Acre Quotes

He was a beautiful man with a beautiful soul. Something about the way he talked, the way he wrote, made me believe that he never quite felt like he'd belonged. Sure, he was rich and famous - he lived on a 60-acre horse ranch just outside of Lexington, for Christ's sake - but just knowing he existed, knowing that even someone as talented as him understood what it felt like to have a hungry heart, made me feel less lonely sometimes. And here he lay. Vulnerable. Bruised. Likely in more pain, even unconscious, than I could imagine. There are so many assholes in the world, I thought, not for the first time. Why do terrible things have to happen to people who try to shine a little light in the darkness? ~ Peter Styles

If 22 bushels (1,300 pounds) of rice and 22 bushels of winter grain are harvested from a quarter acre field, then the field will support five to ten people each investing an average of less than one hour of labour per day. But if the field were turned over to pasturage, or if the grain were fed to cattle, only one person could be supported per quarter acre. Meat becomes a luxury food when its production requires land which could provide food directly for human consumption. This has been shown clearly and definitely. Each person should ponder seriously how much hardship he is causing by indulging in food so expensively produced. ~ Masanobu Fukuoka

We live on a 500-acre ranch, beautiful ranch. ~ Tanya Tucker

What a sad and frightening time it was. Thousands of firefighters and other rescue workers swarmed the sixteen-acre disaster zone, searching for survivors. The area, which became known as Ground Zero, was extremely dangerous. Underground fires smoldered, and the smoke was a toxic mix of melted plastic, steel, lead, and many poisonous chemicals. Few of the rescue workers had on proper protective clothing or masks. And as it quickly became clear, there were not very many survivors to find. Only fourteen people were pulled out of the rubble alive, all within the first twenty-four hours of the collapse. About 50,000 people had been working in the buildings that day. Two thousand and sixteen died. Also among the dead: 343 firefighters and 60 police officers who were in or near the ~ Lauren Tarshis

I hear people say all the time, "I'm not really religious, but I consider myself spiritual." I definitely have always been spiritual, being raised by my grandmother on that little acre in Mississippi, indoctrinated, born into the church and the ways of the church. ~ Oprah Winfrey

Nicholas wanted to believe in fairy tales. She'd read her share, hoping for miracles, but in the end, there was no hundred acre wood to play in with her little stuffed animals. There was pain and crushing disillusionment and betrayal. ~ Christine Feehan

Maybe he, like Mum, believed God had delivered three extra children, one-two-three, as a sign of His plan for this couple's long, long friendship. But God had also delivered to him the Oxford Paper Company, and the foamy river it sat upon. And the long working hours it required. And the poison it put in the air. Three more girls from God might portend a long married life, but a multi-acre paper mill, with much heat but no heart, could make for still competition if it decided to bestow the opposite.
Maybe it was the work. ~ Monica Wood

Barbara Stanwyck and I began our relationship on Titanic, although we had actually met years before. For a time, my father had an eight-acre ranch in Chatsworth, across from the racetrack. Martha Scott also lived there, and I used to take care of her horse. We'd go riding, and I would see Barbara and her husband, Robert Taylor, riding. I would go trotting along with them, never thinking I'd be involved with her someday. Later, Barbara had a beautiful ranch at the corner of Devonshire and Reseda, with her agent, Zeppo Marx. It's now a shopping center, but when Barbara owned the ranch, it had paddocks that were impeccably maintained and run, like everything Barbara touched. ~ Robert Wagner

We moved all around, and I was very worried I would not get a chance to show her what I had planned. Here was the children's home, here was the library, here was a furniture factory of the kibbutz. I tried to squeeze a few words in about everything we saw, as someone who makes himself known and unversed in the ways of the kibbutz. The highlight was when I gave her a tour, on the tractor, to the pear groves where I worked. I drove the tractor and she sat beside me, in a very unsafe way, standing on the shaft as she rested on one of the wheel's wings of the tractor. The groves were just a few minutes away from the kibbutz, on a dirt road that led south towards Acre. I kept explaining to her about new life on the kibbutz the entire time. ~ Nahum Sivan

Something quite remote from anything the builders intended has come out of their work, and out of the fierce little human tragedy in which I played; something none of us thought about at the time: a small red flame
a beaten-copper lamp of deplorable design, relit before the beaten-copper doors of a tabernacle; the flame which the old knights saw from their tombs, which they saw put out; that flame burns again for other soldiers, far from home, farther, in heart, than Acre or Jerusalem. It could not have been lit but for the builders and the tragedians, and there I found it this morning, burning anew among the old stones. ~ Evelyn Waugh

Barley, where it succeeds, yields a larger weight of feed per acre than any other small grain crop. ~ David F. Houston

Every single one of us at birth is given an emotional acre all our own. ~ Anne Lamott

During the first weekend Prince Charles showed Diana around Highgrove, the 353-acre Gloucestershire home he had bought in July--the same month he had started to woo her. As he took her on a guided tour of the eight-bedroomed mansion, the Prince asked her to organize the interior decoration. He liked her taste while she felt that it was a "most improper" suggestion as they were not even engaged. ~ Andrew Morton

Meat is an inefficient way to eat. An acre of land can yield 20,000 pounds of potatoes, but that same acre would only graze enough cows to get 165 pounds of meat. ~ Alexandra Paul

I've got cattle on 4,000 acres about 100 miles east of Dallas, but I've also got another 65-acre ranch where I raise American miniature horses. ~ Carroll Shelby

A lawyer is sometimes required to search titles, and the client who thinks he has good right to an estate, puts the papers in his hands, and the attorney goes into the public records and finds everything right for three or four years back; but after a time he comes to a break in the title. So he finds that the man who supposed he owned it owns not an acre of the ground which belongs to someone else. I trace the title of this world from century to century until I find the whole right vested in God. Now to whom did he give it? To his own children. All are yours. ~ Thomas De Witt Talmage

We'll fill our lives with what we cultivate the most. Plant grace by the acre. ~ Bob Goff

The US Embassy in Paris is a compact complex on Avenue Gabriel, just north of the Champs-Élysées. The three- acre compound is considered US soil, meaning all those to stand on it are subject to the same laws and protections as they would encounter standing in the United States. ~ Dan Brown

Tennessee was cursed. Initially, she assigned the devastation of Tennessee, the blaze and the disease, to justice. The whites got what they deserved for enslaving her people, for massacring another race, for stealing the very land itself. Let them burn by flame or fever, let the destruction started here roll acre by acre until the dead have been avenged. But if people received their just portion of misfortune, what had she done to bring her troubles on herself? ~ Colson Whitehead

Many Detroiters, for example, are beginning to see urban agriculture as a real part of the solution; to grow things right where people live, where they work, and definitely need healthier food on the table. Green city gardens are scattered throughout Detroit now, from the schoolyard at Catherine Ferguson Academy for pregnant teens and teen moms, to reclaimed land owned by a local order of Catholic friars (Earthworks), to a seven-acre organic farm in Rouge Park. Together, city gardeners, nonprofit organizations, and the Greening of Detroit resource agency are writing a new local-food story of urban Michigan. ~ Jaye Beeler

Explore, and explore, and explore. Be neither chided nor flattered out of your position of perpetual inquiry. Neither dogmatise yourself, nor accept another's dogmatism. Why should you renounce your right to traverse the star-lit deserts of truth, for the premature comforts of an acre, house, and barn? Truth also has its roof, and bed, and board. Make yourself necessary to the world, and mankind will give you bread, and if not store of it, yet such as shall not take away your property in all men's possessions, in all men's affections, in art, in nature, and in hope. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Our hearts, it seems, can be scraped only so gaunt before they crack into an acre of arid indifference. ~ Michael Yankoski

A family of four could have enough bread for 10 years with one acre of wheat ~ Adam Anderson

My father was a prosperous hatter-farmer - making hats for the local markets during the winter months, tilling his little ten-acre farm during the summer time. ~ Jenkin Lloyd Jones

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

Confession Who knows more of Wanda, the wan, than I do? And who knows more of Terry, the torn, than I do? And who knows more than I do of Ziggy, the Zap, fleeing the rap, using his eyes and teeth to spring the trap, than I do! Or did. Good Lord, forbid that morning's acre, held in the palm ~ James Baldwin

One of the strengths of Labor Zionism had always been its strong pragmatic outlook, its philosophy that a new reality can be built only by careful planning and then constructing things brick by brick, acre after acre. It ~ Thomas L. Friedman

Maybe what I admired most about John Steinbeck is that he never mortgaged his 45-acre heart for a suite in an ivory tower. ~ Tom Robbins

Why should you renounce your right to traverse the star-lit deserts of truth, of the premature comforts of an acre, house, and barn? Truth also has its roof, and bed, and board. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

I never wanted to become an actor. I always wanted to be a farmer and dreamt of owning half an acre of agriculture land. ~ Pawan Kalyan

It's very common to implement mob grazing and double your production for a per-acre capitalisation investment ... because it doesn't take any more corraling, no more electricity, rent, machinery or labour to double your production on an existing place. ~ Joel Salatin

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

Winnie the Pooh and his friends from the Hundred Acre Wood are among the most entertaining and beloved characters ever animated by Disney. ~ John Lasseter

SCARED TO DEATH In Arizona, a 1000-acre forest of junipers suddenly withered and died. Foresters are unable to explain it, but the Indians say the trees died of fear but they are not in agreement as to what caused the fright. ~ Malcolm Lowry

Only by himself, with one acre and a house, will a dunce be a dunce. Once he manages to gain power, he'll turn into a scoundrel. ~ Franz Grillparzer

And thank you for bringing me."
"A pleasure." Bartel returned politely, and stole one last look at the incredible smiling Hairy.
Rider stood. Though he was relieved to hear that she planned on staying for a while, he was glad for an excuse to escape his landlady's inquisition. "I'll give you a hand, Bartel." Just short of grabbing the older man's arm, he hustled him out the door.
Once outside, bartel chortled jovially. "Ease up,son. She isn't coming after us."
Rider exhaled deeply and grinned. "Who put the burr under the lady's saddle?" he asked as they approached the carriage.
"Don't know, but she came flying into my store saying she had to get out here and get out here now! I tried to tell her I was too busy to be gallivanting all over hell's half acre, but do you think she'd listen? Uh-uh. Kept ranting and raving something 'bout Miss Willow's welfare. The woman was in a real dither all the way here."
Rider groaned.
Bartel slapped his back. "I can commiserate with you,son. There isn't anything scarier than a virtuous woman on a crusade. ~ Charlotte McPherren

An acre in Middlesex is better than a principality in Utopia. ~ Thomas Babington Macaulay

I picked up one and then a second and then a third of these stones, finding them at about the rate of one stone to the acre. And here is where my adventure became magical, for in a striking foreshortening of time that embraced thousands of years, I had become the witness of this miserly rain from the stars. the marvel of marvels was that there on the rounded back of the planet, between this magnetic sheet and those stars, a human consciousness was present in which as in a mirror that rain could be reflected. ~ Antoine De Saint Exupery

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

-she loved Lily Cate like her own, and for this night, this moment, she would be her mother, even though there was no guarantee of tomorrow. ~ Laura Frantz

SEEN ACROSS TEN MILES OF sunlit water, Lorbanery was green, green as the bright moss by a fountain's rim. Nearby, it broke up into leaves, and tree-trunks, and shadows, and roads, and houses, and the faces and clothing of people, and dust, and all that goes to make up an island inhabited by men. Yet still, over all, it was green: for every acre of it that was not built or walked upon was given up to the low, round-topped hurbah trees, on the leaves of which feed the little worms that spin the silk that is made into thread and woven by the men and women and children of Lorbanery. At dusk the air there is full of small grey bats who feed on the little worms. They eat many, but are suffered to do so and are not killed by the silk-weavers, who indeed account it a deed of very evil omen to kill the grey-winged bats. For if human beings live off the worms, they say, surely small bats have the right to do so. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

It were good to know how much hay an acre of every sort will bear; how many cattle the same weight of each sort of hay will feed and fatten; what quantity of grain and other commodities the same acre will bear in one, three or seven years; unto what use each soil is proper; all which particulars I call intrinsic value, for there is also another value merely accidental or extrinsic. ~ William Petty

Beyond our grim circle, the underground station looked like the aftermath of a nightclub bombing. Steam from burst pipes shrieked forth in ghostly curtains. Splintered monitors swung broken-necked from the ceiling. A sea of shattered glass spread all the way to the tracks, flashing in the hysterical strobe of red emergency lights like an acre-wide disco ball. ~ Ransom Riggs

Oh, mansion shmansion. Did Gandhi's house have the largest outdoor trampoline in the tristate area? Did Jesus have a two-acre remote-controlled car track, with mountains to scale and a little village that lit up at night?
Not in his Bible. ~ George Saunders

Tennis, imprisoned within fixed boundaries, a patch of an acre, a green rectangle, tries the human soul. A tennis court is like a coffin, only larger. ~ Rita Mae Brown

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

Just under the surface I shall be, all together at first, then separate and drift, through all the earth and perhaps in the end through a cliff into the sea, something of me. A ton of worms in an acre, that is a wonderful thought, a ton of worms, I believe it. ~ Samuel Beckett

All my nose is picking up on is the smell of green alfalfa hay and baling twine. I check with Keeper to see if he's sniffing up either hide or hair of Sneaky Tim Ray since my dog can can whiff dubious intentions from an acre away. People can hide their badness from one another, but the scent of wrongdoing is pungent and unmistakable to our four-legged friends. ~ Lesley Kagen

It looks as though yields of over 10 times what we can currently grow per acre are feasible if you control the CO2 concentration, the humidity, the temperature, all the various factors that plants depend on to grow rapidly. ~ Ralph Merkle

All genuine progress results from finding new facts. No law can be passed to make an acre yield three hundred bushels. God has already established the laws. It is four us to discover them, and to learn the facts by which we can obey them. ~ Wheeler McMillen

THE ELFIN KNIGHT

Are you going to Scarborough Fair?
Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme
Remember me to one who lives there
She must be a true love of mine

Tell her she'll sleep in a goose-feather bed
Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme
Tell her I sear she'll have nothing to dread
She must be a true love of mine

Tell her tomorrow her answer make known
Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme
What e'er she may say I'll not leave her alone
She must be a true love of mine

Her answer came in a week and a day
Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme
I'm sorry good sir, I must answer thee nay
I'll not be a true love of thine

From the sting of my curse she can never be free
Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme
Unless she unravels my riddlings three
She will be a true love of mine

Tell her to make me a magical shirt
Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme
Without any seam or needlework
Else she'll be a true love of mine

Tell her to find me an acre of land
Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme
Between the salt water and the sea strand
Else she'll be a true love of mine

Tell her to plow it with just a goat's horn
Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme
And sow it all over with one grain of corn
Else she'll be a true love of mine
And her daughters forever possessions of mine ~ Nancy Werlin

Continental Drift

you have moved through
like an ice flow-
steady slow substantial

tumble of glacial tongue
sweeping through
valleys reshaped

you arrived on your own epic time
patient and thorough
meltwater firn crevasse and all

lifting rocks on shifting plates
smoothing edges
and moving the very axes of my teeth

you soothed over rifts and fault lines
leaving me
newly minted

peaked and ridged
steep and crested
sloped and spurred

Hillsides lush
and summits glistening
I rush to a new dawn

but not without raw traces
of your tender era
scratched warmly on my every acre ~ Nancy Boutilier

I was in Australia ... Lotta leg room down under. Apartments: dollar a month. 2000-acre den ... think of the parties. ~ Bill Hicks

A border collie named Orson inspired me to buy a 110-acre farm with four barns and a sheep. That led to a series of books about Bedlam Farm and about dogs, rural life, lambing and herding sheep. ~ Jon Katz

Flowers

On the third of June, at a minute past two,
where once was a person, a flower now grew.

Five daisies arranged on a large outdoor stage
in front of a ten-acre pasture of sage.

In a changing room, a lily poses.
At the DMV, rows of roses.

The world was much crueler an hour ago.
I'm glad someone decided to give flowers a go. ~ Bo Burnham

On my solemn oath, Edmund, I'd gladly face not having an acre of land to call my own, nor a penny in the bank, I'd be willing to have no home but the poorhouse in my old age, if I could look back now on having been the fine artist I might have been. ~ Eugene O'Neill

The memories of childhood have a strange shuttling quality, and areas of darkness ring the spaces of light. The memories of childhood are like clear candles in an acre of night, illuminating fixed scenes from surrounding darkness. ~ Carson McCullers

Organic farming is environmentally friendlier to every acre of land. But it requires _more_ acres. The trade-off is a harsh one. Would we rather have pesticides on farmland and nitrogen runoffs from them? Or would we rather chop down more forest?

How much more forest would we have to chop down? If we wanted to reduce pesticide use and nitrogen runoff by turning all of the world's farmland to organic farming, we'd need about 50 percent more farmland than we have today. Nobel Prize winner Norman Borlaug, whose work helped triple crop yields over the last fifty years and arguably saved billions from starvation, estimates that the world would need an _additional_ 5 to 6 billion head of cattle to produce enough manure to fertilize that farmland. There are only an estimated 1.3 billion cattle on the planet today.

Combined, we'd need to chop down roughly half of the world's remaining forest to grow crops and to graze cattle that produce enough manure to fertilize those crops. Clearing that much land would produce around 500 billion tons of CO2, or almost as much as the total cumulative CO2 emissions of the world thus far. And the cattle needed to fertilize that land would produce far _more_ greenhouse gases, in the form of methane, than all of agriculture does today, possibly enough to equal all human greenhouse gases emitted from all sources today.

That's not a viable path. ~ Ramez Naam

Not just the industrial farming but the sprawl, the sprawl, the sprawl. Low-density development is the worst. And SUVs everywhere, snowmobiles everywhere, Jet Skis everywhere, ATVs everywhere, two-acre lawns everywhere. The goddamned green monospecific chemical-drenched lawns. ~ Jonathan Franzen

At first as they stumped along the path which edged the Hundred Acre Wood, they didn't say much to each other; but when they came to the stream, and had helped each other across the stepping stones, and were able to walk side by side again over the heather, they began to talk in a friendly way ... ~ A.A. Milne

There is not an acre of ground on the globe that is in possession of its rightful owner, or that has not been taken away from owner after owner, cycle afer cycle, by force and bloodshed. ~ Mark Twain

The flavour of a fish which comes out of the sea at Acre is not similar to the flavour of a fish which comes out of the sea in Spain. ~ Rashi

I live up at about the 2000 feet level on a five acre piece of forest that I built a small house on. ~ Terence McKenna

Rot dead marigolds- an acre at a time! Gold are you? ~ William Carlos Williams

It is a moot question whether the origin of any kind of property is derived from nature at all. It is agreed by those who have seriously considered the subject that no individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land, for instance. By a universal law, indeed, whatever, whether fixed or movable, belongs to all men equally and in common is the property for the moment of him who occupies it; but when he relinquishes the occupation, the property goes with it. Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society. ~ Thomas Jefferson

The charming island of Rock Island, three miles long and half a mile wide, belongs to the United States, and the Government has turned it into a wonderful park, enhancing its natural attractions by art, and threading its fine forests with many miles of drives. Near the center of the island one catches glimpses, through the trees, of ten vast stone four-story buildings, each of which covers an acre of ground. ~ Mark Twain

If you give a poor man an acre of land around his house, he will be pleased and stay there for life. Build a wall around that acre, however, and all he will want is to escape. ~ Deepak Chopra

Roses climbed the shed, entwined with dark purple clematis, leaves as glossy as satin. There were no thorns. Patience's cupboard was overflowing with remedies, and the little barn was often crowded with seekers. The half acre of meadow was wild with cosmos and lupine, coreopsis, and sweet William. Basil, thyme, coriander, and broad leaf parsley grew in billowing clouds of green; the smell so fresh your mouth watered and you began to plan the next meal. Cucumbers spilled out of the raised beds, fighting for space with the peas and beans, lettuce, tomatoes, and bright yellow peppers.
The cart was righted out by the road and was soon bowed under glass jars and tin pails of sunflowers, zinnias, dahlias, and salvia. Pears, apples, and out-of-season apricots sat in balsa wood baskets in the shade, and watermelons, some with pink flesh, some with yellow, all sweet and seedless, lined the willow fence. ~ Ellen Herrick

Woe beside those who live by way of examples! Life is not with them. If you live according to an example, you thus live the life of that example, but who should live your own life if not yourself? So live yourselves.
The signposts have fallen, unblazed trails lie before us. Do not be greedy to gobble up the fruits of foreign fields. Do you not know that you yourselves are the fertile acre which bears everything that avails you? Yet who today knows this? Who knows the way to the eternally fruitful climes of the soul, You seek the way through mere appearances, you study books and give ear to all kinds of opinion. What good is all that?
There is only one way and that is your way.
You seek the path? I warn you away from my own. It can also be the wrong way for you.
May each go his own way.
I will be no savior, no lawgiver, no master teacher unto you. You are no longer little children.
Giving laws, wanting improvements, making things easier, has all become wrong and evil. May each one seek out his own way. The way leads to mutual love in community. Men will come to see and feel the similarity and commonality of their ways.
Laws and teachings held in common compel people to solitude, so that they may escape the pressure of undesirable contact, but solitude makes people hostile and venomous.
Therefore give people dignity and let each of them stand apart, so that each may find his own fellowship and love it.
Power stands against power, con ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

Cath thought of Levi's warmth against her arm last night. And his ten thousand smiles. And his forty-acre foreheard. ~ Rainbow Rowell

I have a 60-acre farm in North Carolina, and I have a tractor and a farmhouse. As soon as I groom the land, I want to put cabins around and have a place where people can write and hang out. It'll be either that or an all-black nudist colony. ~ Zach Galifianakis

Two clocks, two ghosts, one square acre of hidden mirror. ~ David Foster Wallace

It's possible to make one's own grape pest disease culture by looking for sick or dead caterpillars. If sick, they will lose color and move slowly, if at all. At death, they often hang limp and darkened from a leaf by a spot of "glue." Several of these are all you need to treat an acre of vines. Whiz them in a blender with a quart of water, strain, and dilute to spray your vines. Use right away, as this mixture will start to putrefy after just twelve hours. It's a bit grisly, but very cheap and very effective. Just don't forget to clean the blender ~ Jeff Cox

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

No, plenty for all is not a dream – though it was a dream indeed in those days when man, for all his pains, could hardly win a few bushels of wheat from an acre of land, and had to fashion by hand all the implements he used in agriculture and industry. Now it is no longer a dream, because man has invented a motor which, with a little iron and a few sacks of coal, gives him the mastery of a creature strong and docile as a horse, and capable of setting the most complicated machinery in motion.
But, if plenty for all is to become a reality, this immense capital – cities, houses, pastures, arable lands, factories, highways, education – must cease to be regarded as private property, for the monopolist to dispose of at his pleasure.
This rich endowment, painfully won, builded, fashioned, or invented by our ancestors, must become common property, so that the collective interests of men may gain from it the greatest good for all. ~ Pyotr Kropotkin

The sunlight lying on an acre of farm land weighs several tons, believe it or not. ~ Jack Finney

God's acre was her garden-spot, she said;
She sat there often, of the Summer days,
Little and slim and sweet, among the dead,
Her hair a fable in the leveled rays. ~ Dorothy Parker

An acre of performance is worth a whole world of promise. ~ William Dean Howells

There is fuel in every bit of vegetable matter that can be fermented. There's enough alcohol in one year's yield of an acre of potatoes to drive the machinery necessary to cultivate the fields for a hundred years. ~ Henry Ford

All about him stretched the lush green countryside in which there were to every acre a thousand hiding-places, deep and wide and quiet enough to hold so small and worthless a thing as a single unit of mortal clay. I ~ Margery Allingham

The usual way of growing cotton is highly petrochemical-intensive, requiring 110 pounds of nitrogen fertilizer per acre. Some of the fertilizer is broken down by soil bacteria into nitrate, a toxic and highly soluble chemical that can leach into groundwater or get washed into lakes, creating oxygenless dead zones. ~ Alex Shoumatoff

It is a much wiser policy to plant acre after acre of orchids and lead one's life in solitude encompassed by their sheltering stems, than to surround oneself with the hoi polloi and so court the same pointless misanthropic disgust as befell Timon of Athens. Society is forever holding forth about fairness and justice. If it really believes these to be of such importance, it might do well to kill off a few dozen petty criminals per day, and use their carcasses to fertilize and give life to countless fields of flowers. ~ Soseki Natsume

Wilderness, or wildness is a mystique. A religion, an intense philosophy, a dream of ideal society - these are also mystique. We are not engaged in preserving so many acre-feet of water, so many board-feet of timber, so many billion tons of granite, so many profit possibilities in so many ways for those concerned with the material aspects of the world. Yet, we must accept the fact that human life (at least in the metabolic sense) depends upon the resources of the Earth. As the fisherman depends upon the rivers, lakes and seas, and the farmer upon the land for his existence, so does mankind in general depend upon the beauty of the world about him for his spiritual and emotional existence.

From a speech to The Wilderness Society, May 9 1980 ~ Ansel Adams

We can die by it, if not live by love, And if unfit for tombs and hearse Our legend be, it will be fit for verse; And if no peace of chronicle we prove, We'll build in sonnet pretty rooms; As well a well wrought urne becomes The greatest ashes, as half-acre tombs. ~ John Donne

What is a woman that you forsake her
And the hearth fire and the home acre
To go with that old grey widow-maker? ~ Rudyard Kipling

White Acre was not, in fact, a very large place. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

cram's with praise, and make's
As fat as tame things.
One good deed dying tongueless
Slaughters a thousand waiting upon that.
Our praises are our wages; you may ride's
With one soft kiss a thousand furlongs ere
With spur we heat an acre. ~ William Shakespeare

I wanted to learn a little bit about acting, not because I thought I'd find a star vehicle and set the world on fire, but I thought the discipline of it would be good for me. I met a good coach, and I joined her class - with a lot of hungry young actors who really didn't acre if I was a rock 'n' roll singer or not. I started to learn to get a focus, without having to jump up and down every few seconds. ~ Iggy Pop

I like that ancient Saxon phrase, which calls The burial-ground God's-Acre! It is just; It consecrates each grave within its walls, And breathes a benison o'er the sleeping dust. ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Is something a friend once told me. She said that every single one of us at birth is given an emotional acre all our own. You get one, your awful Uncle Phil gets one, I get one, Tricia Nixon gets one, everyone gets one. And as long as you don't hurt anyone, you really get to do with your acre as you please. You can plant fruit trees or flowers or alphabetized rows of vegetables, or nothing at all. If you want your acre to look like a giant garage sale, or an auto-wrecking yard, that's what you get to do with it. There's a fence around your acre, though, with a gate, and if people keep coming onto your land and sliming it or trying to get you to do what they think is right, you get to ask them to leave. And they have to go, because this is your acre. ~ Anne Lamott

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

Under the Timber and Stone Act of 1878, which might well have been called the 'Dust and Ashes Act,' any citizen of the United States could take up one hundred and sixty acres of timber land and, by paying two dollars and a half an acre for it, obtain title. ~ John Muir

Except to heaven, she is nought; Except for angels, lone; Except to some wide-wandering bee, A flower superfluous blown; Except for winds, provincial; Except by butterflies, Unnoticed as a single dew That on the acre lies ~ Howard Mumford Jones

My dad was the manager at the 45,000-acre ranch, but he owned his own 1,200-acre ranch, and I owned four cattle that he gave to me when I graduated from grammar school, from the eighth grade. And those cows multiplied, and he kept track of them for years for me. And that was my herd. ~ Dave Brubeck

Every time we burn a gallon of gas or an acre of rain forest, aren't we killing the future to preserve the present? ~ Chuck Palahniuk

Now I would solicit the particular attention of those numerous people who imagine that money is everything in this world, and that rank and ability are inseparable from wealth: let them observe that Cincinnatus, the one man in whom Rome reposed all her hope of survival, was at that moment working a little three-acre farm (now known as Quinctian meadows) west of the Tiber, just opposite the spot where the shipyards are today. A mission from the city found him at work on his land - digging a ditch, maybe, or ploughing. Greetings were exchanged, and he was asked - with a prayer for God's blessing on himself and his country - to put on his toga and hear the Senate's instructions. This naturally surprised him, and, asking if all were well, he told his wife Racilia to run to their cottage and fetch his toga. The toga was brought, and wiping the grimy sweat from his hands and face he put it on; at once the envoys from the city saluted him, with congratulations, as Dictator, invited him to enter Rome, and informed him of the terrible danger of Minucius's army. ~ Livy

A stranger came out to White Acre one day to sell Henry a pony, for Alma to learn to ride. The pony's name was Soames, and he was the color of sugar icing, and Alma loved him immediately. A price was negotiated. The two men settled on three dollars. Alma, who was only six years old, asked, "Excuse me, sir, but does that price also include the bridle and saddle which the pony is currently wearing?"
The stranger balked at the question, but Henry roared with laughter. "She's got you there, man!" he bellowed, and for the rest of that day, he ruffled Alma's hair whenever she came nearer, saying, "What a good little auctioneer I've got as a daughter! ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

A cavalry of sweaty but righteous blond gods chased pesky, unkempt people across an annoyingly leaky Mexican border. A grimy cowboy with a headdress of scrawny vultures lay facedown in fiery sands at the end of a trail of his own groveling claw marks, body flattened like a roadkill, his back a pincushion of Apache arrows. He rose and shook his head as if he had merely walked into a doorknob. Never mind John Wayne and his vultures and an "Oregon Trail" lined with the Mesozoic buttes of the Southwest, where the movies were filmed, or the Indians who were supposed to be northern plains Cheyenne but actually were Navajo extras in costume department Sioux war bonnets saying mischievous, naughty things in Navajo, a language neither filmmaker nor audience understood anyway, but which the interpreter onscreen translated as soberly as his forked tongue could manage, "Well give you three cents an acre." Never mind the ecologically incorrect arctic loon cries on the soundtrack. I loved that desert. ~ Ellen Meloy

Apart from the most obvious cases, like the Oriental Bittersweet vine, escaped from private gardens and smothering the mountains one acre at a time, the most painful proof of man's destruction is not what you can see right in front of you; it's what you will never see again. ~ Wil S. Hylton

The eight-acre underground was so sprawling that for months after the park first opened, guides had to be stationed in the tunnels to redirect lost employees. Soon after, the tunnel walls were color-coded by land and maps were posted at each intersection to help newcomers find their way. ~ David Koenig