Octavia Spencer Quotes

It takes some serious mental gymnastics to think of the Confederacy only as a romantic lost cause.

The South is the only part of the country that has been defeated; the rest of the country, unlike most people in the world have never been conquered. But the Southerners have …. The South is the soul of America.

You have to realize that, when it comes to the South, we carry around a lot of baggage. The South lost the war, and I spent years denying my culture.

I live in the South; there are Confederate flags everywhere.

I grew up in the South, so a huge part of our American History education revolved around the Civil War.

I can see why many Southerners, black ones in particular, don't like the implication that Southernness and the Confederate heritage are one and the same, because they're not. On the other hand, there are people who want to extirpate that completely and want folks to spit on the graves of their ancestors.

My ancestors fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War; I was raised in Natchez, Miss.; I performed in the Confederate Pageant for a decade; I dug ditches and loaded trucks with black men who taught me more than any book ever could; and I graduated from Ole Miss. Anyone who survived that is a de facto expert on the South.

Monuments throughout the South were erected to celebrate individuals whose only claim to fame is that they took up arms against the United States in order to retain slavery.

Being a son of the South puts you in a different position when it comes to the Confederate flag. It means something entirely different to the people who have ancestors who fought in the Civil War on the south side of the Mason-Dixon line.

It's a touchy subject, but as a Southerner, you can't ignore our history any more than a Renaissance painter can ignore the Virgin Mary. And it's impossible to drive down a road or eat a vegetable or pass a church without being reminded of slavery.

Nothing is worse than a Yankee telling a Southerner that his monuments don't matter.

I am southern - from the great state of South Carolina. They say, 'You can take the girl out of the South, but you can't take the South out of the girl.' And it's true.

For the entire state of Georgia, having the premiere of Gone With the Wind on home ground was like winning the Battle of Atlanta 75 years late.

I think we Southerners have talked a fair amount of malarkey about the mystique of being Southern.

Any Southern nationalist movement, especially one that wraps itself in the Confederate flag, is going to be viewed with suspicion, given the historical record.

Anything to do with the South resonates with me, because I'm Southern.

It's the South that maintains the idea that they're different, which is interesting because nobody else really cares.

We can only imagine the history of the free world today if, at the end of the Civil War, there had been two countries: the United States and the Confederate States of America.

I feel like if you're a girl in the South, you know 'Gone with the Wind' better than anything. Scarlett O'Hara is such a quintessential Southern woman.

Growing up, my birthday was always Confederate Memorial Day. It helped to create this profound sense of awareness about the Civil War and the 100 years between the Civil War and the civil rights movement and my parents' then-illegal and interracial marriage.

The South was right. Say it! Say it!

Every Southern man sustains me. The fragments of the stick are begged for as sacred relicts. .

I would direct your attention in some detail to the vast and irreparable calamity brought upon our nation in the last century by a tiny group of vociferous and crazed fanatics, the abolitionists, who forced upon the South its tragic war for independence.

The South does not need defense, but exposition.

I don't want to cancel the South out in my life. I carry my Southernness with me. God knows, it's a great place to come from. It's also a place I had to get away from. It is just an endless world for me, so much culture and eccentricity.