Why I Farm Quotes & Sayings

So you did get it?" I asked, suddenly babbling. "I wasn't sure. I mean, sometimes we don't get very good reception at school. But I guess you know that, living on a farm and all." Shut up, shut up, shut up .
He smiled slowly. "Hunter, are you nervous?"
"Shut up."
"Are you going to ask me to prom?" he teased.
"Shut up," I repeated, choking on a horrified laugh.
He grinned. "I look pretty good in a tux."
I rolled my eyes, suddenly comfortable again. "And you're so refreshingly modest. — Alyxandra Harvey

The only investable idea I have real confidence in is farming and forestry. My family owns some forest, and now we're closing on a farm. Make the farming more sustainable and the forestry more sustainable, and everyone benefits. — Jeremy Grantham

wrestling with a curiosity about country living that seemed strangely akin to a homophobic person "struggling with same-sex attraction." As much as I wanted to be a creature of the city, as much as I'd organized my entire life around the overpriced, undersized vagaries of Manhattan living, I sometimes found myself wanting desperately to live on a farm, or at least near one. — Meghan Daum

The forest had retreated. I could see farm cottages where once there had been only sheep pastures, pastures where there had been forest, and stumplands beyond that. My heart sank; once we had hunted there, my wolf and I, where now sheep pastured. The world had to change and for some reason the prosperity of men always results in them taking ever more from wild creatures and places. Foolish, perhaps, to feel that pang of regret for what was gone, and perhaps it was only felt by those who straddled the worlds of humans and beasts. — Robin Hobb

She isn't missing. She's at the farm right now. — Ed Gein

One of the central memories of my childhood is of hunting - not well; I am a terrible shot - quail and dove and grouse on a farm on the Tennessee River. — Jon Meacham

All roads lead to Johannesburg. If you are white or if you are black they lead to Johannesburg. If the crops fail, there is work in Johannesburg. If there are taxes to be paid, there is work in Johannesburg. If the farm is too small to be divided further, some must go to Johannesburg. If there is a child to be born that must be delivered in secret, it can be delivered in Johannesburg. — Alan Paton

I had a bad time in school in the first grade. Because I had been a rather lonely child on a farm, but I was free and wild and to be shut up in a classroom - there were 40 children on those days in the classroom, and it was quite a shock. — Beverly Cleary

Way back when I was four, I became increasingly sickly and spiritless. My mother took me to the doctor, who poked and prodded and deliberated. In the end, he pronounced, "She's depressed." Depressed at four years old. Why? No one had an answer....I have long evaded the real reasons for my discontentment. I still can't tell what they are, precisely, but I feel their presence most acutely in moments like this one with my grandmother, imagining a day in a big-box store that had replaced an old farm. — Alisa Smith

The ancient house is our chrysalis, trapping us until our metamorphosis is complete: our chic city wings plucked from our backs and we'll emerge as fat, white farm larvae. Like the ones living in the corral cow pies. — Mix Hart

I'm tired and it's taking an increasing amount out of me, more than I have to give physically. And that's why I want to move to Sicily and buy that little farm and raise a flock of goats and geese. I find it peaceful ... and it would be a nice way to end life. — Tennessee Williams

Charles, a footman who had once worked on his father's farm and who loved animals, appeared and came over to help her prepare dishes of boiled chicken and brown rice for the cats and dogs waiting eagerly at their feet.
When guests were staying, Charles often assisted with the care of her furry brood. Without asking, he set to work, even taking a few moments to gather fresh meat scraps for Aeolus, her wounded hawk, and cut-up apple and beetroots for Poppy, a convalescing rabbit who had an injured leg. He gave her several more apple quarters for the horses, who got jealous if she didn't bring them treats as well.
Once all her cats and dogs were fed, Esme set off for the stables, laden pail in hand, Burr trotting at her heels. She stopped along the way to chat with the gardener and his assistant, who gave her some timothy grass, comfrey and lavender to supplement the hay she regularly fed Poppy. — Tracy Anne Warren

My faith has helped me to adjust to life whether I was a small farm boy, a submarine officer, governor, president or an ex-president. I've tried to remember the teaching that we have to accommodate change we can't control in our lives, whether it's disappointment, sorrow, loss or failure, while simultaneously clinging to principles that never change. — Jimmy Carter

Once people spend time with farm animals in a loving way ... a pig or cow or a little chicken or a turkey, they might find they relate with them the same way they relate with dogs and cats. People don't really think of them that way because they're on the plate. Why should they be food when other animals are pets? I would never eat my doggies. — Alicia Silverstone

Remote though your farm may be, It's something to be the lord of one green lizard-and free. — Juvenal

Grandpa's farm had belonged to our people ever since there had been a farm in that place, or people to own a farm. Grandpa's father had left it to Grandpa and his other sons and daughters. But Grandpa had borrowed money and bought their shares. He had to have it whole hog or none, root hog or die, or he wouldn't have it at all. — Wendell Berry

Bill is about moving forward on a long overdue provision to protect vulnerable paid farm workers in Alberta to the same degree that they are protected in every other province in the country, and we feel confident that once people see how the bill actually applies to the regular family farm, they will see that a lot of the concerns were perhaps misplaced. And it's unfortunate that we created a situation that made people worry; that was not ever our intention. — Rachel Notley

They rattled off the names of dozens of cities too fast to write down, but I did catch Industrial City, Military City, Farm City, Food City, and Fashion City. I wonder why the naming conventions are so provincial. Must be that the same not-so-enterprising guy who discovered Thera and decided not to cash in named everything with his simpleton vocabulary. As — Megan Thomason

My midwife partners and I at the The Farm learned by observation and experience that the presence of even one person who is not exquisitely attuned to the mother's feelings can stop some women's labors. All women are sensitive. Some women are extraordinarily so. We learned this truth by observing many labors stop or slow down when someone entered the birth room who was not intimate with the laboring mother's feelings. If that person then left the room, labor usually returned to its former pace or intensity. — Ina May Gaskin

Mouse took an idle whack at some kudzu as he passed, but his face was serious. "Hell, I don't know. Why do you care? That was right after our farm burned. They got everyone. Mom and Dad. Simon. Shane got recruited. I saw that. They shot Simon because he was too little, but they took Shane." He knocked aside more kudzu. "Maybe I was hoping they'd just shoot me and get it over with. I was so sick of hiding and scavenging. I think I wanted the bullet. — Paolo Bacigalupi

At sixty miles per hour, you could pass our farm in a minute, on County Road 686, which ran due north into the T intersection at Cabot Street Road. — Jane Smiley

Farm workers everywhere are angry and worried that we cannot win without violence. We have proved it before through persistence, hard work, faith and willingness to sacrifice. We can win and keep our own self-respect and build a great union that will secure the spirit of all people if we do it through a re-dedication and re-commitment to the struggle for justice through non-violence. — Cesar Chavez

Incendiary

That one small boy with a face like pallid cheese
And burnt-out little eyes could make a blaze
As brazen, fierce and huge, as red and gold
And zany yellow as the one that spoiled
Three thousand guineas' worth of property
And crops at Godwin's Farm on Saturday
Is frightening---as fact and metaphor:
An ordinary match intended for
The lighting of a pipe or kitchen fire
Misused may set a whole menagerie
Of flame-fanged tigers roaring hungrily.
And frightening, too, that one small boy should set
The sky on fire and choke the stars to heat
Such skinny limbs and such a little heart
Which would have been content with one warm kiss
Had there been anyone to offer this. — Vernon Scannell

Of course, Storm-Lord! But why would a god marry a poor farm girl?" asked one of the bound novices, his voice thin and chirping as an insect.
"All things must eventually mate," I shrugged, "having been cast into a man's flesh I must do as flesh does. And it hardly matters whether one mates with a woman or a rock or a river - the end result is the same. Once all the world wed stones and trees - but this is a degenerate age, and no one keeps to tradition. — Catherynne M Valente

I always felt that a marriage works best at a farm ... where you're together and everybody has clear-cut roles; they have chores, 'you take care of this' and you know. But it's hard. — Ethan Hawke

Why do farmers farm, given their economic adversities on top of the many frustrations and difficulties normal to farming? And always the answer is: "Love. They must do it for love." Farmers farm for the love of farming. They love to watch and nurture the growth of plants. They love to live in the presence of animals. They love to work outdoors. They love the weather, maybe even when it is making them miserable. They love to live where they work and to work where they live. If the scale of their farming is small enough, they like to work in the company of their children and with the help of their children. They love the measure of independence that farm life can still provide. I have an idea that a lot of farmers have gone to a lot of trouble merely to be self-employed to live at least a part of their lives without a boss. — Wendell Berry

In 1900, the typical American was a boy, not yet a teenager, named John. He lived with his parents and his sisters, Mary and Helen, on a farm in New York or Pennsylvania. — Bill Dedman

The old man kept going about how he could never keep her home, how she loved to roam. He said she should have been a sheep in the foothills of Scotland. Now if that wasn't a load of shit I don't know what is. I'll tell you why that sheep roamed. The fences around here was held up with goddamn binder twine and half-assed prayers. That's why. — Susan Juby

I used to help my grandfather on the farm, driving tractors, raising crops and animals. I used to feed some of the baby cows and pigs, and I had to be no older than 7 or 8. Then at about 9 or 10 I started driving tractors. It showed me at an early age what hard work was all about and how dedicated you have to be, no matter what you do. — Tyson Chandler

You boys ain't but two weeks off the farm. Your mama probably gave you your last bath. You think you went through one battle and you're soldiers now? I saw that boy fight for his cause. I saw him sicken and almost die for it. He sang around that fire when he had nothing left to sing. He sang for us. that boy gave everything and then he up and left and I say God bless him. — Kathy Hepinstall

I'm not one to insist that a man can't possibly make it without a lot of formal education, since my own formal education pretty much stopped when I graduated from Independence High School in 1901. And then there was a twenty-two-year gap, while I worked on a farm and as a railroad timekeeper and served in the Army and did a lot of other things, before I started to attend night classes at Kansas City Law School - and I left there in 1925 and never got a degree. But I've tried to increase my knowledge all my life by reading and reading and reading, — Harry Truman

I am through with baseball forever. I have my farm and my home and enough to take care of me, so why should I work and worry any longer? — Eddie Plank

I live out in the desert, in farm country. I'm around a lot of farmers, guys with packing houses, that sort of thing. Half the time, these guys are in their pajamas or in their slippers. It's their place. — William Devane

I work like a labourer on a farm or in a vineyard. Things come to me slowly. My vocabulary of forms, for instance, has not been the discovery of a day. It took shape in spite of myself ... That is why I am always working on a hundred different things at the same time. — Joan Miro

I think about that centurion from time to time and wonder, had he retired to a farm in Campagna, happy with his harvest of grapes and grandchildren, or had he fallen amongst his comrades on some distant, ruined field, defending the honor and the ever-expanding borders of the Republic? What we foreigners have failed to comprehend over the centuries is that the proud centurion would have found either fate equally satisfying. This is why Rome grows, and the rest of the world shrinks. — Andrew Levkoff

The greatest destroyer of the small economies of small farms has been the doctrine of sanitation. I have no argument against cleanliness and healthfulness; I am for them as much as anyone. I do, however, question the validity and honesty of the sanitation laws that have come to rule over farm production in the last thirty or forty years. Why have new sanitation laws always required more, and more expensive, equipment? Why have they always worked against the survival of the small producer? Is it impossible to be inexpensively healthful and clean? — Wendell Berry

I want people to remember me that I was faithful, faithful to the gospel, faithful to the call that God gave me. And when I get to heaven, I'm going to ask him why he called me, because I was much used to milking cows and working on the farm than I was preaching. — Billy Graham

Shhhh," Johnny soothed, sliding his hands up and down her back, nuzzling her hair. "Car thieves don't cry, baby. You gotta toughen up if you're gonna have a future with good old Clyde here."

"I like it when you do that."

"What?"

"Call me baby," Maggie whispered.

"You liked it when I called you Bonnie too," he replied with a smile in his voice. "Why?"

"You used to call me baby all the time. It makes me believe you can love me again."

Johnny wrapped his arms tightly around her waist and lifted her to him, kissing her tear-streaked cheeks before he touched his lips to hers.

"I'm already there Maggie. I fell in love when you begged me to help you escape the cops. I fell in love when we danced to Nat King Cole singing 'Stardust' on a moonlit beach. Hell, I fell in love when you told me how blondes spell farm."

"E-I-E-I-O," Maggie quipped wetly.

Johnny laughed and held her tightly. — Amy Harmon

Harvest

Do not let a woman with a sexy rump deceive you
with wheedling and coaxing words; she is after your barn.
-Hesiod

Shall we gather the sunset
pluck what is ripe
harness the cicada's song?
Even if this isn't the season
of new love
let us remember the buds
and reap what we can.
No crop is too small.
No harvest too lean.
The grain will yield.
So scatter and slash
call in the cows
and let us milk them all dry.
Plow as you will.
Bulldoze away.
Why not make every season
our season
each day
our day
to till and tease
to clear and seed
to plant and replant
as we please.
Come
my sweet smell of hay
do not be deceived
by Hesiod.
He says that I am
after your barn.
I want the whole
fucking farm! — Nancy Boutilier

What is the bottom line for the animal/human hierarchy? I think it is at the animate/inanimate line, and Carol Adams and others are close to it: we eat them. This is what humans want from animals and largely why and how they are most harmed. We make them dead so we can live. We make our bodies out of their bodies. Their inanimate becomes our animate. We justify it as necessary, but it is not. We do it because we want to, we enjoy it, and we can. We say they eat each other, too, which they do. But this does not exonerate us; it only makes us animal rather than human, the distinguishing methodology abandoned when its conclusions are inconvenient or unpleasant. The place to look for this bottom line is the farm, the stockyard, the slaughterhouse. I have yet to see one run by a nonhuman animal. — Catherine Mackinnon

I was camped at the same site as her: Broughton Farm. She came over to my tent and showed me her blisters. She asked me whether I knew the reason why a blister can keep on producing fluid ad infinitum. I said that I had always wondered the same thing about mucus. One of the reasons we are together is because we have similar interests. — Joe Dunthorne

The truth is that I've spent all my life with my binoculars trained on the Maybe Islands, a pristine place of fantasy that is really no better than the razor-rocks of misery. Maybe if I had stayed on the farm ... maybe if I hadn't gone with Spike ... maybe if I could have lived more peaceably ... maybe if I'd met the right person years ago, maybe if I hadn't done this, or that or, its cousin, the other. Maybe, baby, the promised land was there and I missed it. Look at it glittering in the light. But the truth is I am inventing the maybe. I can only make the choices I make, so why torture myself with what I might have done, when all I can handle is what I have done. The Maybe Islands are hostile to human life. — Jeanette Winterson

The worst scream I have ever heard, by far, is a mother cow on a dairy farm screaming her lungs out day, after day, after day for her stolen baby to be given back to her. And why do they steal babies from their moms? Well, the dairy industry can't have little babies sucking up all that milk that was meant for them. Every time you have a glass of cow milk, some calf is not. — Gary Yourofsky

I will put gold in your room for the journey. And I will let it be whispered about that I have sent you out to a farm to hoe cabbages. Will Elayne be going with you?"
Nynaeve forgot herself enough to stare at the Amyrlin, then hurriedly put her eyes back on her hands. Her knuckles were white on the spit handle. "You scheming old ... Why all the pretense, if you knew? Your sly plots have had us squirming nearly as much as the Black Ajah has. Why?" The Amyrlin's face had tightened, enough to make her force a more respectful tone. "If I may ask, Mother. — Robert Jordan

'You have chickens?' That's what nearly everyone asks next, after they find out about our family pets. They just need to make sure they heard me correctly. Perhaps it's because I don't come across to most as a rural-loving farm girl. — Amy Robach

I probably shouldn't say this about all animals, but at least the farm animals that I've hung out with, and even when I go to the zoo usually, they're like a blank slate. I guess that's why I like them. They're puppets, and you can imagine them being anything you want. — Kristen Schaal

I have a lot of brothers and sisters, and each movie has helped pay for tuition. And then I was like, I only have one left in college, so why am I doing this? But now I want to go back to Italy and live on a farm in Tuscany. — Rose McGowan

Pepperidge Farm bread. That's fancy bread. You can tell it's fancy because it's wrapped twice. You open it, and it still isn't open. That's why I don't buy it. I don't need another step between me and toast. — Mitch Hedberg

If instituted, the TPP's IP regime would trample over individual rights and free expression, as well as ride roughshod over the intellectual and creative commons. If you read, write, publish, think, listen, dance, sing or invent; if you farm or consume food; if you're ill now or might one day be ill, the TPP has you in its crosshairs. — Julian Assange

The ecological principle in agriculture is to connect the genius of the place, to fit the farming to the farm. — Wendell Berry

People are important too, however, and what a terrible impact a total ban on hunting would have on the rural economy, which is still reeling from the after-effects of foot and mouth disease. With average net farm income having fallen to 5,200 per farm in England and 4,100 in Wales, it seems an act of spiteful vandalism to destroy literally thousands of jobs in deeply rural areas, when it is simply not necessary to do so and where no meaningful alternative employment exists. — Ann Winterton

I was talking about no nukes, the farm crisis. People said that wasn't stuff that a state auditor was supposed to be talking about. Maybe they were right. — Paul Wellstone

Hi, I have just added my new novel, "Incessant Expectations" for your reading enjoyment. It is about commercial salmon fishing on the Oregon coast circa 1976. It is fiction. The industry doesn't exist anymore. A young farmer from the dry country in Southwestern Colorado visits the wet Northwestern Oregon coast, seeking a summer job after his dad's farm is sold in the spring. He has spent his first 22 years in isolation, doing hard labor on the family farm. He knows hard work but has little social experience. During his summer of 1976 he learns about the ocean, fishing, and women. — Kenneth Fenter

In early autumn the farm recruiters arrived to sign up new workers, and the War Relocation Authority allowed many of the young men and women to go out and help harvest the crops. Some came back wearing the same shoes they'd left in and swore they would never go out there again. They said they'd been shot at. Spat on. Refused entrance to the local diner. The movie theater. The dry goods store. They said the signs in the windows were the same wherever they went: 'No Japs Allowed.' Life was easier, they said, on this side of the fence. — Julie Otsuka

Somehow it seemed as though the farm had grown richer without making the animals themselves any richer - except, of course, for the pigs and the dogs. — George Orwell

Merton. Gethsemani required a vow of silence, and at dinner if you wanted salt, you had to stare hard at the shaker until another brother noticed. One day, cutting down a tree, Jack couldn't contain himself. He held his head back and roared, "Timber." After that, his days at the monastery were numbered. Within a couple of years, he had married, and he and his young wife, Fran, who herself had just spent a year in a nunnery, opened a Catholic Worker farm in eastern Missouri for recovering alcoholics. — Alex Kotlowitz

All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others. — George Orwell

This past Thanksgiving, my father was at the farm, and I had all 11 dogs in the house with a father who never allowed dogs in the house. And he got up to leave the table and came back and Solomon was in his chair. And he says, "This dog is in my chair." And I said, "It's the other way around, you're sitting in his chair." — Oprah Winfrey

Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon, you all had great moments, but you never tasted the supreme triumph; you were never a farm boy riding in from the fields on a bulging rack of new-mown hay. — Grant Wood

Reversing the historical trajectory of human eating, for this meal the forest would be feeding us again. — Michael Pollan

The thing that got me about the Orphan Trains was that the experiences were so varied. Some of the kids went from neglect and hunger in New York to loving farm families who couldn't wait to fatten them up, who gave them medical care, an education, affection. And some of the kids became the victims of terrible cruelty, and more hunger, and more neglect - it all depended on who adopted them off of the train. — Laura Moriarty

The most insistent and formidable concern of agriculture, wherever it is taken seriously, is the distinct individuality of every farm, every field on every farm, every farm family, and every creature on every farm. — Wendell Berry

Products produced cheaply create ugly work lives and ugly households and ugly communities. Profits produced quickly cannot purchase patience and care. Patience is beautiful. Restraint and care are beautiful. Peace is beautiful. A small, diversified organic farm is beautiful. — Woody Tasch

The fairest state of them all, this tranquil and beloved domain - what has it now become? A nursery for Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas. A monstrous breeding farm to supply the sinew to gratify the maw of Eli Whitney's infernal machine, cursed be that blackguard's name! In such a way is our human decency brought down, when we pander all that is in us noble and just to the false god which goes by the vile name of Capital! Oh, Virginia, woe betide thee! Woe, thrice woe, and ever damned in memory be the day when poor black men in chains first trod upon thy sacred strand! — William Styron

It was true. Sugar did treat her bees like next of kin but then again, they were.
Along with her manners, the accent she tried so hard to soften, a single china cup covered in blue daisies and a weathered box of essential oils, they were all she carried with her from her past. Her bees relied on her for shelter and food but she relied on them too. She made her living from their honey, not just the healthful liquid itself but from the salves and gels and tinctures and remedies she created and sold at farm stands or farmers' markets wherever she lived.
It was the most symbiotic of relationships. — Sarah-Kate Lynch

I have always wanted to open up a brewery slash goat farm. Brew some beer, make some goat cheese, but that's kinda dreamy. — Adam Lamberg

Don't tell me you've been harboring secret fantasies about the farm laborers.'
'Of course not,' she said, 'although ... '
There was no way he was going to let those words trail off into oblivion. 'Although?' he prompted.
She looked a bit sheepish. 'Well, they do look terribly ... *elemental* ... out there in the sun, toiling away.'
He smiled. Slowly, like a man about to feast upon his dream come true. — Julia Quinn

Weak or strong, clever or simple, we are all brothers. — George Orwell

Westerns was why I got into the business. I grew up on a small farm in California and all I ever wanted to do was to play gangsters and cowboys in movies. — Brion James

Presently we saw a curious thing: There were no clouds, the sun was going down in a limpid, gold-washed sky. Just as the lower edge of the red disk rested on the high fields against the horizon, a great black figure suddenly appeared on the face of the sun. We sprang to our feet, straining our eyes toward it. In a moment we realized what it was. On some upland farm, a plough had been left standing in the field. The sun was sinking just behind it. Magnified across the distance by the horizontal light, it stood out against the sun, was exactly contained within the circle of the disk; the handles, the tongue, the share - black against the molten red. There it was, heroic in size, a picture writing on the sun. Even — Willa Cather

(Carmine Crocco) A farm-labourer and cowherd, had joined the Bourbon army, killed a comrade in a brawl, deserted and lived as an outlaw for ten years. He joined the liberal insurgents in 1860 in the hope of an amnesty for his past offences, and subsequently became the most formidable guerilla chief and leader of men on the Bourbon side. — Eric Hobsbawm

Friends persuaded me to run for the office, and I won. I had been warned, before taking office, that state politics lacks the glamour of its Washington counterpart; one labors largely in obscurity, mostly on topics that mean a great deal to some but that the average man or woman on the street can safely ignore (the regulation of mobile homes, say, or the tax consequences of farm equipment depreciation). Nonetheless, I found the work — Barack Obama

I think the idea that death is not the end, that your dog's just gone to live on the farm, is limiting. Thoughts like that prevent you from making the most of the time that you have. — Jimmy Carr

I thought the idea of 'Smurfs' lent itself to the 3-D environment pretty well, I think, better than some of the farm animal movies that have been done before. I was a fan of the 'Smurfs' and they come with their own fan base, which I thought was nice. — Neil Patrick Harris

The good people of Dakota offered to give Calvin Coolidge a farm if he would live on it. I wouldn't advise you to give those people too much credit for generosity. There is not a farmer in any State in the West that wouldn't be glad to give him a farm if he will paint it, fix up the fences and keep up the series of mortgages that are on it. And if you think Coolidge ain't smart, you just watch him not take it. — Will Rogers

I was raised by my grandmother on a farm, where we were really poor - we had dirt floors - but so did everybody else. — Robert Herjavec

The home was a school. Farm and cabin households, though bookless save for the Family Bible and The Sacred Harp, taught the girls to spin, weave, quilt, cook, sew, and mind their manners; the boys to wield gun, ax, hammer and saw, to ride, plow, sow and reap, and to be men. Nobody need ever be bored. Amusement did not have to be bought. — Richard M. Weaver

The industrial mind is a mind without compunction; it simply accepts that people, ultimately, will be treated as things and that things, ultimately, will be treated as garbage. (A Defense of the Family Farm, 1986) — Wendell Berry

If you live on a farm, there is definite peer pressure to grow something. — Janaki Lenin

Why not take a science fiction comic and put the characters in a small town to gain their particular perspective? A lot of that comes from me growing up in a small town on a farm, so that's what I know and what I'm comfortable with. My drawing style is also very sparse and minimalist, so a rural setting complements that. — Jeff Lemire