The York State Quote Board

I am pleased to announce the formation of the York State Quote Board! For some time, I have been collecting some of my favorite quotes from Upstaters about Upstate and I've created a subpage to display them. The link will soon be up on the right-hand side of the page, but I would like to put them up here as well:

"York Staters eat snowstorms for breakfast, spit on their hands, then go out and do what needs doing."
-Historian Phillip Maples on the WNY response to the terrible winter of 1823

"Everybody has to have a hometown, Binghamton's mine. In the strangely brittle, terribly sensitive make-up of a human being, there is a need for a place to hang a hat or a kind of geographical womb to crawl back into, or maybe just a place that's familiar because that's where you grew up... When I dig back through memory cells, I get one particularly distinctive feeling—and that's one of warmth, comfort and well-being. For whatever else I may have had, or lost, or will find—I've still got a hometown. This, nobody's gonna take away from me."
-Rod Serling, Upstate Filmmaker and creator of the Twilight Zone

"All that is within me cries out to go back to my home on the Hudson River."
-President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1944, burdened by the pressure of war and near his death from illness.

"Ithaca is Gorges"
-T-Shirt Expressions, Ithaca

"As for me, I’ll be leaving New York when they chisel open the permafrost and throw my body into the cold, hard ground."
-NYCO, Upstate Blogger

"There's a part of the country could drop off tomorrow in an earthquake,/Yeah it's out there on the cutting edge, the people move, the sidwalks shake./And there's another part of the country with a land that gently creaks and thuds,/Where the heavy snows make faucets leak in bathrooms with free-standing tubs./They're in houses that are haunted, the with kids who lie awake and think about/All the generations past who used to use that dripping sink/...Sometimes Southern California wants to be Western New York"
-'Southern California Wants to be Western New York,' by Dar Williams, singer-songwriter from Chappaqua, NY

"No matter what our philosophies, the York Stater's manners should be above reproach"
-Natalie Franz, co-editor of the this blog when discussing how to deal with politically aggressive posting

"As a man tramps the woods to the lake he knows he will find pines and lilies, blue herons and golden shiners, shadows on the rocks and the glint of light on the wavelets, just as they were in the summer of 1354, as they will be in 2054 and beyond. He can stand on a rock by the shore and be in a past he could not have known, in a future he will never see. He can be a part of time that was and time yet to come."
-William Chapman White, Adirondack Country, 1954

"WHEREAS, Daniel Webster, That base and infamous enemy of the human race, did in a speech of which he delivered himself, in Syracuse last Spring, exultingly and insultingly predict that fugitive slaves would yet be taken away from Syracuse and even from anti-slavery conventions in Syracuse, and whereas the attempt to fulfill this prediction was delayed until the first day of October, 1851, when the Liberty party of the State of New York were holding their annual convention in Syracuse; and whereas the attempt was defeated by the mighty uprising of 2,500 brave men, before whom the half-dozen kidnappers were 'as tow', therefore, Resolved, That we rejoice that the City of Syracuse- the anti-slavery city of Syracuse- the city of anti-slavery conventions, our beloved and glorious city of Syracuse- still remains undisgraced by the fulfillment of the satanic prediction of the satanic Daniel Webster."
-Resolution written by abolitionist Gerrit Smith and passed by the anti-slavery Liberty Party the day after the Jerry Rescue, where the last Central New Yorker to be arrest for the purpose of being returned to slavery was rescued.

What are your favorite quotes by Yorkstaters or about Upstate?

-Posted by Jesse