“…But you cannot know a place without loving it, hating it, and feeling everything in between. You cannot understand the complex people by only looking at the way they have been portrayed on the television and movie screens. One must go to the mountains to drive these winding roads. One must sit and jaw for a while with folks on their front porches, must attend weddings and high school graduations. One must study the history of the place and come to understand it, must sit at a wake and look at the lines on the faces of the people and the callouses on their hands and understand the gestational and generational complexities of poverty and pride and culture. Something inside you has to crack and let in the light so your eyes and brain and heart can adjust properly.”

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- Silas House, read in the 2018 documentary Hillbilly.

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