Subjects A-G

Photographed for the book project, "A Portrait Of The South."

"What's my secret? Lord, honey, I don't have any secrets. I tell them all. If anybody ever had a secret and said, 'Don't tell it' and I would tell it, because I can't keep a secret. Not to save my life. I'm a mess."

"I know right here in Kentucky we're at a real crossroads. Things are mighty uncertain. Tobacco used to be the crop that covered everybody; there was enough demand, but not anymore. We're trying to work on diversification, but you can only do so much."

" Yeah, I like Nu Way. I told them, 'When I die, bury me in a Nu Way shirt.' So maybe they will."

"All my little music came from the good Lord and my daddy. When I hear music constantly, I don't sleep sound, I just sleep enough to dream. I dream a lot of my chords and put them together."

"Just because 'that's the way things are' doesn't mean that's the way they have to be.... I have traveled all over the world and I have never seen nothing like Selma, Alabama."

"The barrel is the most important part of the whiskey. It gives it it's flavor and it's color. Kentucky bourbon has to be aged in a new white oak barrel for at least four years and it takes 75 to 100 years to make the barrel - from the tree to the barrel. You can't get in a hurry. Making a whiskey barrel is an art. You are always going to have to do most of it by hand. It's been that way forever."

"I am personally very glad that George Vanderbilt came here. Where else could I drive to work and see the beauty that I see everyday? I'm driving in the mornings, and it's just phenomenal. These foggy fall mornings with the mist as we're coming up past the river; it's just beautiful."

"Now we work hard for the name 'bitch'. First, you've got to spell bitch one letter at a time for me: B - Beautiful I - Intelligent T - Talented C - Cunning H - Oh, we're horny"

"I can tell cats who play, I can tell how they feel, how they really feel, you know. So wherever you go you can express who you are with music better than you can with words. They may not understand the words but they'll understand what you're saying anyway with your music. That's why they have always said music is an international language. It's a language beyond our barriers."

"One of our jobs is to make sure that the taste of the product remains the same. Of course we have changed the way we make the product. But if Jack Daniel could come back today and see what we're doing, he would probably tell us that we're behind the times. He was such a visionary."

"I've never been a racist, but I've always been a segregationist."

"Got to be calm in spirit to be a farmer. Have to have patience, be willing to work, work hard -- and, not necessarily get a good return for your work every year. And, you have to love the land. It's basically something that you raised with. There's something in you that make you good at that."

"The first theater I ever attended was the front porch of Granddaddy's house. On Sundays, we would take my grandmother to the Hardin Baptist Church. She was in a wheelchair and she couldn't get out of the house unless somebody took her and Grandmother loved church. After church we'd go back and have Sunday dinner. Then if it were spring, summer or fall, we'd sit on the front porch. She'd sing songs and if Granddaddy was around, he'd tell stories. That's it. Then, I'd act things out with my Johnny West and GI Joe action figures out in my backyard. I guess that was my first acting class."

"Kentucky's just the place I wish the world was. It's just a better place. Physically I just love the way it looks. I love the rolling hills. I love the air when I'm there. I love the visual spectacle of Kentucky and the old-fashioned, salt of the earth people who always wake up every morning trying to do the right thing. That all makes for a very alluring, irresistible environment for me."

"I think that the sanctuary has the profound ability to not only help the healing of the elephants that live here, but also the healing of the whole community. What's inspiring about this is that it's really not where we're from, it's where we are and what we're doing where we are."

"In this area, right here, I've got roots like a tree. I got roots in every inch of this land because I farmed it and I worked it, it's hard to get rid of it. So, I'm holdin' on to it for my children. I'm givin' them the land. I've had a hard life, but I've been happy for years. This place makes me happy."

"If you were born and raised here like I was and live to get to be my age, you still didn't create no more than you had to start with. Wasn't no hours, you'd just go to work in the fields and come out when it was dark. You would be glad to see the sun go down. I guess that was the start of the blues, they sang that they really didn't have nothing and didn't think they was ever going to have nothing. There was always some guy, would go around playing music with a guitar swinging on his back. There was always somebody learning how to make music and eat out of it, and what you call making a living out of it."

"The whole basis of our company is based on quilting. We're making garments, not quilts, but it is built on a quilting stitch, so it doesn't really get much more Southern than that."

"Hunting is the only time I get to myself. It's really quiet and just being able to get outdoors is important because I'm a wildlife biologist, and now I deal with habitat protection. It truly makes me appreciate what I do and the reasons I do it."

"Churchill Downs on Derby Day is just stunning - the history, the tradition, the ambience. It's a beautiful flower garden of hats and busy little bees of conversation and then a roar. At Derby time when they play 'My Old Kentucky Home' you can hear a pin drop. It's overwhelming, I kid you not."

"Some people go in the cemetery and some of them are scared to go in there because 'people are walking.' But I don't see nothin', I don't feel nothin'. Some people just believe that, but I don't. I done buried a lot of people but I ain't never seen nothing. Some even say they can't sleep that night after visiting the cemetery. I can sleep. Once we bury those people they ain't coming out, they ain't no walking. If they was walking I wouldn't be here."

"We stick to a lot of really archaic ideas based on our Southernness. We allow our Southernness to limit us. I think that thinking of yourself as a Southern writer or a 'Southern' anything is limiting. I think it's a trap, especially when you are talking about the way people think and the way they write."

"Little Black babies have been taught that they're supposed to be scared of that flag when they see it and the White babies have been taught that it's their flag and they want to know what I am doing with their flag. You see, it's not just their flag. It's mine, too."

"Tillie was my sanity. I learned more from her probably than I have any single person in my life."

"When I was about ten I finally started quail hunting -and that was it. I couldn't wait until Saturday morning. My daddy would take me and my dog out in the county seven or eight miles and put me out. I would take enough food for me and the dog; I just had to get home by dark. I had a great time. I played football in high school but it didn't last too long. After a while I finally said, 'Ya'll can go to hell, it's hunting season.'"

"Since the cancer, I think that my whole personality is kicked up a notch. I love to laugh and so I like to do it a lot. I think southern women are very funny. They have really good sense of humors. Even after the cancer, I laughed more then, because there were so many jokes to be made.:

"The thing about Pumpkin Center, these people were poor people, pretty much like me. When a train went through there, the people would get up on the cars and throw them off some coal. I guess they figured the coal company owed them that. Wasn't safe to be by the railroad at that time because you might get hit with a piece of coal on your head."

"I've learned that anything is possible in life. You never know what is going to happen. Like me, I never dreamed I would be in prison and I never thought something like this would happen to me. But that's what a lot of people think and it can happen. I had never been in trouble with the law before in my life and here I sit. All it took was three beers and a 15-minute drive home."

Hoenwald, Tennessee Photographed for the book project, "A Portrait Of The South."

"I think I represent Kentucky pretty well wherever I'm at. In fact, I've been talked about as being the best Kentucky fan in the state, but I'm not, there's other fans that's more so than I am."

"I was definitely called to this life, kind of born that way. I was always more aware of spiritual presence and was very prone to seeing things that nobody else saw. From as long as I can remember, I was just very aware that the surface isn't the whole thing, that there is an ensouling depth to things, to people, to animals and all that."

"Time to time, you find people that like to talk about Hispanics. The say things about it and kind of push you. You got to get away from it, ignore them and just keep going through it. I'm just here to make a living. I mean I didn't come down here to fight or do any wrongdoing. I try to put the best of me in it. I look at like this -- life is there to live in it, to take it as it comes.... I never thought I was going to work on a piece of history like the Zippin' Pippin', this roller coaster here in Memphis."

"A lot of Jewish people were involved in the civil rights movement, and I think it's because we've been through what they're going through. For thousands of years we have gone through bigotry and hatred. I can only speak for myself, but I always felt like I have walked in their shoes. But the thing that was easier for me was that I wasn't so obvious because my skin was white. They stand out because they're not white."

"Being a single mother, I have so many friends that I count on. I think we just really lean on each other. If I didn't have these women in my life, I really just don't know what I do. They've always got your back. It is really very much like a sisterhood."