“Southern culture is vivified, made a culture, by the melding of influences that are held far more closely than in other, lesser parts of the country: in the Southland, the past is not really past, and the ancestral homelands are not so far away as they are elsewhere, paradoxically: the assimilation of Southerners, unlike the uneasy attempts at assimilation of Americans elsewhere, has created a culture in which the old influences in our blood, of the Ivory Coast, Languedoc, the Highlands, Wales, Antrim, and Devon, of Sephardic communities from Amsterdam to Cadiz, of the Caribbean sugar islands and Castile, have been absorbed into the fabric of New World life.”

“The vitality of a culture is in its capacity to assimilate foreign influences. The culture that's defensive and closed condemns itself to decadence.”

“Introverts paradoxically pull away from culture and create culture.”

“It is a highly valued function of society to prevent changes in the rules of the many games it embraces... Deviancy, however, is the very essence of culture. Whoever merely follows the script, merely repeating the past, is culturally impoverished. There are variations in the quality of deviation; not all divergence from the past is culturally significant. Any attempt to vary from the past in such a way as to cut the past off, causing it to be forgotten, has little cultural importance. Greater significance attaches to those variations that bring the tradition into view in a new way, allowing the familiar to be seen as unfamiliar, as requiring a new appraisal of all that we have been- and therefore all that we are. Cultural deviation does not return us to the past, but continues what was begun but not finished in the past... Properly speaking, a culture does not have a tradition; it is a tradition.”

“The tragedy of Central Appalachia is that it is becoming more marginalized in American life just when the country needs more than ever what it has to offer. At a time when the bonds of community and family are visibly failing and people feel more alone than ever, and as they are bombarded from all sides with more demands, and with more "data" that they can possibly digest, Appalachia offers a model for a less frenetic and more measured way of life. People of Appalachian descent elsewhere in the nation-and they number many millions-still feel deep ties to some Appalachian hamlet or hollow as to an ancestral homeland, though they may never have even visited it. As they make their way in the big world of getting and spending they know that something valuable has been lost for all they may have gained. That less frenetic way of life is deeply embedded in Appalachian culture, which has proved incredibly tough and enduring. Yet Appalachia has now been so thoroughly bypassed and forgotten that it cannot give, because the rest of America will not take, what could be it's greatest gift.”

“Don't let the culture influence your message, let your message influence the culture.”