Acres Quotes & Sayings

Forests are breaking out all over America. New England has more forests since the Civil War. In 1880, New York State was only 25 percent forested. Today it is more than 66 percent. In 1850, Vermont was only 35 percent forested. Now it's 76 percent forested and rising. In the south, more land is covered by forest than at any time in the last century. In 1936 a study found that 80 percent of piedmont Georgia was without trees. Today nearly 70 percent of the state is forested. In the last decade alone, America has added more than 10 million acres of forestland. — Jonah Goldberg

I took acres of fertile ignorance up to that place. And they started to pour preconceptions all over it. Like forty tons of cement. No thanks. I got out before it hardened. I did a year, passed — William McIlvanney

It is not a field of a few acres of ground, but a cause, that we are defending, and whether we defeat the enemy in one battle, or by degrees, the consequences will be the same. — Thomas Paine

Across the road from my cabin was a huge clear-cut
hundreds of acres of massive spruce stumps interspersed with tiny Douglas firs
products of what they call "Reforestation," which I guess makes the spindly firs en masse a "Reforest," which makes an individual spindly fir a "Refir," which means you could say that Weyerhauser, who owns the joint, has Refir Madness, since they think that sawing down 200-foot-tall spruces and replacing them with puling 2-foot Refirs is no different from farming beans or corn or alfalfa. They even call the towering spires they wipe from the Earth's face forever a "crop"
as if they'd planted the virgin forest! But I'm just a fisherman and may be missing some deeper significance in their nomenclature and stranger treatment of primordial trees. — David James Duncan

Being out here in the country and having acres of land, you can go outside naked if you want. — Matt Hardy

I have every luxury imaginable, I own acres of land, and have enough money to buy the moon were it for sale. Though people think I have everything, it sometimes feels like my possessions own me; towering over me and reducing me into a small bundle of insignificance. — J. Matthew Nespoli

The slave labors, but with no cheer-it is not the road to respectability, it will honor him with no citizens' trust, it brings no bread to his family, no grain to his garner, no leisure in after-days, no books or papers to his children. It opens no school-house door, builds no church, rears for him no factory, lays no keel, fills no bank, earns no acres. With sweat and toil and ignorance he consumes his life, to pour the earnings into channels from which he does no drink, into hands that never honor him. But perpetually rob and often torment. — Henry Ward Beecher

If I could afford it, I'd buy 1,000 acres and put my house right dead-center. — Mark Fuhrman

A bald eagle perched in a dead tree, watching us. The landscape was bold. Not only was the property on the North Platte River but the river ran through it, taking an east-west turn for a few miles in its course. The land was a section, 640 acres, a square mile of riparian shrubs and cottonwood, some wetland areas during June high water, sage flats and a lot of weedy overgrazed pasture (46). — Annie Proulx

I've been busy for years, buying land, often under pseudonyms, and planting trees on it. All the money is going into it when I die - and in the end I'd like to think that it will be 20 to 30,000 acres. — Felix Dennis

I swear, one range fire and you've turned into a timid little baby kitten afraid of his own shadow."
Reza swore under his breath, wishing Emily wasn't standing right there watching Teague show his ass - figuratively, of course. He wondered how long it would be before Teague tried to hit on her.
The thought made Reza's spine stiffen as he glanced over at her.
Emily raised both eyebrows, her lips twitching. "Range fire?"
Heat crawled up Reza's neck, along with a strong desire to throttle Ben Teague. "I may or may not have been involved in an accident involving a small fire here at Fort Hood."
"Ha," Teague snorted and grabbed his helmet. "He burned down three hundred acres of training area last year."
"It was an accident," Reza snarled. — Jessica Scott

I composed habits for those acres
so that my last look would be
neither gluttonous nor starved.
I was ready to go anywhere. — Seamus Heaney

The city of London, within the walls, occupies a space of only 370 acres, and is but the hundred and fortieth part of the extent covered by the whole metropolis. — Henry Mayhew

Satan must have been pretty simple, even according to the New Testament, or he wouldn't have led Christ up on a high mountain and offered him the world if he would fall down and worship him. That was a manifestly absurd proposition, because Christ, as the Son of God, already owned the world; and besides, what Satan showed him was only a few rocky acres of Palestine. It is just as if some one should try to buy Rockefeller, the owner of all the Standard Oil Company, with a gallon of kerosene. — Mark Twain

You are, at this moment, standing, right in the middle of your own 'acres of diamonds.' — Earl Nightingale

What it 't to us, if taxes rise or fall,
Thanks to our fortune, we pay none at all.
Let muckworms who in dirty acres deal,
Lament those hardships which we cannot feel,
His grace who smarts, may bellow if he please,
But must I bellow too, who sit at ease?
By custom safe, the poets' numbers flow,
Free as the light and air some years ago.
No statesman e'er will find it worth his pains
To tax our labours, and excise our brains.
Burthens like these with earthly buildings bear,
No tributes laid on castles in the air. — Charles Churchill

Taylor and I both pride ourselves on having escaped that collapsed circus tent of epistemology - those acres of canvas under which many of our colleagues still thrash aimlessly about. — Richard M. Rorty

This then is Borgia Rome: a city where a traveler entering the gates must still cross acres of country before he reaches the center, where animals still outnumber citizens, goats and cattle grazing the imperial ruins, their insistent teeth pulling weeds - and mortar - from between the stones of history. A city still struggling with a chasm of hardship between rich and poor, still ripped apart by gross family violence. But also a place of growing magnificence and confidence where, for the first time in centuries, the future no longer looks bleaker than the past, and where the new Pope has chosen for himself a name designed to foster a belief in magnificence again. Alexander — Sarah Dunant

Like these entities may be the lost acres of the mind, things that have been overlooked by the higher consciousness; that it can't see them, can't process them, fills in the space where they are by folding up the visual map around them., putting things on either side next to each other, like the blind spot in the eye. — Ian McDonald

On my reservation, we had one of the most abundant fisheries in the world and hundreds of thousands of acres of wild rice beds. We've lost a lot of it, but there's still natural wealth that could support our communities. — Winona LaDuke

The median family of four ... paid $4,722 in federal taxes last year. That's enough to pay for a new curtain for the secretary of commerce's office, to bribe a farmer not to plant 38 acres with corn ... seven weeks of salary for a Customs man assigned to save us from the terror of high-quality, low priced foreign TV sets, or the subsidy on 6,000 bushels of wheat to prop up the Soviet regime. Surely civilization would collapse without such essential services. — Alan Bock

Men swagger around calling themselves "cattlemen" but abuse their grass like a rapist. And abuse their cattle with concrete fecal feedlots without any regards to rumen function. Vegetable growers plow thousands of acres, planting monocrops of annuals in a never-ending tillage routine that totally annihilates carbon wealth. Why? Why are we so enamored of things that destroy carbon and disrespect the animals under our care? Grass. Lowly grass. It just gets no respect. And yet it is the lifeblood of the planet. — Joel Salatin

Know that each acre of fallow ought to support yearly two sheep at the least, then a hundred acres of fallow can support two hundred sheep, two hundred acres, four hundred sheep and so on. — Robert Grosseteste

There are acres of diamonds in the problem you have before you right now. — Brian Tracy

Freedom was a thing that shifted as you looked at it, the way a forest is dense with the trees up close but from the outside, from the empty meadow, you see its true limits. Being free had nothing to do with chains or how much space you had. On the plantation, she was not free, but she moved unrestricted on its acres, tasting the air and tracing the summer stars. The place was big in its smallness. Here, she was free of her master but slunk around a warren so tiny she couldn't stand. — Colson Whitehead

The Copse at Hurstbourne is one of those fancy-sounding titles for a brand-new tract of condominiums on the outskirts of town. 'Copse' as in 'a thicket of small trees.' 'Hurst' as in 'hillock, knoll, or mound.' And 'bourne' as in 'brook or stream.' All of these geological and botanical wonders did seem to conjoin within the twenty parcels of the development, but it was hard to understand why it couldn't have just been called Shady Acres, which is what it was. Apparently people aren't willing to pay a hundred and fifty thousand dollars for a home that doesn't sound like it's part of an Anglo-Saxon land grant. These often quite utilitarian dwellings are never named after Jews or Mexicans. Try marketing Rancho Feinstein if you want to lose money in a hurry. Or Paco Sanchez Park. Middle-class Americans aspire to tone, which is equated, absurdly, with the British gentry. — Sue Grafton

The great god Ra, whose shrine once covered acres, is filler now for crossword puzzle makers. — Keith Preston

I seem to grow more acutely conscious of the swift passage of time as I grow older. When I was small, days and hours were long and spacious, and there was play and acres of leisure, and many children's books to read. I remember that as I was writing a poem on "Snow" when I was eight. I said aloud, "I wish I could have the ability to write down the feelings I have now while I'm still little, because when I grow up I will know how to write, but I will have forgotten what being little feels like." And so it is that childlike sensitivity to new experiences and sensations seems to diminish in an inverse proportion to growth of technical ability. As we become polished, so do we become hardened and guilty of accepting eating, sleeping, seeing, and hearing too easily and lazily, without question. We become blunt and callous and blissfully passive as each day adds another drop to the stagnant well of our years. — Sylvia Plath

Folks are always talking about 40 acres and a mule, but what we need is some psychoanalysis. Forget 40 acres in a mule: sign all of us up for some shrinks so we can get ourselves right by reflecting and truly learning ourselves. — LaTanya Richardson

Gas prices in many parts of the country are nearing $4 a gallon; it could get even worse as unrest spreads throughout the oil-exporting Middle East. Yet the Obama administration once again seems to see no crisis. It has curtailed new leases for offshore oil exploration for seven years and exempted thousands of acres in the West from new drilling. It will not reconsider opening up small areas of Alaska with known large oil reserves. — Victor Davis Hanson

If he needs a million acres to make him feel rich, seems to me he needs it 'cause he feels awful poor inside hisself, and if he's poor in hisself, there ain't no million acres gonna make him feel rich, an' maybe he's disappointed that nothin' he can do 'll make him feel rich. — John Steinbeck

I slipped the acres of pink taffeta over my head and struggled to get it zipped. What had originally been a dress from the Little House on the Prairie collection was now straight out of the Little Whore-house on the Prairie collection. — Janet Evanovich

In September 1942 the U.S. government purchased 58,575 acres of wilderness in eastern Tennessee. Soon there was a town, Oak Ridge, and amazing scientific facilities. Thirty-four months after the purchase, an atomic blast lit the New Mexico desert. After 43 months in Iraq, U.S. forces still struggle to cope with improvised explosive devices. — George Will

I think that every town should have a park, or rather a primitive forest, of five hundred or a thousand acres, either in one body or several, where a stick would never be cut for fuel, not for the navy, not to make wagons, but stand and decay for higher uses - a common possession for instruction and recreation. — Henry David Thoreau

Philosophy
I studied philosophy for four years. But I'd trade everything I learned for this passage ... quoted in the Britannica:
'But we were born of risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers besides. And so what shall we wonder at? Our murders and massacres and missiles, and our irreconcilable regiments? Or our treaties whatever they may be worth; our symphonies however seldom they may be played; our peaceful acres, however frequently they may be converted into battlefields; our dreams however rarely they may be accomplished. The miracle of man is not how far he has sunk but how magnificently he has risen. We are known among the stars by our poems, not our corpses.'
Amen. — A. J. Jacobs

My ultimate dream is for the Irvine Ranch to be known and celebrated as much for the outstanding communities we've planned and built as it is for what is not developed. The beneficiary being the 50,000 acres of undeveloped land that is now permanently preserved and conserved as Open Space and parklands. — Donald Bren

We are in the process of finding out what filling billions of acres with huge wind turbines does to the global environment. — Steven Magee

A lot of people don't know, but New Jersey has, like, 700,000 acres of farmland. — Charlie Puth

An acre of the best ground for hemp, is to be selected and sewn in hemp and be kept for a permanent hemp patch. — Thomas Jefferson

...Most peasants never traveled farther than twenty-five miles from the village of their birth. They had strong social ties to their communities, and could not imagine living anywhere else.
"In many places, peasant villages were located within a noble's estate, which was called a manor. Manors could be as small as one hundred acres or as large as several thousand acres and typically encompassed a mixture of cultivated and uncultivated land. Forests provided wood, nuts, and berries; pastures and meadows offered grazing for livestock; and lakes and rivers gave water and fish. But the largest acreage was devoted to agriculture, apportioned among the peasants and the noble, although the noble did no farming himself. Instead the peasants collectively worked both his land and theirs. — Patricia D. Netzley

When I first joined the Irvine Company, I realized that less than 11,000 acres were designated as open space in the original master plan, and that just didn't seem adequate to me. So, I began the lengthy process working with public and community organizations to add more open space. — Donald Bren

Recall the cold
Of Towton on Palm Sunday before dawn,
Wakefield, Tewkesbury : fastidious trumpets
Shrilling into the ruck ; some trampled
Acres, parched, sodden or blanched by sleet,
Stuck with strange-postured dead. Recall the wind's
Flurrying, darkness over the human mire. — Geoffrey Hill

When we seed millions of acres of land with these plants, what happens to foraging birds, to insects, to microbes, to the other animals, when they come in contact and digest plants that are producing materials ranging from plastics to vaccines to pharmaceutical products? — Jeremy Rifkin

As far as size goes, to gain access to the complex we're going to cross the 623 foot moat, using the stone causeway. Once across we simply need to search the 203 acres of land and temple for any sign of what we may be looking for. — Vincent Pauletti

I go on a hunting safari at least once a year to Botswana, which is fantastic because we have a huge area of wilderness entirely to ourselves. My island covers roughly 55 acres, which again I have to myself, with nearly half a kilometre of private beach with my own jetties and boats. — Wilbur Smith

With the recent news that the State of Florida has agreed to purchase 181,000 acres of U.S. Sugar land, we have an historic opportunity for our larger restoration efforts and for the people of Florida. This too will not come without difficult challenges, but it reminds us that anything is possible. — Debbie Wasserman Schultz

I only started to understand the concept of "environmental protection" 14 years ago. I was an ambassador for a charity event, and the staff told me that the consumption of disposable chopsticks in China, per year, could result in the devastation of unimaginable acres of forest. — Li Bingbing

But Maine is a special place: there's something about untold acres of natural beauty in concert with an underachieving public school system that leads to deviations from the customary and commonsensical. — William Giraldi

Happy the man who, removed from all cares of business, after the manner of his forefathers cultivates with his own team his paternal acres, freed from all thought of usury. — Horace

In those days Cheboygan was already something of a resort town, although Milo didn't realize this fact until he was older. For most of his childhood, he knew only the deep woods that ran behind their property - 350 acres of sugar maple, beech, and evergreen that had managed to remain unlogged during the huge timber harvests that had denuded much of the rest of the state. He spent a good part of his days inside this forest. The soil there was padded with a layer of decaying leaves and needles whose scents mingled to form a cool spice in his nose. He didn't notice the smell when he was in it so much as feel its absence when he wasn't. School, home, any building he had to spend time in - they all left him with the feeling that something had been cleaned away. — Ethan Canin

Yellowstone, a place so special and awe-inspiring that after exploring it in 1871, the Hayden Expedition conceived of the original concept of the world's first national park - a set-aside of 2. 2 million acres containing more than ten thousand thermal features, canyons, waterfalls, and wildlife - so no man or corporation could ever own it. — C.J. Box

I heard the voice of that bird, son of Polypas, whose piercing outcry
and whose arrival announces to men the season when fields
are plowed, and the voice of her broke the heart that darkens within me,
since other men posess my flourishing acres now,
and not for me are the mules dragging the plow through the grainland,
since I have given my heart to the restless seafarer's life. — Theognis

Everybody can identify with somebody in the Hundred Acre Wood. — Jim Cummings

All the lights on Broadway don't amount to an acre of green. — Buffy Sainte-Marie

Hemp is Earth's number-one biomass resource; it is capable of producing 10 tons per acre in four months. — Jack Herer

When I was 9, we moved to Osseo, Wis., where we owned a couple of hundred acres. My father was well respected in town. — Diane Hendricks

If everyone agreed to become vegetarian, leaving little or nothing for livestock, the present 1.4 billion hectares of arable land (3.5 billion acres) would support about 10 billion people, — E. O. Wilson

It is very possible that I could have ended up on 80 acres of land by myself, and fallen in love at a distance with a gorgeous woman I could never have been with. — Peter Sarsgaard

How many a poor immortal soul have I met well-nigh crushed and smothered under its load, creeping down the road of life, pushing before it a barn seventy-five feet by forty, its Augean stables never cleansed, and one hundred acres of land, tillage, mowing, pasture, and wood-lot. The portionless, who struggle with no such unnecessary inherited encumbrances, find it labor enough to subdue and cultivate a few cubic feet of flesh. — Henry David Thoreau

Humanity must work together to stop deforestation. Every minute over 160 acres of land feel the destructive effects of deforestation. Deforestation causes species to become extinct, disrupts natural habitats, and erodes the top soil of viable farming lands causing drought and famine. — Kambiz Mostofizadeh

In Africa, you can make three acres sustainable relatively easily, but 50,000 acres? It's not about picking up towels or sleeping in a tent. — Jochen Zeitz

Every sixty seconds, thirty acres of rain forest are destroyed in order to raise beef for fast-food restaurants that sell it to people, giving them strokes and heart attacks, which raise medical costs and insurance rates, providing insurance companies with more money to invest in large corporations that branch out further into the Third World so they can destroy more rain forests. — George Carlin

Why Brownlee left, and where he went,
Is a mystery even now.
For if a man should have been content
It was him; two acres of barley,
One of potatoes, four bullocks,
A milker, a slated farmhouse.
He was last seen going out to plough
On a March morning, bright and early.

By noon Brownlee was famous;
They had found all abandoned, with
The last rig unbroken, his pair of black
Horses, like man and wife,
Shifting their weight from foot to
Foot, and gazing into the future. — Paul Muldoon

It is not acceptable that we continue to see thousands of acres burn because of forest fires, because of poor management on our forests, big kill, and we have these catastrophic situations take place when we are not able to take action. — Cathy McMorris Rodgers

If you want to feed the planet and keep the forests we have, you need to be able to grow roughly twice as much food per acre around the world. How do you do that? New technology. — Ramez Naam

You ready? And PS, the next time you want someone to mark a hundred acres of territory, that's all you. Denver shot him a hostile glare before slinging his legs off the sofa and getting up, then walking barefoot toward the bedrooms. — Dannika Dark

Each day they expend innumerable foot-pounds of energy - enough to plough thousands of acres, build miles of road, put up dozens of houses - in mere, useless walking. — George Orwell

It's just a little ranch. Thirty-five acres. In Texas, if it's not a thousand acres, it's considered a ranchette. — Betty Buckley

Some of my favorite contemporary Montana writers and their books include Annick Smith's Homestead, a memoir of her experiences, along with her husband and four children, homesteading in the Blackfoot Valley on 163 acres in the 1960s; Deirdre — Nancy Pearl

He drove into the spewing smoke of acres of burning truck tires and the planes descended and the transit cranes stood in rows at the marine terminal and he saw billboards for Hertz and Avis and Chevy Blazer, for Marlboro, Continental and Goodyear, and he realized that all the things around him, the planes taking off and landing, the streaking cars, the tires on the cars, the cigarettes that the drivers of the cars were dousing in their ashtrays
all these were on the billboards around him, systematically linked in some self-referring relationship that had a kind of neurotic tightness, an inescapability, as if the billboards were generating reality ... — Don DeLillo

Beaumont-Hamel sits within a thousand acres of French agriculture. The trenches are under this blanket of grass. In the 1920s, a park was established here and trees from Newfoundland imported to encircle the battlefield so you get the feeling of being within a copse of woods. — Michael Winter

We can be thankful to a friend for a few acres, or a little money; and yet for the freedom and command of the whole earth, and for the great benefits of our being, our life, health, and reason, we look upon ourselves as under no obligation. — Lucius Annaeus Seneca

The rituals surrounding vacations among Manhattan's wealthiest and best-connected citizens are strange and specific. By vacations I don't mean country houses, which are part of the regular ebb and flow of life and which are frequently subjects for complaint - The kids never want to go! The caretaker missed the roof leak! The pipes froze! - as though having a six-thousand-square-foot, cedar-shingled cottage on five acres overlooking the ocean is nothing more or less than a constant test of character. — Anna Quindlen

In the 24 hours since this time yesterday, over 200,000 acres of rainforest have been destroyed in our world. Fully 13 million tons of toxic chemicals have been released into our environment. Over 45,000 people have died from starvation, 38,000 of them children. And more than 130 plant and animal species have been driven to extinction by the actions of humans. And all this just since yesterday. — Thom Hartmann

Haska - a dim legendary figure of a generation ago, who went back up the mountain and cleared six acres of brush in the tiny valley that took his name. He broke the soil, reared stone walls and a house, and planted apple trees. And already the site of the house is undiscoverable, the location of the stone walls may be deduced from the configuration of the landscape, and I am renewing the battle, putting in angora goats to browse away the brush that has overrun Haska's clearing and choked Haska's apple trees to death. So I, too, scratch the land with my brief endeavour and flash my name across a page of legal script ere I pass and the page grows musty. — Jack London

As I sounded through the ice I could determine the shape of the bottom with greater accuracy than is possible in surveying harbors which do not freeze over, and I was surprised at its general regularity. In the deepest part there are several acres more level than almost any field which is exposed to the sun, wind, and plow. In one instance, on a line arbitrarily chosen, the depth did not vary more than one foot in thirty rods; and generally, near the middle, I could calculate the variation for each one hundred feet in any direction beforehand within three or four inches. Some are accustomed to speak of deep and dangerous holes even in quiet sandy ponds like this, — Henry David Thoreau

Do you know how many acres of beautiful forests and moors have been destroyed by your company? How many animals have lost their homes and how many trees have been murdered? I am sick of being bothered by you people. — Emily Arden

Scientific knowledge has taught [humans] much since the days of the Deluge, and it will increase their power still further. And, as for the great necessities of Fate, against which there is no help, they will learn to endure them with resignation. Of what use to them is the mirage of wide acres in the moon, whose harvest no one has ever yet seen? As honest smallholders on this earth they will know how to cultivate their plot in such a way that it supports them. By withdrawing their expectations from the other world and concentrating all their liberated energies into their life on earth, they will probably succeed in achieving a state of things in which life will become tolerable for everyone and civilization no longer oppressive to anyone. Then, with one of our fellow-unbelievers, they will be able to say without regret: 'We leave Heaven to the angels and the sparrows. — Sigmund Freud

In 2001, the Associated Press published a three-part investigation into the theft of black-owned land stretching back to the antebellum period. The series documented some 406 victims and 24,000 acres of land values at tends of millions of dollars. The land was taken through means ranging from legal chicanery to terrorism. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

I grew up in a town outside of Waco, Texas, and we had 30 acres. — Jesse Plemons

deep-seated hatred between the cattlemen and the settler."40 This should come as no shock; the only surprise is that the big cattlemen would sometimes deny their attitude toward settlers. A settler who exercised his perfect right to 160 acres along a stream could significantly impair a big cowman's range; if several did so, the range would be lost altogether, as happened, for example, along Shell Creek in the Big Horn Basin. — John W. Davis

I'm in this absolutely gorgeous manor house with acres of quite beautiful countryside. I've got trout in the river, an organic vegetable garden, I've got my work 40 yards from my home. I don't mind being criticised, but where are they criticising from? Which hut are they criticising me from, exactly? — Jay Kay

I first saw the site for Disneyland back in 1953, In those days it was all flat land - no rivers, no mountains, no castles or rocket ships - just orange groves, and a few acres of walnut trees. — Walt Disney

It's happening everywhere; commercial and housing development, along with the road network needed to support it, is the single greatest pressure on natural landscapes in the United States, and by its very pervasiveness the hardest to control. Between 1982 and 1997, developed land in the forty-eight contiguous states increased by 25 million acres - meaning a quarter of all the open land lost since European settlement disappeared in just those fifteen years. This isn't a trend, it's a juggernaut, and the worst may be yet to come. At this pace, by 2025 there will be 68 million more rural acres in development, an area about the size of Wyoming, and the total developed land in the United States will stand at a Texas-sized 174 million acres. Already, just the impervious covering we put on the land, the things like roads, sidewalks, and buildings we pave with asphalt or concrete, adds up to an area the size of Ohio.3 — Scott Weidensaul

But we were born of risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers besides. And so what shall we wonder at? Our murders and massacres and missiles, and our irreconcilable regiments? Or our treaties whatever they may be worth; our symphonies however seldom they may be played; our peaceful acres, however frequently they may be converted into battlefields; our dreams however rarely they may be accomplished. The miracle of man is not how far he has sunk but how magnificently he has risen. We are known among the stars by our poems, not our corpses. — Robert Ardrey

We've set aside tens of millions of acres of those northwestern forests for perpetuity. The unemployment rate has gone not up, but down. The economy has gone up. — Bruce Babbitt

At least once a week, if not once a day, we might each ponder what cosmic truths lie undiscovered before us, perhaps awaiting the arrival of a clever thinker, an ingenious experiment, or an innovative space mission to reveal them. We might further ponder how those discoveries may one day transform life on Earth.
Absent such curiosity, we are no different from the provincial farmer who expresses no need to venture beyond the county line, because his forty acres meet all his needs. Yet if all our predecessors had felt that way, the farmer would instead be a cave dweller, chasing down his dinner with a stick and a rock. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

My daughter is here in town doing a play, and her dog is staying with us. We live up in the hills, so he has access to thousands of acres of wilderness. — Rene Auberjonois

Where else but America could football flourish, America with its millions of fertile acres of corn, soy, and wheat, its lakes of dairy, its year-round gushers of fruits and vegetables, and such meats, that extraordinary pipline of beef, poultry, seafood, and pork, feedlot gorged, vitamin enriched, and hypodermically immunized, humming factories of high-velocity protein production, all of which culminate after several generations of epic nutrition in this strain of industrial-sized humans? Only America could produce such giants. — Ben Fountain

Percy was waiting for them. He looked mad.
He stood at the edge of the glacier, leaning on the staff with the golden eagle, gazing down at the wreckage he'd caused: several hundred acres of newly open water dotted with icebergs and flotsam from the ruined camp.
The only remains on the glacier were the main gates, which listed sideways, and a tattered blue banner lying over a pile of now-bricks.
When they ran up to him, Percy said, "Hey," like they were just meeting for lunch or something.
"You're alive!" Frank marveled.
Percy frowned. "The fall? That was nothing. I fell twice that far from the St. Louis Arch."
"You did what?" Hazel asked.
"Never mind. The important thing was I didn't drown. — Rick Riordan

How many of these houses do you own?"
"We own, and all of them."
"Do we own anything else?"
"We also own the woods directly behind us."
Those woods extended for quite a while. There used to be a huge golf course and a shopping center behind us, but trees and brush had swallowed it long ago. "How many acres?"
"Five hundred and twelve."
I opened my mouth and nothing came out.
"I thought of calling it the Five Hundred Acre Wood," Curran said. — Ilona Andrews

In the interval from about February to May 1609, there was considerable material progress in and about Jamestown. Perhaps forty acres were cleared and prepared for planting in Indian corn, the new grain that fast became a staple commodity. A "deep well" was dug in the fort. The church was re-covered and twenty cabins built. A second trial was made at glass manufacture in the furnaces built late in 1608. A blockhouse was built at the isthmus which connected the Island to the mainland for better control of the Indians, and a new fort was erected on a tidal creek across the river from Jamestown. — Charles E. Hatch

Sure, we thought the acres
That we tilled were sacred,
But how could we have known
That wheat can haunt like ghosts — Sherman Alexie

Have you reckon'd a thousand acres much? have you reckon'd the earth much?
Have you practis'd so long to learn to read?
Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems? — Walt Whitman

I have always been a plodder, a person who anguishes and struggles over each sentence, and even on my best days I do no more than inch along, crawling on my belly like a man lost in the desert. The smallest word is surrounded by acres of silence for me, and even after I manage to get that word down on the page, it seems to sit there like a mirage, a speck of doubt glimmering in the sand. — Paul Auster

The graves and monuments were in rough rows. Somewhere there would be a caretaker's building, and in it would be a map of Pleasantview's twenty or so acres, neatly and sanely divided into quadrants, each quadrant showing the occupied graves and the unsold plots. Real estate for sale. One-room apartments. Sleepers. — Stephen King

My wife's father said if you marry my daughter I'll give you three acres and a cow. I'm still waiting for the three acres. — Max Miller

support added density. In spite of those challenges, TDR zoning can work. For example, in Montgomery County, adjacent to Washington D.C., TDR zoning has protected 40,000 acres in 20 years, achieving half the area's farmland preservation — Peter Ladner

The snowfall obliterated the borders between the fields and made Kabuo Miyamoto's long-cherished seven acres indistinguishable from the land that surrounded them. All human claims to the landscape were superseded, made null and void by the snow. The world was one world, and the notion that a man might kill another over some small patch of it did not make sense. — David Guterson

Vatican city is an independent state created by the Lateran treaty of 11th Feb 1929 which was signed by Pope Pius XI, the holy see and the Italian government. It covers an area of 108 acres on the hill west of the Tiber river. It is separated from the rest of Rome by high walls on all sides except at the Piazza of St Peter. — Julian Noyce