"I know folks all have a tizzy about it, but I like a little bourbon of an evening. It helps me sleep. I don't much care what they say about it"
About this Quote
There’s a sly kind of Southern steel in this: a genteel voice using plain talk to draw a hard boundary. Carter doesn’t posture. She shrugs. And that shrug is the point. “Folks all have a tizzy about it” frames public judgment as noise, not moral authority. It’s not a defense so much as a demotion of the critics: they’re fussing, not thinking.
The bourbon detail matters because it’s domestic, not decadent. “A little bourbon of an evening” lands as ritual, like a porch light switched on at dusk. By tethering it to sleep, she reframes drinking from vice to self-care before that language existed. The sentence is built to sound reasonable, even modest, while quietly insisting on autonomy.
The subtext is sharper: this is a woman of her era and region refusing the surveillance that policed female respectability. Coming from Lillian Gordy Carter, the mother of a famously upright, church-forward president, the line also reads as a small rebellion against the halo the public tries to pin on political families. She punctures the expectation that proximity to power requires permanent sanctimony.
“I don’t much care what they say about it” is the mic-drop, delivered in slippers. It’s less about bourbon than ownership: of one’s body, one’s evenings, one’s story. In a culture that loves to turn women adjacent to fame into symbols, Carter insists on being a person instead.
The bourbon detail matters because it’s domestic, not decadent. “A little bourbon of an evening” lands as ritual, like a porch light switched on at dusk. By tethering it to sleep, she reframes drinking from vice to self-care before that language existed. The sentence is built to sound reasonable, even modest, while quietly insisting on autonomy.
The subtext is sharper: this is a woman of her era and region refusing the surveillance that policed female respectability. Coming from Lillian Gordy Carter, the mother of a famously upright, church-forward president, the line also reads as a small rebellion against the halo the public tries to pin on political families. She punctures the expectation that proximity to power requires permanent sanctimony.
“I don’t much care what they say about it” is the mic-drop, delivered in slippers. It’s less about bourbon than ownership: of one’s body, one’s evenings, one’s story. In a culture that loves to turn women adjacent to fame into symbols, Carter insists on being a person instead.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wine |
|---|
More Quotes by Lillian
Add to List
