A Southernism, Monday, April 15, 2024

 

Truth: that long clean clear simple

undeniable unchallengeable straight

and shining line, on one side of which

black is black and on the other white

is white, has now become an angle, a

point of view.

 

—William Faulkner

Art: Deborah Fagan Carpenter

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A Southernism, Monday, April 1, 2024

 

“April that year came sudden and

still, and the green of the trees

was a wild bright green. The pale

wisterias bloomed all over town, and

silently the blossoms shattered.”

 

 

— Carson McCullers, The Member of the Wedding

 

 

Photo: Deborah Fagan Carpenter

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A Southernism, Monday, March 18, 2024

 

I want to lay up like that, to float

unstructured, without ambition or anxiety. I

want to inhabit my life like a porch.

 

 

—Rebecca Wells

Photo: Deborah Fagan Carpenter

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A Southernism, Monday, March 11, 2024

“Despite the forecast, live like it’s spring.”

 

—Lilly Pulitzer

Photo: Deborah Fagan Carpenter

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A Southernism, Monday, March 4, 2024

“War may sometimes be a necessary evil. But no matter how necessary, it is always an evil, never a good. We will not learn to live together in peace by killing each other’s children.”

― Jimmy Carter, The Nobel Peace Prize Lecture

Photo: Deborah Fagan Carpenter

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A Southernism, Monday, February 26, 2023

“These southerners know the names of what shrubs hang over what creek, what dogwood flowers bloom what color, what kind of soil is under their feet.”

—Natalia Goldberg

Photo: Deborah Fagan Carpenter

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A Southernism, Monday, February 19, 2024

“The arc of the moral universe is

long, but it bends toward justice.”

 

Dr. Martin Lither King, Jr.

Photo: Deborah Fagan Carpenter

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A Southernism, Monday, February 12, 2024

“No one is without Christianity if we agree on what we mean by that word. It is every individual’s individual code of behavior by means of which he makes himself a better human being than his nature wants to be, if he followed his nature only. Whatever its symbol – cross or crescent or whatever – that symbol is man’s reminder of his duty inside the human race.”

— William Faulkner

 

 

Photo: Grounds of Rowan Oak, Deborah Fagan Carpenter

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A Southernism, Monday, January 22, 2024

 

A southerner doesn’t truly understand cold.

Though Anne was born in Alabama and schooled in Mississippi, she had traveled North, and, like many Southerners, gained a theoretical understanding of the concept of cold. But the mind is an overprotective parent. What it doesn’t care for, it hides. Like many inhabiting the subtropics, Anne had repressed the reality of subzero mercury.

—Thomas Wolfe

 

 

(Thanks to Kim for the beautiful photo of my frigid yard)

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A Southernism, Tuesday, January 9, 2024

“…and I wonder if there is any way to adequately describe the folly that causes us to undo all the great gifts of both Earth and Heaven.”

—James Lee Burke

Photo: Deborah Fagan Carpenter

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