Malerba Farm Quotes

There are times of great beauty on a coffee farm. When the plantation flowered in the beginning of the rains, it was a radiant sight, like a cloud of chalk, in the mist of the drizzling rain. ~ Isak Dinesen

The road to social justice for the farm worker is the road of unionization. Our cause, our strike against table grapes and our international boycott are all founded upon our deep conviction that the form of collective self-help, which is unionization, holds far more hope for the farm worker than any other single approach, whether public or private. This conviction is what brings spirit, high hope and optimism to everything we do. ~ Cesar Chavez

I would say my fraternity was nothing but a bunch of farm boys; we weren't really in the whole fraternity scene, but yeah, that's a safe assessment of who I am. I've lived that life, growing up in agriculture and then going off to college and joining a fraternity, livin' that life. ~ Luke Bryan

Here was an occasion, she thought, for indulging in that deliberate rudeness which only persons with habitually good manners have the right to commit ... ~ Stella Gibbons

The official line is that, after the war, women couldn't wait to leave the offices and assembly lines and government agencies. But the real story was that the economy couldn't have men coming home without women going home, not unless it wanted a lot of unemployed vets. So the problem became unemployed women. "How you gonna keep us down on the farm after we've seen the world,"' she ad-libs to the old World War I tune. 'Enter the women's magazines, and cookbook publishers, and all these advertising agencies carrying on about the scourge of germs in the toilet bowl, and scuffs on the kitchen floor, and, my favorite, house B.O. Enter chicken hash that takes two and a half hours to prepare. I can just hear them sitting around the conference tables. 'That'll keep the gals out of trouble. ~ Ellen Feldman

It was better to meet friends at their houses, their mother, Aurora, explained, because Dad had a lot of breakable things around the farm.
One of the breakable things: Aurora Lynch. Golden-haired Aurora was the obvious queen of a place like the Barns, a gentle and joyous ruler of a peaceful and secret country.
She was a patron of her sons' fanciful arts (although Declan, the eldest, was rarely fanciful), and she was a tireless playmate in her sons' games of make-believe (although Declan, the eldest, was rarely playful).
She loved Niall, of course – everyone loved larger-than-life Niall, the braggart poet, the musician king – but unlike everyone else, she preferred him in his silent moods.
She loved the truth, and it was difficult to love both the truth and Niall Lynch when the latter was speaking. ~ Maggie Stiefvater

This is the first time for the girl, a
time of revelation.
Mysteries unravel at this height,
patterns emerge.
She stands woman--tall, shoulder to shoulder,
with the sun and laughs to think that
such a splendid world had ever frightened her.
All that she sees, farm and forest, pasture and
prairie, city and country, and continent,
stretches before her like tomorrows filled with promise . . .
She was born to this kingdom.
In time it will be hers to explore, to
make her own.
One climb is over, another just beginning.
She is rich in days, wealthy in possibilities.
And here in this crowning moment,
For the very first time . . .

She knows. ~ Edward Cunningham

The summer of 1966, I hitch-hiked alone for two months all over Europe instead of working on a farm in Spain. It was a big game to see how much I could see on $400. This got me hooked on traveling. ~ Peter Menzel

The best stock a man can invest in, is the stock of a farm; the best shares are plow shares; and the best banks are the fertile banks of a rural stream; the more these are broken the better dividends they pay. ~ Henry Ward Beecher

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

Oh God, my chin. I have a cluster of five hairs on the left side of my chin. They're coarse and wiry, like boar hair, and for the past couple of years, they've been my hideous secret and my sworn enemies. They sprout up every couple of days, and so I have to be vigilant. I keep my weapons - Revlon tweezers and a 10X magnifying mirror - at home, in my Sherpa bag, and in my desk drawer at work, so in theory, I can be anywhere, and if one of those evil little weeds pokes through the surface, I can yank it. I've been in meetings with CEOs, some of the most powerful men in the world, and could barely stay focused on what they were saying because I'd inadvertently touched my chin and become obsessed with the idea of destroying five microscopic hairs. I hate them, and I'm terrified of someone else noticing them before I do, but I have to admit, there is almost nothing more satisfying than pulling them out.I stroke my chin, expecting to feel my Little Pig beard, but touch only smooth skin. My leg feels like a farm animal, which suggests I haven't shaved in at least a week, but my chin is bare, which would put me in this bed for less than two days. My body hair isn't making any sense. ~ Lisa Genova

Blue-collar workers" have jobs requiring just as much brainpower as "white-collar professionals." To run a family farm is to be a business owner in a complicated industry. But, unlike many jobs requiring smarts and creativity, working a farm summons the body's intelligence, too. ~ Sarah Smarsh

I live on a farm in Dorset. The nearest neighbour is a quarter of a mile away. It's really quiet, with an amazing view - can't see a pylon, can't see a road. Blockbuster's an event in our house, when the little blue envelope comes in. ~ Martin Clunes

TELLING TIME

Before she was old, she took canoe trips in the rain

and buried her passions deep within nature poems.


Ten years before she was old, her husband died

and developers paid a mighty price for their dairy farm.


She knew she was getting old, when rest stops in Iowa

changed over to those crazy automated washrooms.


When she was old, God helped with little things (growing tomatoes in her garden)

but was missing on big ticket items (bringing her husband back).


She knew she had lived too long

when her grandson explained extinction to his stuffed polar bear. ~ Carol Baldwin

I like farm salmon. I like the idea of fish growing on trees. ~ Jarod Kintz

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'm a farm boy from Connecticut, and I adopted urban life. ~ William Atherton

What is a farm but a mute gospel? ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Well, don't make duck. I'm morally opposed to duck. Do you know what they do to ducks at a duck farm? The cruelty! It's barbaric. But I do love veal. Can you make veal? Or is that too hard for you? ~ Kristan Higgins

Not to mention Graceless, Pointless, Feckless and Aimless, who are all under-producing and their milk is sour and they won't go anywhere near the yard. ~ Charles Stross

I was a 'Duck Hunt' and 'Mario' guy, and stuff like that. I was never technologically driven. I never had all the cool, new toys. I was the youngest child, I wasn't the only child, so I wasn't spoiled as a kid. And, we were on the farm, so we didn't have a lot. Also, with computers, I'm not very good with them. I just check my email. ~ Garrett Hedlund

On harsh, frigid January days, when the winds are relentless and the snow piles up around us, I often think of our small feathered friends back on the Third Line. I wonder if the old feeder is still standing in the orchard and if anyone thinks to put out a few crumbs and some bacon drippings for our beautiful, hungry, winter birds. In the stark, white landscape they provided a welcome splash of colour and their songs gave us hope through the long, silent winter. ~ Arlene Stafford-Wilson

Shinji slowly fell forward onto his face. Debris bounced up on impact. It took less than thirty seconds for the rest of his body to die. The memento of his beloved uncle
the earring worn by the woman he loved
was now stained with the blood running down Shinji's left ear, reflecting the glow from the red flames of the farm building.
And so the boy known as the Third Man, Shinji Mimura, was dead. ~ Koushun Takami

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

The escape from industrialism is not in socialism or in Sovietism. The answer lies in a return to a society where agriculture is practiced by most of the people. It is in fact impossible for any culture to be sound and healthy without a proper regard for the soil, no matter how many urban dwellers think that their food comes from grocers and delicatessens, or their milk from tin cans. This ignorance does not release them from a final dependence upon the farm and that most incorrigible of beings, the farmer. ~ Andrew Lytle

Many of those who refer to Orwell seem not to have read much more than Animal Farm and Nineteen-Eighty-Four, if those. The millions who have heard of Big Brother and Room 101 know nothing of their progenitor. ~ Peter Davidson

How can you care for a rough man like me?' he asked me. 'How can you love a man who can bring you no lands but the farm a soldier's pension can buy? Who can give your children no title of nobility?' Because love does not do sums, I should have told him. Love makes choices, and then gives its all. Had he seen himself as I first saw him though, he could have had no questions. ~ Tad Williams

She's pretty in an unsophisticated way, like a Midwestern farm girl, and you can see the wide-open prairies behind her, the blue-skied meadows in her eyes. ~ Jonathan Tropper

He'll stand up for you and protect you and kill dragons for you, but he won't always know that sometimes, he's the dragon ~ Jodi Taylor

Keeping a private guard this large is like using a wolf to guard the farm. It may keep off the other wolves, but sooner or later it will eat you. ~ Megan Whalen Turner

And the way they are now, I don't see's there's much difference between the Fromes up at the farm and the Fromes down in the graveyard; 'cept that down there they're all quiet, and the women have got to hold their tongues. ~ Edith Wharton

With the permanent elimination of this tax, farmers and business owners will have the sense of security they need to plan for the financial future of their business or farm and their family. ~ Doc Hastings

Growing up on a dairy farm, you certainly learn discipline and a commitment to purpose. ~ Mike Johanns

What was shocking were the rewards my father's cousins had gathered in the intervening couple of decades. They farmed now on thousands of acres, not hundreds. They drove fancy pickup trucks, owned lakefront property and second homes. A simple Internet search offered the truth of where their riches had come from: good ol' Uncle Sam. Recently I clicked again on a database of farm subsidy payments, and found that five of my father's first cousins had been paid, all told, $3 million between 1995 and 2005 - and that on top of whatever they'd earned outright for the sale of their corn and soybeans. They worked hard, certainly. They'd saved and scrimped through the lean years. They were good and honorable yeoman, and now they'd come through to their great reward: a prime place at the trough of the welfare state. All that corn syrup guzzled down the gullets of America's overweight children, all that beef inefficiently fattened on cheap feed, all that ethanol being distilled in heartland refineries: all of it underwritten by as wasteful a government program as now exists this side of the defense industry. In the last ten years, the federal government has paid $131 million in subsidies and disaster insurance in just the county [in Minnesota] where I grew up. Corn is subsidized to keep it cheap, and the subsidies encourage overproduction, which encourages a scramble for ever more ways to use corn, and thus bigger subsidies - the perfect feedback loop of government welfare. ~ Philip Connors

I jetset around and play these songs and get to hang with some pretty amazing people, then I go home to a really great farm, though actually it's a disaster area of a farm at the moment. But it's certainly a blast. I wouldn't trade lives with anyone right now. ~ Brad Paisley

Torrens kicked at the door until it was finally opened. The farm couple and three youngsters had been eating breakfast in the common room. The yard dog would have bounded in had not Torrens kicked the door shut.

'I want a bed. Quilts. A hot drink. I am a doctor. This woman is my patient.'

The farm couple was terrified. The look on the face of Torrens cut short any questions. They did as he ordered. One of the children ran to fetch his medical kit from the cart. The woman motioned for Torrens to set Caroline on a straw pallet. The farmer kept his distance, but his wife, shyly, fearffully, ventured closer. She glanced at Torrens, as if requesting his permission to help. Between them, they made Caroline as comfortable as they could.

Torrens knelt by the pallet. Caroline reached for his hand. 'Leave while you can. Do not burden yourself with me.'

'A light burden.'

'I wish you to find Augusta.'

'You have my promise.'

'Take this.' Caroline had slipped off a gold ring set with diamonds. 'It was a wedding gift from the king. It has not left my finger since then. I give it to you now - ' Torrens protested, but Caroline went on - 'not as a keepsake. You and I have better keepsakes in our hearts. I wish you to sell it. You will need money, perhaps even more than this will bring. But you must stary alive and find my child. Help her as you have always helped me.'

'We shall talk of this later, when you ~ Lloyd Alexander

Sometimes they opened a book and closed it again; what was the point? On other days they had the idea of tidying up the garden, but after a quarter of an hour they felt tired; or of looking at their farm, but they came back sick at heart; or doing household jobs, but Germaine cried out in protest; they gave up. ~ Gustave Flaubert

Which brings me to one more thing about the Sheridan FCI [prison]. After you make it through the metal detector, you re stamped on the flesh above your right thumb with ink visible only in the black light of the prison checkpoints. Then you wait in a holding area like a farm animal before the next set of computer-locked double doors, and in this space, there are two things: a plaque celebrating the FCI Employee of the Month, and a full-length mirror with the message This is the image you will present today. Redressing, I always wondered whether this prop with its quasi motivational message was intended for us, the visitors of felons, or for would-be employees of the month. Perhaps both. ~ Jill Christman

I cannot but regard it as a kindness in those who have the steering of me that, by the want of pecuniary wealth, I have been nailed dawn to this my native region so long and steadily, and made to study and love this spot of earth more and more. What would signify in comparison a thin and diffused love and knowledge of the whole earth instead, got by wandering? The traveler's is but a barren and comfortless condition. Wealth will not buy a man a home in nature-house nor farm there. The man of business does not by his business earn a residence in nature, but is denaturalized rather. ~ Henry David Thoreau

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'd be okay with that kind of trouble, Amber said, as a pair of flannel-clad farm boys headed toward them. ~ Laura Ruby