Thumbnail image from South Dade News
Some people collect Florida t-shirts, keychains, postcards or recipes, but I love my alligator purses (so popular in the 40s), signs that I see in Venice, where I live and Florida quotes that I’ve collected. Here are some of my favorites:
About Florida…
“As I went farther and farther north and it got colder and colder, I could see why Florida is a golden word. The very name of Florida carried the message of warmth and ease and comfort. It was irresistible.”
-John Steinbeck, author
“I came to Florida when I was about five years old, and I always felt cheated that I wasn’t born here. Florida is a very healing place.”
-Burt Reynolds, actor
“The seasons do change in South Florida—but you have to live there quite a while to recognize just how.”
-Ernest Lyons, author of “My Florida”
“Here in Florida, the seasons move in and out like nuns in soft clothing, making no rustle in their passing… Somehow, autumn does not seem properly used in Florida.”
-Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, author
“Politically and socially, Florida has its North and South, but its northern area is strictly southern and its southern area definitely northern.”
–Federal Writers’ Project, 1939
“Florida, like a piece of embroidery, has two sides to it—one side all tag-rag, and thumbs, without order or position: and the other side always showing flowers and arabesques and brilliant coloring. There is a right side and a wrong side to everything… If I had my say, I wouldn’t come north at all. I leave Florida with tears in my eyes.”
-Harriet Beecher Stowe, author
“Wild places have always haunted me. Yet I had not anticipated any lure of the Everglades. I was powerfully impressed by this strange region.”
-Zane Grey, author
“In its calmness, its unhurried gait of Southern spirit, West Florida is a long way in mind and in geography from the travel agency brochure perception of newer Florida.”
-Jesse Earl Bowden, Editor of the Pensacola News Journal and author
“Key West is like something seen in a dream.”
-John Dos Passos, writer
“I love Key West. There are a lot of incredible characters down there, as migratory and gypsy-souled as I am.”
-Jimmy Buffett, singer and author
“When we pulled into the mustard-yellow railway station of Miami, we felt we were in fairyland.”
-David Fairchild, 1912, American botanist and plant explorer
“Wealth has its privileges. That’s the continuing reality of Palm Beach.”
“Florida is the greatest country in America.”
-Bill Peterson, American football player and coach
“We shall fight till the last drop of Seminole blood has moistened the dust of our hunting ground.”
-Osceola
“I had rather be killed by a white man in Florida than die as an old man in Arkansas.”
-Coacoochee
“I want a location where I can put everything.”
-Walt Disney, developer
“Florida is at once the oldest and the newest state in the Union.”
-Ralph Henry Barbour, novelist, 1926
Do you have a favorite to add to our list? If so, please share them by sending to Editor rebecca.fending@lifestylesafter50.com.
