And my parents live down in West Virginia, and I have to drive through the Shenandoah Valley pretty often to go visit them. You actually drive right by Gettysburg and some other spots where there were huge battles.
Aaron Dessner
I was like, 18 and it was in West Virginia because I was allowed to get into the clubs in West Virginia, not Pennsylvania where I was growing up. And we went in and there was a drag queen on stage and she was huge and beautiful, but she was lip syncing to a song. I was legitimately stunned.
Alaska
I'd lived in West Virginia on and off for four to five years growing up. I'm familiar with Bible Belt, with Appalachia, 'Hillbilly Elegy.'
Antoni Porowski
A West Virginia 10 is a California 4. Or at least that's what legend tells us: The Legend of Dr. Feelgood. Plastic surgery has a permanent home here, which is why Nancy Pelosi loves our Botoxed beaches. Beverly Hills looks like a moving Madame Tussauds.
Ben Shapiro
I grew up in a small town in West Virginia called Kenova. It's the city where the plane crashed from Marshall University. I watched the mountain burn, and my cousins were the volunteer firemen. I was 6 years old at the time.
Brad D. Smith
Anytime you're in West Virginia or near it, and you sing, 'Take Me Home, Country Roads,' it's a sight to behold.
Brad Paisley
Deep down, I'm just a West Virginia hillbilly.
In West Virginia yesterday, a man was arrested for stealing several blow-up dolls. Reportedly, police didn't have any trouble catching the man because he was completely out of breath.
Conan O'Brien
I think family is very important in West Virginia and has long been so because the mountains made travel difficult in the past, and family members had to depend on each other.
David Selby
The West Virginia NASA Space Grant took me under their wing and taught me everything about applying for internships, scholarships, and performing research at the undergraduate level.
Emily Calandrelli
I was very good until I left home to go to a little college in West Virginia, and then I started to break some rules.
Frances McDormand
I'm from northern Virginia, but I grew up next to the West Virginia border, so it was hills and farmland. We had that sense of adventure you get from growing up around old farmhouses and lazy, rolling hills, you know?
Hilarie Burton
When I was a West Virginia lad of 17, I met a Massachusetts lad of 42 by the name of John F. Kennedy. At the time, I was in a bright orange suit that I had just purchased to wear to the 1960 National Science Fair, where I hoped my home-built rockets would win a medal. Kennedy was in West Virginia trying to win the state's presidential primary.
Homer Hickam
Coalwood, West Virginia, is the little coal-mining town where I grew up, and it was there that five other teenage boys and I famously built and launched rockets. I recounted this story in my memoir, 'Rocket Boys.'
I was in federal prison in West Virginia for three months for contempt of Congress for a refusing to comply with a request of a Congressional committee of Congress, the House Un-American Activities Committee.
Howard Fast
Trump talks like a guy at a bar in West Virginia. Trump talks like my dad sitting around the dinner table.
J. D. Vance
We were growing up in West Virginia. Everybody was poor there in the southern part of the state. It was like growing up in the Great Depression from the stories I hear people tell. Everybody was poor and so we didn't know that we were any different from anybody else.
James Green Somerville
My father was a Presbyterian minister, working among the poor in West Virginia. He had taken what amounted to a vow of poverty when he accepted that call and so we never had much money.
There's no telling how many guns we have in America - and when one gets used in a crime, no way for the cops to connect it to its owner. The only place the police can turn for help is a Kafkaesque agency in West Virginia, where, thanks to the gun lobby, computers are illegal and detective work is absurdly antiquated.
Jeanne Marie Laskas
It may be too late for West Virginia to save itself from the ravages of Big Coal. But it's not too late for America.
Jeff Goodell
I mean, I didn't ever watch 'Gilligan's Island' and think, 'Those people are actors.' I lived in West Virginia. Hollywood just felt like this total other universe.
I miss West Virginia very much.
I'm still very much a West Virginia boy. I haven't forgotten my roots, because that's really who I am.
I grew up in Palestine, West Virginia, which is mostly a farming community; there aren't a lot of jobs.
I want each and every West Virginian to have bragging rights. I want to stop playing defense and start playing offense. So, together, let us grab the reins of history.
I fully expect to be able to complete one more campaign goal - and that is to proudly report that signs have been erected as you enter our great state that say 'Welcome to Wild, Wonderful West Virginia: Open for Business!'
Our workers comp debt is the Achilles heel of our state's economy, and I firmly believe that in order to create more good jobs in West Virginia this system must be fixed and it must be fixed now. We cannot afford to wait even one more minute.
Wherever there is one job on the verge of being lost, I will fight to save it. Wherever there is one company looking to grow in West Virginia, I will fight to make that growth a reality.
Come to West Virginia and we'll show you how to live... how to treat people. We're open for business. West Virginia is truly on the move.
I am very proud of the critical role West Virginians play in providing energy to our nation.
Whoever is president, my first priority is the same - as always. I look for what's best for West Virginia and the nation as a whole.
In West Virginia, the most vulnerable people we have are people who get up every morning and go to work.
I can assure you that my wife and I - every penny of income we've ever had, our taxes were paid in West Virginia.
My father was in the coal business in West Virginia. Both dad and mother were, however, originally from Massachusetts; New England, to them, meant the place to go if you really wanted an education.
I hated baseball. I really didn't like baseball at all until someone decided they were going to pay me... Every year I played in the big leagues, the day the season ended, I called my buddies in West Virginia and said, 'I'll be home tomorrow.'
People in West Virginia do have cars. We have indoor plumbing. We even use knives and forks.
I've been a conservative in West Virginia before that was popular. I've seen a change in West Virginia. Not a change in John Raese, but a change in West Virginia and a change in America.
I'm a native West Virginian and I've been called everything from a hillbilly to a stump jumper. I'm always proud of it; I'm very proud to be a West Virginian.
My dad claims that he was able to trace us back to the West Virginia Hatfields. When I look at the old pictures, the patriarchs have kind of a physical likeness to some of the men on the father's side of my family. I want it to be true.
I grew up in a small town in West Virginia, and most of my family lived in our neighborhood or very close by. I had my grandparents down the street, my great-grandmother next door, and my great-aunt and great-uncle one door down.
My grandmother Dora taught me how to cook. She's from a small town in West Virginia called Milton. I would pull a stool up to her kitchen counter after school. My love of food started there.
My mother was actually born in Ohio but raised in West Virginia where her family had a laundry. She has a West Virginian accent. My father was born in China, but he's the son of an American citizen. My paternal grandfather was born in San Francisco in 1867.
Katherine Johnson actually integrated the public university in West Virginia. And Mary Jackson had to petition state courts to be allowed to attend an all-white college to get the qualifications needed to become an engineer. At every turn, these women were involved in the Second World War, the Cold War, the civil rights movement.
When I was incarcerated at Alderson in West Virginia for a five-month term, they had a ceramics class.
When the human race neglects its weaker members, when the family neglects its weakest one - it's the first blow in a suicidal movement. I see the neglect in cities around the country, in poor white children in West Virginia and Virginia and Kentucky - in the big cities, too, for that matter.
I've told so many stories to so many friends of mine. I have friends in Pittsburgh, in West Virginia, and in Indy. That's three different demographics of people, and they all laughed, so I assumed that if I find something funny and all my friends find something funny, I hope people everywhere will find it funny.
When candidate Donald Trump ran for the highest office in the land, he promised to fight for forgotten Americans. In the presidential election of 2016, the forgotten Americans of the Upper Midwest and the coal country of Kentucky and West Virginia, many of them life-long Democrats, delivered a decisive win for this first-time Republican candidate.
I played college basketball in West Virginia for two years, and then I graduated from NYU with a sports management degree because I realized the NBA's not going to happen.
I'm from West Virginia. If you didn't know what was happening in NASCAR, you were on the outside. NASCAR is a big league sport, but it's still also country and redneck.
The sun doesn't always shine in West Virginia, but the people do.
