Tennessee Quotes

I'm from around Tennessee. I ran away when I was 12 years old and I ain't never looked back.

When you think about it, what other playwrights are there besides O'Neill, Tennessee and me?

When I was in Nashville, Tennessee in 1970 with Derek and the Dominoes, I went into this shop and they had a rack of Strats and Teles - all going for $100.00 each. I bought a handfull and made Blackie out of the body from one, the neck from another, and so on

Part of it is living in Tennessee. I'm so out of the loop. And as a person, I'm out of the loop. I'm oblivious by nature.

Sign at a Tennessee highway: When this sign is under water, this road is impassable.

Tennessee helps me open up. I'm much more vulnerable there, more willing to talk about anything.

I love Tennessee, but they don't have the pine trees and the sandy soil and the black water that I grew up around.

In Tennessee where I grew up, there were animals, farms, wagons, mules.

All my Ex's live in Texas, and that's why I hang my hat in Tennessee.

All my ex's live in Texas, And Texas is the place I'd dearly love to be, But all my ex's live in Texas, Therefore I reside in Tennessee

My elementary school is still there [in Luttrell, Tennessee]. I drop by my high school. It's a small community. I say this every night before I do the song 'The Boys of Fall' in the show - I'm really happy about where I grew up and how I grew up.

You've probably heard the term, 'red flag warning.' That means there are extreme conditions. Low humidity, high temperatures. The fuels are extremely dry and volatile. We classify those in East Tennessee as 'fire days' so if your fire class day is a 1, it's relatively low. A class 5 day would be an extremely high danger day. A day like Sunday would be a 4 or a 5.

I'm an American playwright. Tennessee Williams got in all our DNA.

I saw a sign on the side of the road in Tennessee once that said 'dirt for sale'... what a great country we live in. DIRT for sale. How would you like to get inside that guy's mind and look around for a hour? That guy sees opportunity at every glance, doesn't he?

Look at Picasso. O’Neill. Tennessee Williams. Capote. Were these shiny happy people spreading sunshine? No. Only the greatest of personal demons can force you to do powerful work.

I want to run for the Senate from Tennessee. Not now, but when I'm 50, when music dies down a little bit. I know lots of artists and actors have those delusions of grandeur, but ever since I was a kid, it's been of interest to me.

Tennessee is a very country-type state. Maybe I can practice on some type of country-western dance where they'll know what I'm doing.

The global environment crisis is, as we say in Tennessee, real as rain, and I cannot stand the thought of leaving my children with a degraded earth and a diminished future.

I don't even want to call it God. I just want to call it connecting with something that's greater than I am. So that's the biggest thing from Tennessee - the spirit.

When I go to Africa and spend more time there with people who are the least of the least, those in desperate situations, I am broken by it. But I also find people with so much more joy and freedom living with nothing than I see walking down the streets of my own community here in Tennessee.

No matter what, I always make it home for Christmas. I love to go to my Tennessee Mountain Home and invite all of my nieces and nephews and their spouses and kids and do what we all like to do - eat, laugh, trade presents and just enjoy each other... and sometimes I even dress up like Santa Claus!

I was born in Chicago, but I was raised in a town called Jackson, Tennessee. And a lot of these changes that were necessary and talked about it as important have been made, like, people go to school where they want to go. They work for equal pay, they work for - they can go school and have an equal shot at a job.

My biggest extravagances are also investments. I have several houses in California, a house in Nashville, an office complex, and I bought the old home place in Tennessee. They are different places for me to write, but I can turn right around and sell them.

There's an old saying in Tennessee — I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again.

Personally, I'd like as many children as I can pop out, I reckon. You come from a happy family; you want to create a happy family. And in the same breath, I'd like to be on stage at England's National Theatre, doing Miller and Chekhov. Give me a Sam Mendes/Tennessee Williams combination-that would be glorious. And to be making some Oscar-worthy movies with Scorsese. I'm always looking for the hard road. That way, you remain interested and interesting. Hopefully.

Let me tell about Tennessee. If your car breaks down in Tennessee, you have just moved to Tennessee.

There is, it appears, a conspiracy of scientists afoot. Their purpose is to break down religion, propagate immorality, and so reduce mankind to the level of brutes. They are the sworn and sinister agents of Beelzebub, who yearns to conquer the world, and has his eye especially upon Tennessee.]

I had someone correct my grammar once on a blind date, and within the first 10 minutes the date was over. You just don't correct somebody's grammar. That's just not okay. I'm from Tennessee, so I probably say everything wrong. I might have said ain't, or something like that.

In America, Blackberry Farm in Tennessee is one of the most amazing hotels I've had the privilege of staying at.

There are a couple of different types of food I eat a lot. I was raised in the South, in Tennessee, so I’m going to go with comfort food, soul food. I would probably start with collard greens and candied baby carrots and then have some biscuits and white gravy - and for dessert, probably blackberry cobbler.

My education commitment is simple. I believe that every child is unique. Im going to work as hard as I know how, and Im going to ask each of you to help me to offer all Tennessee children the education they need to energize their God-given talents to take them as far as they can go.

I said to Tennessee, this thing is becoming the Marlon Brando show.

My problem with Obama is that he's not a new paradigm; he's an old paradigm. A new paradigm would be somebody like Harold Ford [former Democratic Congressman from Tennessee] or Michael Steele [former Republican Lieutenant Governor of Maryland], no relation, both of whom present themselves as individuals, and don't seem to wear a mask. They don't 'bargain;' they don't 'challenge.' So, I see them as fresh, and as evidence of what I hope will be a new trend.

When I started playing music at East Tennessee State University I would sit on a stool with a tip jar in front of me and play four hours a night at a college bar called Quarterback's Barbecue. I wasn't thinking about doing it for a living. I was just making enough money to go to Taco Bell every day. People were eating chips, drinking beer and not listening to me. I'd had three or four years of people ignoring me, and I'd kind of gotten used to it.

You invest into the future, and that's how young people become human in best sense of it - through the great experience of listening a Müller symphony or to see a great play by Tennessee Williams, experience something in a ballet, in a film.

I cut the ribbon in Paris, and everyone in Paris speaks French — maybe you knew that. But I'm from Tennessee, and Tennessee girls don't speak French. So suddenly I'm stuck onstage with Minnie and Mickey and everyone is yelling at me in French — I guess they're telling me to get off the stage, but I didn't know what they were saying at the time, so I start dancing with Minnie and Mickey like on the show and finally my aunt comes and gets me off.

New Orleans could wreck your liver and poison your blood. It could destroy you financially. It could shun you or embrace you, teach you tricks of the heart you thought Tennessee Williams was just kidding about. And in August it could break your spirit.

I want to keep coaching as long as I can. I love teaching and working with student athletes and I love being at the University of Tennessee.

I grew up in rural Tennessee. There were no bookstores in the town, but the school had a little library and the town had a little library, each with a patient and enthusiastic librarian, and I raced into both as if they were doorways to another world.

The tricky or boastful gods of ancient myths and primitive folk tales are characters of the same kind that turn up in Faulkner or Tennessee Williams.

I love Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, Flannery O'Connor. I read a lot of American writers.

In Washington I'm thought of as a conservative, but in Tennessee I'm thought of as a Bolshevik.

The Civil War was fought in 10,000 places, from Valverde, New Mexico, and Tullahoma, Tennessee, to St. Albans, Vermont, and Fernandina on the Florida coast. More than 3 million Americans fought in it, and over 600,000 men, 2 percent of the population, died in it.

Angels in America' - which is composed of two three-hour plays, 'Millennium Approaches' and 'Perestroika' - proved to be a watershed drama, the most lyrical and ambitious augury of an era since Tennessee Williams's 'The Glass Menagerie.

Alabama - they were the masters of that. They could come out with 'Mountain Music' or 'Tennessee River' and then turn around and come out with 'Feels So Right.' Go out and have fun and be those guys that like to party, then turn around and make every woman in America want Randy Owen.

I grew up in Tennessee, and if you didn't play football, you were a sissy. I got slurs all the time because I was in music and art...I was an outcast in a lot of ways...but everything that you get picked on for or you feel makes you weird is essentially what's going to make you sexy as an adult.

Teenage girls, please don’t worry about being super popular in high school, or being the best actress in high school, or the best athlete. Not only do people not care about any of that the second you graduate, but when you get older, if you reference your successes in high school too much, it actually makes you look kind of pitiful, like some babbling old Tennessee Williams character with nothing else going on in her current life. What I’ve noticed is that almost no one who was a big star in high school is also big star later in life. For us overlooked kids, it’s so wonderfully fair.

Right after graduation, I married Samuel Fisher Babbitt, an academic administrator. I spent the next ten years in Connecticut, Tennessee, and Washington, D.C., raising our children, Christopher, Tom, and Lucy.

There is an event once a year that I'm able to sing at, through 'Passions,' in Tennessee. That's always fun. We perform at the Wild Horse Saloon.

Since the turn of the 20th century, members of the Jewish community in Upper East Tennessee and Southwest Virginia have been meeting together to celebrate and worship.