cause you to think that life is easy! Mountains never deceive you; they teach you the realties! Go to the mountains!
I'm a hard-mouthed northeastern lad. That's me - the Eminem of Northeast England.
Lake Winnipesaukee, he
I take with me Kentucky, embedded in my brain and heart, in my flesh and bone and blood. Since I am Kentucky, and Kentucky is part of me.
I believe we hillbillies are the toughest goddamned people on this earth. We take an electric saw to the hide of those who insult our mother. We
The beautiful, passionate, ruined South, the land of magnolias and music, of roses and romance ... living on the memory of crushing defeats
For better or worse, the bulk of coal industry jobs are in Appalachia - and when that coal is gone, so are the jobs.
For every hiker, climber or canoeist who gets into trouble, there are thousands more who don't. Peter Bronski's compelling account of misadventures in the Adirondacks is a necessary corrective for those who go into the mountains unwary of the dangers.
Louisville, an hour after dark, is a carpet of gilt thumbtacks below them, with straight, twinkling lines like strings of beads leading out from it. Southeastward now, toward the Tennessee state-line. ("Jane Brown's Body")
Because they [Americans] want to be thought of as a rich nation, they are very ashamed of this place [Appalachia] that has come to represent poverty, even though poverty exists all over the country, and exists as much in urban areas as it does in rural, if not more.
I am a country boy at heart.
I'm basically a country person.
Upstream, Arkansas and Ohio have their bottomlands, too, populated by a jaundiced and hungry-looking race, prone to fevers, whose eyes gleam at the sight of stone and iron, for they know only sand and driftwood and muddy water.
It's rural America. It's where I came from. We always refer to ourselves as real America. Rural America, real America, real, real, America.
Sometimes I feel so entangled with the West Virginia seasons, it's like I'm breathing through them.
I'm a real big country boy.
Wilderness is the very stuff America is made of.
I was born under the Blue Ridge, and under that side which is blue in the evening light, in a wild land of game and forest and rushing waters.
Over the years, I've lived in a variety of places, including America, but I was born and raised in the Lake District, in Cumbria. Growing up in that rural, sodden, mountainous county has shaped my brain, perhaps even my temperament.
Up from the meadows rich with corn, Clear in the cool September morn
I like rural areas.
Texas [10w]
Every Texan has a project and every picnic has fire-ants.
There is extreme poverty in Appalachia, where I was, and increasingly poverty is not just an urban thing.
Wilderness to the people of America is a spiritual necessity, an antidote to the high pressure of modern life, a means of regaining serenity and equilibrium.
In America one of the first things done in a new State is to make the post go there; in the forests of Michigan there is no cabin so isolated, no valley so wild, but that letters and newspapers arrive at least once a week.
In my heart and soul, I am a West Country man, and ideally, my weekends are spent there.
The Arctic has a call that is compelling. The distant mountains [of the Brooks Range in Alaska] make one want to go on and on over the next ridge and over the one beyond. The call is that of a wilderness known only to a few ... This last American wilderness must remain sacrosanct.
The Sierra, a region so quiet and pristine that we have the sense of being the first human beings ever to set foot in it. We fall silent ourselves in its midst, as if conversation in a place of such primaevl solitude would be like talking in church.
Wild steep mountains floating in a haze of cloud...a sea of green trees swallowing the hills and valleys, and curling around the trails and rivers, with the wind in the leaves as its tide.
I went to college in Vermont, and then stayed in the East Coast.
My father ... removed from Kentucky to ... Indiana, in my eighth year ... It was a wild region, with many bears and other wild animals still in the woods. There I grew up ... Of course when I came of age, I did not know much. Still somehow, I could read, write, and cipher ... but that was all.
What is most striking in the Maine wilderness is the continuousness of the forest, with fewer open intervals or glades than you had imagined. Except the few burnt lands, the narrow intervals on the rivers, the bare tops of the high mountains, and the lakes and streams, the forest is uninterrupted.
Lonely as America, a throatpierced sound in the night.
Stock runnin' on the plains south of the Platte all the way
the south where these stories take place - is lower Alabama, lush and green and full of death, the wooded counties between the Alabama and Tombigbee Rivers.
Oh Beautiful for smoggy skies, insecticided grain,
For strip-mined mountain's majesty above the asphalt plain.
America, America, man sheds his waste on thee,
And hides the pines with billboard signs, from sea to oily sea.
Though American scenery is destitute of many of those circumstances that give value to the European, still it has features, and glorious ones, unknown to Europe...the most distinctive, and perhaps the most impressive, characteristic of American scenery is its wildness
Doing a thing call the Hillbilly Rock, some say it came from Elvis down in Tennessee.
Clay Blaisdell Western
I placed a jar in Tennessee and round it
was upon a hill.
In Tennessee where I grew up, there were animals, farms, wagons, mules.
The best an American can look forward to is the lonely pleasure of one who stands at long last on a chilly and inhospitable mountaintop where few have been before, where few can follow and where few will consent to believe he has been.
To myself, mountains are the beginning and the end of all natural scenery; in them, and in the forms of inferior landscape that lead to them, my affections are wholly bound up.
You know you're in the Lowcountry when the steering wheel in your old red pick up is slippery from humidity, the news on the radio is all about the projected path of the latest Atlantic hurricane and the road kill you narrowly miss smearing further is a five foot long alligator.
I grew up in the unlikely place of Connecticut. The Eastern Woodlands. It was semi-rural where I grew up. I was fascinated by the Piqua and the Mohegan Indians of that area.
heading west on the 495.