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“Let us have the candor to acknowledge that what we call "the economy" or "the free market" is less and less distinguishable from warfare.”
― Wendell Berry

“You’ve gone far away to a place with no horses and very little grass, and you’re studying how to write a story with a happy ending. If you can write that ending for yourself, maybe you can come back.”
― Jennifer Echols, Love Story

“Sir Edwin Chadwick (1800-1890) was an England reformer. His words are true and relevant in 2025. He said, “There is a moral as well as an intellectual objection to the custom, frequent in these times, of making education consist in a mere smattering of twenty different things, instead of in the mastery of five or six.”
― Shafter Bailey, James Ed Hoskins and the One-Room Schoolhouse: The Unprosecuted Crime Against Children

“I am more than just a Serious basketball fan. I am a life-long Addict. I was addicted from birth, in fact, because I was born in Kentucky.”
― Hunter S. Thompson

“The first time I managed to pick up a basketball I knew I was destined to lead the UK to another National championship. ... Even now, so many years later, I still believe Kentucky will go undefeated in March & win everything.”
― Hunter S. Thompson

“Living away from my native place I became more consciously Kentuckian than I was when I lived at home. This is what the experience of exile can do, change your mind, utterly transform one's perception of the world of home.”
― Bell Hooks, Belonging: A Culture of Place

“Lexington wasn't a great city, like Philadelphia or New York, but around the Courthouse square, and along Main Street and Broadway, brick buildings reared two and three stories tall, and it was possible to buy almost anything: breeze-soft silks from France that came upriver from New Orleans, fine wines and cigars, pearl necklaces, and canes with ivory handles shaped like parrots or dogs'-heads or (in the case of Mary's older friend Cash Clay) scantily dressed ladies (but Cash was careful not to carry that one in company).”
― Barbara Hambly, The Emancipator's Wife: A Novel of Mary Todd Lincoln

“The city most believed to be the handsomest in Kentucky never failed to impress .... The streets, lined with booths and wagons from which people displayed their wares, had a festive air.”
― Jan Watson, Troublesome Creek

“Lexington, Kentucky looks like paradise. Acres of grass as green and tender as a golf course putting green surround hilltop mansions. New Circle Road--a beltway enveloping the city's heartland like a moat--attempts to separate the wealthy landowners from the encroaching strip centers and fast-food joins that are symbolic of the rest of the state .... Combining the traditional feelings of Southerners with the uniquely gorgeous landscape of the bluegrass, Lexingtonians consider themselves and their region the cream of the crop--not only of Kentucky, but also of the nation.”
― Sally Denton, The Bluegrass Conspiracy: An Inside Story of Power, Greed, Drugs and Murder

“The longer I live here, the better satisfied I am in having pitched my earthly camp-fire, gypsylike, on the edge of a town, keeping it on one side, and the green fields, lanes, and woods on the other. Each, in turn, is to me as a magnet to the needle. At times the needle of my nature points towards the country. On that side everything is poetry. I wander over field and forest, and through me runs a glad current of feeling that is like a clear brook across the meadows of May. At others the needle veers round, and I go to town--to the massed haunts of the highest animal and cannibal.”
― James Lane Allen, A Kentucky Cardinal

“In the pleasant May of 1958, a group of pioneers, engineers, second-generation Americans, speculators, ne'er-do-wells, and visionaries known as the Chocinoe Management Group gathered by a bubbling spring in the middle fork of Lansill's Creek and talked about creating a settlement to be called Garden Springs. The next month they received a use permit from the Planning Commission of the City of Lexington, and began clear-cutting and bulldozing, in preparation for the excavation of sites where the cement foundations of this subdivision would be laid .... The building of this subdivision was part of the all-important process of Lexington's becoming The Greater Lexington Area, and I take special pride in noting that this general shift away from its tobacco-town heritage was bemoaned by scarcely anyone.”
― Johnny Payne, Kentuckiana

“By ten o'clock, the sidewalk along Vine Street looks like the Fourth of July parade. Mama minds the cash box while Daddy and Mitch go to haul more tomatoes and peppers from the truck. The basket of beans is almost empty, so I fill it up again.”
― Paul Brett Johnson, Farmers' Market

“Lexington is not big enough to have clubs with long lines, but at least they don't have velvet ropes.”
― Lynn Hightower, Fortunes of the Dead

“Change "I'm too old to start (or finish or publish) that novel" to "I'm too alive NOT to start." Sharing your words is the best way to keep on living.”
― Judalon de Bornay, Great Crossing

“I have heard that we are stupid for voting against our self interest,
and I know how hard it is to vote in my state.
I have heard that we are willfully uneducated,
and I have seen our artificially low property taxes
create our underfunded school system.
I have heard criticism from the experts,
but I have seen nothing but classism disguised
as neoliberal conjecture.
You cannot understand where I come from
if you are not also from there. I mean
that words fail
and nuance exists
and the enemy is never who we are taught to hate.”
― Belle Townsend, Push and Pull

“Gusts of snow blew in front of the car as he felt his way toward Man o' War Boulevard .... The snow-covered fields made him think of the desert. Black fences rimmed with snow created a grid against the blank, vanished ground. He saw five snow-blanketed horses huddled under a clump of trees .... He was surprised they weren't lolling on feather beds in their climate-controlled barns. Racehorses got better care than some people, he thought.”
― Bobbie Ann Mason, Zigzagging Down Wild Trail

“Surely slavery was not tolerated in Kentucky, surely not in Lexington, which the captain so often called the Beautiful City. Everything would be different once they arrived in paradise. There'd be neither black nor white--there'd be people. Cynthia had been neither schooled nor conditioned for prejudice.”
― David Dick, The Scourges of Heaven: A Novel

“As far as my part in it is concerned, it began one night in the fall of 1956 in Lexington, Kentucky, when I walked into the Zebra Bar--a musty, murky coal-hole of a place across Short Street from the Drake Hotel (IF YOU DUCK THE DRAKE YOUR A GOOSE!! read the peeling roadside billboard out on the edge of town)--walked in under a marquee that did, sure enough, declare the presence inside of one 'Little Enis,' and came upon this amazing little stud stomping around atop the bar, flailing away at one of those enormous old electric guitars that looked like an Oldsmobile in drag--left-handed!”
― Ed McClanahan, Famous People I Have Known

“I glanced down at the tattered, bloodstained marriage license. Numb, I pulled myself atop the wagon. There was nothing more to be said. The sheriff, God and Kentucky had said it for me. It had been foolish to dream. I snapped the reins. Dreams were for books.”
― Kim Michele Richardson, The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek

“If you don't know what a hot brown is, let me just put it this way: it takes the perfection of bread, turkey, and bacon, and then sends it all into a different dimension with a Mornay sauce worth trading your waistline for.”
― Bethany Turner, Hadley Beckett's Next Dish

“Nebraska. Seriously? What demon would choose to live in Nebraska of all places?"

"You've got to be kidding me," Micah mutters when he reads the address over my shoulder. "Don't they marry cousins there?"

Shaking my head, I say, "No, that's Kentucky. I don't know if they do anything in Nebraska.”
― Rory Miles, Tainted Power - The Complete Series

“I come from a line of people
who could not discern their exploitation
from someone else’s:
people who will always stop for the car that is pulled over to the side of the road,
but participate in a culture
curated by a ruling class
that individualizes
and disconnects
the marginalized.”
― Belle Townsend, Push and Pull

“My home is full of targets,
and they have been hit. Over and over and over.
Meanwhile, the bullseyes sit in penthouses and mansions,
unaffected, watching us
scramble over the arrows.”
― Belle Townsend, Push and Pull

“And when I moved back to Kentucky,

I forgot about waving to other drivers.
I forgot about taking that one second to acknowledge
who you are sharing a road with.
I forgot about how much
all of us want
so terribly
to be together.”
― Belle Townsend

“Funny how a person hung on to things that weren't of no use at all but then those were the things that pierced the soul when a body lost them.”
― Ann H Gabhart

“In the days of slavery and the underground railroads, there lived on the banks of the Ohio River near Gallipolis, a noted Democrat named Judge French, who said to some anti-slavery friends that he should like them to bring to his office the first runaway negro that crossed the river, bound northward by the underground. He couldn't understand why they wished to run away. This was done, and the following conversation took place:
Judge: "So you have run away from Kentucky. Bad master, I suppose?"
Slave: "Oh, no, Judge; very good, kind massa."
Judge: "He worked you too hard?"
Slave: "No, sah, never overworked myself all my life."
Judge, hesitatingly: "He did not give you enough to eat?"
Slave: "Not enough to eat down in Kaintuck? Oh, Lor', plenty to eat."
Judge: "He did not clothe you well?"
Slave: "Good enough clothes for me, Judge."
Judge: "You hadn't a comfortable home?"
Slave: "Oh, Lor', makes me cry to think of my pretty little cabin down dar in old Kaintuck."
Judge, after a pause: "You had a good, kind master, you were not overworked, plenty to eat, good clothes, fine home. I don't see why the devil you wished to run away."
Slave: "Well, Judge, I lef de situation down dar open. You kin go rite down and git it."

The Judge had seen a great light.”
― Andrew Carnegie

“Mamaw says that mountain people get rediscovered every once in a while, but usually only when something bad happens.”
― Silas House & Neela Vaswani

“Today the sun was out, and as I walked to school I wondered if it was sunny in Kentucky too. And then I thought to myself that it's the same sun here as it is there, and that made me feel like you're not so far away after all.”
― Silas House & Neela Vaswani

“Aunt Jane was in perfect correspondence with her environment. She wore a purple calico dress, rather short and scant; a gingham apron, with a capacious pocket, in which she always carried knitting: or some other "handy work"; a white handkerchief was laid primly around the wrinkled throat and fastened with a pin containing a lock of gray hair; her cap was of black lace and lutestring ribbon, not one of the butterfly affairs that perch on the top of the puffs and frizzes of the modern old lady, but a substantial structure that covered her whole head and was tied securely under her chin. She talked in a sweet old treble with a little lisp, caused by the absence of teeth, and her laugh was as clear and joyous as a young girl's.

"Yes, I'm a-piecin' quilts again," she said, snipping away at the bits of calico in her lap. "I did say I was done with that sort o' work; but this mornin' I was rummagin' around up in the garret, and I come across this bundle of pieces, and thinks I, 'I reckon it's intended for me to piece one more quilt before I die;' I must 'a' put 'em there thirty years ago and clean forgot 'em, and I've been settin' here all the evenin' cuttin' 'em and thinkin' about old times.

"Jest feel o' that," she continued, tossing some scraps into my lap. "There ain't any such caliker nowadays. This ain't your five-cent stuff that fades in the first washin' and wears out in the second. A caliker dress was somethin' worth buyin' and worth makin' up in them days. That blue-flowered piece was a dress I got the spring before Abram died. When I put on mournin' it was as good as new, and I give it to sister Mary. That one with the green ground and white figger was my niece Rebecca's. She wore it for the first time to the County Fair the year I took the premium on my salt-risin' bread and sponge cake. This black-an' white piece Sally Ann Flint give me. I ricollect 'twas in blackberry time, and I'd been out in the big pasture pickin' some for supper, and I stopped in at Sally Ann's for a drink o' water on my way back. She was cuttin' out this dress.”
― Eliza Calvert Hall, Aunt Jane of Kentucky

“Here Aunt Jane paused, and began to cut three-cornered pieces out of a time-stained square of flowered chintz. The quilt was to be of the wild-goose pattern. There was a drowsy hum from the bee hive near the window, and the shadows were lengthening as sunset approached.

"One queer thing about it," she resumed, "was that while Sally Ann was talkin', not one of us felt like laughin'. We set there as solemn as if parson was preachin' to us on 'lection and predestination. But whenever I think about it now, I laugh fit to kill. And I've thought many a time that Sally Ann's plain talk to them men done more good than all the sermons us women had had preached to us about bein' 'shame faced' and 'submittin" ourselves to our husbands, for every one o' them women come out in new clothes that spring, and such a change as it made in some of 'em!. . . .

"Things is different from what they used to be," she went on, as she folded her pieces into a compact bundle and tied it with a piece of gray yarn. "My son-in-law was tellin' me last summer how a passel o' women kept goin' up to Frankfort and so pesterin' the Legislatur', that they had to change the laws to git rid of 'em. So married women now has all the prop erty rights they want, and more'n some of 'cm has sense to use, I reckon.”
― Eliza Calvert Hall, Aunt Jane of Kentucky