Vermont Quotes

I've been writing about Vermont independence for nearly ten years ... and, more often than not, it was for an audience of one. ~ Thomas Naylor

In cold weather states like Vermont, where the weather can get to 20 below zero, home heating assistance is critically important. In fact, it is a life and death issue. ~ Bernie Sanders

We arrived in Vermont expecting to fix up the old lake house. But in the end, it was the house that fixed us. ~ Sarah Ockler

Norway ... looked to Roosevelt as funny a kingdom as was ever imagined outside of opera bouffe ... It is much as if Vermont should offhand try the experiment of having a king. ~ Edmund Morris

Trouble in our family is spelled with a capital C and has been as long as I can remember. The C stands for Charles. He's my older brother, two years and four months older to be exact. Ever since the phone call about him last night, I've felt incredibly tense. And now, at this very minute, my parents are driving up to Vermont, to Charles's boarding school, to find out if he's actually been kicked out or if he's just been suspended again. I ~ Judy Blume

I've made a commitment that state spending in Vermont won't grow any more than the rate of inflation plus population growth. ~ James Douglas

My father and mother in 1817 were forty-nine days on the road with their emigrant wagons [from Vermont] to Ohio. More than two days for each hour that I spent in the same journey. ~ Rutherford B. Hayes

The wedding took place in Vermont, where they have legalized gay civil unions, and I married a woman. ~ Craig Ferguson

People want to go out and travel around and meet cool people. I could just go live in Vermont, but is that what I really want? ~ Tom Brady

Similarly, perhaps it never did snow that August in Vermont; perhaps there never were flurries in the night wind, and maybe no one else felt the ground hardening and summer already dead even as we pretended to bask in it, but that was how it felt to me, and it might as well have snowed, could have snowed, did snow. ~ Joan Didion

It occurs to me if we kissed now, we'd be like a folded map of America. My Pennsylvania scab next to her New Jersey black eye. I wonder, then, how many other kids could join in. Where are the Montanas and the Colorados? Where is the Vermont? Florida? How many maps would we make? ~ A.S. King

I moved to New York and was told, "Go back home. We don't need you. Go pump gas. You're from Vermont. We've got no use for you. You're not drawing guys in tights." So, I learned how to draw guys in tights, and I put them in as many crime situations as I could. ~ Frank Miller

I was always into noir. When I lived in Vermont I was drawing stuff that looked like an amateur doing Sin City. When I first got to New York I was swiftly informed that they only did guys in tights. ~ Frank Miller

HERE IS HOW Billy Pilgrim lost his wife, Valencia. He was unconscious in the hospital in Vermont, after the airplane crashed on Sugarbush Mountain, and Valencia, having heard about the crash, was driving from Ilium to the hospital in the family Cadillac El Dorado Coupe de Ville. Valencia was hysterical, because she had been told frankly that Billy might die, ~ Kurt Vonnegut

I live in Vermont, and we don't have a tax incentive there, and therefore, we don't have professional crew there. ~ Colin Trevorrow

In Massachusetts and Vermont, there had been plenty of mosquitoes, but in New Hampshire, they had reinforcements. ~ Jennifer Pharr Davis

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders is expected to announce tomorrow that he is running for president, making him Hillary Clinton's only Democratic challenger so far. Or as Hillary put it, 'Oooo, appetizers!' ~ Jimmy Fallon

Shouting down and intimidating someone from speaking their mind is not exactly a Vermont town meeting value, nor should it be an American town meeting value. ~ Bernie Sanders

I am often reminded that the wellspring of Vermont liberty flows from Main Street, not State Street. ~ James H. Douglas, Jr.

In Northern Vermont – so far north that on clear days you might be able to see the North Pole – lies the magical town of Evergreen…. ~ Nancy Naigle

I'm very proud that the state of Vermont banned fracking. I hope communities all over California, and all over America do the same. ~ Bernie Sanders

Compared with more emotional types, Vermonters seem to have few passions. But those they have are great and burning. The greatest is their conviction that without freedom human life is not worth living. ~ Dorothy Canfield Fisher

Consider a white ninth-grade student taking American history in a predominantly middle-class town in Vermont. Her father tapes Sheetrock, earning an income that in slow construction seasons leaves the family quite poor. Her mother helps out by driving a school bus part-time, in addition to taking care of her two younger siblings. The girl lives with her family in a small house, a winterized former summer cabin, while most of her classmates live in large suburban homes. How is this girl to understand her poverty? Since history textbooks present the American past as four hundred years of progress and portray our society as a land of opportunity in which folks get what they deserve and deserve what they get, the failures of working-class Americans to transcend their class origin inevitably get laid at their own doorsteps. ~ James W. Loewen

The chalkboard menu really seemed to emphasize that everything was local and that everything had maple syrup in it. The BBQ beef was in maple syrup BBQ sauce. The mac and cheese was made with smoked maple cheese. There was maple tofu and maple-syrup dressing for the salads.
"Did you forget you were in Vermont for a second?" Stevie said to Janelle as they took their trays. "Look down. You are standing in maple syrup."
"Yeah," Janelle replied, a bit dispiritedly, as she took some tofu and vegetables. "It's not my favorite."
Nate stared down the sneeze guard at the mapleized meats.
"I'll drink the living blood of trees," he said. "Hit me. ~ Maureen Johnson

There'll never be a perfect breakfast eaten until some man grows arms long enough to stretch down to New Orleans for his coffee & over to Norfolk for his rolls, & reaches up to Vermont & digs a slice of butter out of a spring-house, & then turns over a beehive close to a white clover patch out in Indiana for the rest. Then he'd come pretty close to making a meal on the amber that the gods eat on Mount Olympia. ~ O. Henry

Transferring in haste, I felt a curious breathlessness as the cars rumbled on through the early afternoon sunlight into territories I had always read of but had never before visited. I knew I was entering an altogether older-fashioned and more primitive New England than the mechanised, urbanised coastal and southern areas where all my life had been spent; an unspoiled, ancestral New England without the foreigners and factory-smoke, billboards and concrete roads, of the sections which modernity has touched. There would be odd survivals of that continuous native life whose deep roots make it the one authentic outgrowth of the landscape - -the continuous native life which keeps alive strange ancient memories, and fertilises the soil for shadowy, marvellous, and seldom-mentioned beliefs. ~ H.P. Lovecraft

It never occurred to me that half of the population of Vermont wasn't experiencing pretty much what I put myself through every night- bone-crackling cold that made my joints ache, cold so relentless I felt it in my dreams: ice floes, lost expeditions, the lights of search planes swinging over whitecaps as I floundered alone Arctic Seas. ~ Donna Tartt

Race as a subject only comes about because of what I look like. If I say something truthfully, people say "Oh, she's so angry." If I write about a married person who lives in Vermont, it becomes "Oh, she's autobiographical." ~ Jamaica Kincaid

He had expected that traditionally Republican Vermont would give him too drearily easy a task in preaching Trowbridge. What he found was a dismaying preference for the theoretically Democratic Buzz Windrip. And that preference, Doremus perceived, wasn't even a pathetic trust in Windrip's promises of Utopian bliss for everyone in general. It was a trust in increased cash for the voter himself, and for his family, very much in particular. ~ Sinclair Lewis

The e-mail lands like a mortar in the Hum suzerainty. ~ Evan Dara

Accidentals

Something out of place,
seen where it doesn't belong.

A surprise on the water
like Tundra Swans unexpected
and flung far from the Arctic
onto a Vermont pond.

Me, driving home, seeing all that white
with sinewy S-shaped necks
out of the corner of my eye.

Blessed is an ordinary Wednesday,
now etched forever in memory
as that Wednesday I went home

another way and found myself
far flung from work, from home,
from whoever I was before

black beaks beckoned me
while four pairs of wings unfolded. ~ Lynn Martin

I had a crazy life for a teenager. I lived in New Jersey, but I'd go to Vermont for three weeks, join a commune, take pictures with the guy I was dating, come back home, and post photos. ~ Halsey

My favorite of all was still the place on Vermont, the French cafe, La Lyonnaise, that had given me the best onion soup on that night with George and my father. The two owners hailed from France, from Lyon, before the city had boomed into a culinary sibling of Paris. Inside, it had only a few tables, and the waiters served everything out of order, and it had a B rating in the window, and they usually sat me right by the swinging kitchen door, but I didn't care about any of it.
There, I ordered chicken Dijon, or beef Bourguignon, or a simple green salad, or a pate sandwich, and when it came to the table, I melted into whatever arrived. I lavished in a forkful of spinach gratin on the side, at how delighted the chef had clearly been over the balance of spinach and cheese, like she was conducting a meeting of spinach and cheese, like a matchmaker who knew they would shortly fall in love. Sure, there were small distractions and preoccupations in it all, but I could find the food in there, the food was the center, and the person making the food was so connected with the food that I could really, for once, enjoy it. ~ Aimee Bender

The first inkling of this notion had come to him the Christmas before, at his daughter's place in Vermont. On Christmas Eve, as indifferent evening took hold in the blue squares of the windows, he sat alone in the crepuscular kitchen, imbued with a profound sense of the identity of winter and twilight, of twilight and time, of time and memory, of his childhood and that church which on this night waited to celebrate the second greatest of its feasts. For a moment or an hour as he sat, become one with the blue of the snow and the silence, a congruity of star, cradle, winter, sacrament, self, it was as though he listened to a voice that had long been trying to catch his attention, to tell him, Yes, this was the subject long withheld from him, which he now knew, and must eventually act on.

He had managed, though, to avoid it. He only brought it out now to please his editor, at the same time aware that it wasn't what she had in mind at all. But he couldn't do better; he had really only the one subject, if subject was the word for it, this idea of a notion or a holy thing growing clear in the stream of time, being made manifest in unexpected ways to an assortment of people: the revelation itself wasn't important, it could be anything, almost. Beyond that he had only one interest, the seasons, which he could describe endlessly and with all the passion of a country-bred boy grown old in the city. He was beginning to doubt (he said) whether these were sufficient to make an ~ John Crowley

We wound up with one hundred and thirty kilos of Vermont Cheddar in the evidence lockup," Miller said. "Street value that would have probably bought someone their own ship. It had disappeared by the end of the day. We wrote it up as lost to spoilage. No one said a word, as long as everyone went home with a brick. ~ James S.A. Corey

Vermont is a small state which makes an enormous difference. ~ Fred Rogers

Out, Out

The buzz saw snarled and rattled in the yard
And made dust and dropped stove-length sticks of wood,
Sweet-scented stuff when the breeze drew across it.
And from there those that lifted eyes could count
Five mountain ranges one behind the other
Under the sunset far into Vermont.
And the saw snarled and rattled, snarled and rattled,
As it ran light, or had to bear a load.
And nothing happened: day was all but done.
Call it a day, I wish they might have said
To please the boy by giving him the half hour
That a boy counts so much when saved from work.
His sister stood beside him in her apron
To tell them 'Supper.' At the word, the saw,
As if to prove saws know what supper meant,
Leaped out at the boy's hand, or seemed to leap -
He must have given the hand. However it was,
Neither refused the meeting. But the hand!
The boy's first outcry was a rueful laugh,
As he swung toward them holding up the hand
Half in appeal, but half as if to keep
The life from spilling. Then the boy saw all -
Since he was old enough to know, big boy
Doing a man's work, though a child at heart -
He saw all was spoiled. 'Don't let him cut my hand off -
The doctor, when he comes. Don't let him, sister!'
So. But the hand was gone already.
The doctor put him in the dark of ether.
He lay and puffed his lips out with his breath.
And then - the wa ~ Robert Frost

I'm no light weight, mountain man. It'll take more than a couple of frou-frou Vermont microbrews to get me trashed." She leaned forward and bit his lip. "If you stop, I'm gonna kill you. With your own axe. ~ Penny Watson

I'm going to a commune in Vermont and will deal with no unit of time shorter than a season. ~ Tracy Kidder

The Vermont mountains stretch extended straight; New Hampshire mountains curl up in a coil. ~ Robert Frost

As is the Vermont way, our trips were pretty low-key. No entourage. No advance people. No communications director. No security. Just Phil and me flying in coach, renting cars, and showing up for meetings - trying to get a sense of the potential support that might exist. I ~ Bernie Sanders

In 2011, as American forces left Iraq, Vermont independent Senator Bernie Sanders made public a Defense Department report prepared at his request: 300 defense contractors in Iraq providing products or services to the Pentagon had been involved in fraud, including Lockheed Martin and Northrup-Grumman, both rewarded with even bigger multibillion dollar contracts after paying small fines. During the decade of war, the Pentagon had forked over to the top 37 fraudulent corporations alone $1.1 trillion. ~ Ann Jones

For my band's debut tour in 2011, we road-tripped across the country in a 15-passenger van. It was the first time I'd left Alabama. I drove through scenery I'd only ever seen in calendars: auburn leaves falling in Vermont, the sun setting over purple mountains in Arizona. It was incredible. ~ Brittany Howard

Vermont is the only place in America where I ever hear thrift spoken of with respect. ~ Dorothy Canfield Fisher

Calvin Coolidge was the greatest man who ever came out of Plymouth Corner, Vermont. ~ Clarence Darrow

I'm to have dinner with some people from the bookshop, which is as posh as the motel, at six, then read at seven-thirty. I will have to watch my mouth. Some sarcastic remark about gentrification is almost bound to slip out. Even though the topography is right, this doesn't even look like Vermont. Not a cow in sight, not a single shack held together with staples and Masonite. Where are my people? The ones who used to go to Canada automatically at age 18 and get all their teeth pulled out, a standard right of passage. The ones who believe you can't be an alcoholic if you drink nothing but beer. The ones who know how to roast a haunch of venison with onions and garlic and sage and mustard (and where to find the haunch in July). The ones who buy their clothes at rummage and their cars at the junkyard. The ones who used to be me. Here I am on my balcony with a finger or two of cognac, a cigar, and a laptop computer, wearing my black jeans and my Reeboks. God, it's awful. ~ Hayden Carruth

John Kerry's victory over Howard Dean has completely changed the presidential race around. Now instead of the rich white guy from Yale who lives in the White house facing off against the rich white guy from Yale who lives in Vermont, he may have to face the rich white guy from Yale who lives in Massachusetts. It's a whole different game. ~ Jay Leno

This country needs room to grow and expand. In all my own newspapers I read frightful tales of the shameful atrocities being perpetrated on our Democratic minorities in Maine and Vermont. My patience is almost at an end, and if provoked much further I will place both countries under American protection, even if I have to send in my tourists to start trouble so I'll have to send in a force to restore order. ~ Gracie Allen

The first few years I was in Vermont quite a bit, but I don't think I ever spent years and years there. ~ Ethan Suplee

Pike said, "What were they saying?" "Couldn't hear, but it's an easy guess. The nephew here just lost two hundred thousand and a boatload of workers. They probably weren't talking about a promotion." Their next stop was a large two-level strip mall on Vermont. The strip mall was in the final stages of being remodeled, with a club and a restaurant taking up most of the upper level and what looked like another bar and a karaoke lounge on the lower level. A large sign in Korean script and English hung across the front of the karaoke lounge: OPENING SOON. Stone ~ Robert Crais

Early in 1968, a group of optometrists, with Billy among them, chartered an airplane to fly them from Ilium to an international convention of optometrists in Montreal. The plane crashed on top of Sugarbush Mountain, in Vermont. Everybody was killed but Billy. So it goes. While Billy was recuperating in a hospital in Vermont, his wife died accidentally of carbon-monoxide poisoning. So it goes. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

The potential for Home Star to create jobs is proven and real. In Vermont, our statewide energy efficiency utility, Efficiency Vermont, created more than 430 jobs in 2007 and 2008, generating more than $40 million in income. ~ Peter Welch

In Vermont, Governor Madeleine Kunin has given years of service to our state after becoming the state's first female governor in 1985. She is an inspiration to girls throughout Vermont and the country in allowing them to know that the opportunities they have are unlimited. ~ Bernie Sanders

I graduated with a B.A. from Goddard College in 1991 and then studied poetry for a year in the M.F.A. in Writing Program at Vermont College. ~ Jennifer McMahon

Think of it like the best mac and cheese you've ever had. No neon yellow Velveeta and bread crumbs. I'm talking gourmet cheddar, the expensive stuff from Vermont that crackles as it melts into the crust on top. Imagine if right before you were about to tear into it, the mac and cheese starts talking to you? ~ Alaya Dawn Johnson

One out of every 100 families in Vermont was a part owner of Ben and Jerry's. ~ Jerry Greenfield

While it is not likely that Democrats will start winning statewide elections tomorrow in Alabama, South Carolina, Kansas, Wyoming, or Utah, they will never win if they don't plant a flag and start organizing. My own state of Vermont is a good example. Forty-five years ago, Vermont was one of the most Republican states in the country. Today, as a result of a lot of hard work by many people, it is one of the most progressive. It ~ Bernie Sanders

I don't have a PR rep. I live in Vermont. ~ Colin Trevorrow

Former Vermont Governor Howard Dean was all smiles, well smirks, after picking up the endorsement of former Vice President Al Gore at a rally in Harlem ... Gore went on to praise Dean for taking a tough anti-war stance before the invasion of Iraq and he praised Dean supporters in hopes that will ease his concerns over lack of foreign policy experience, and his lack of support among blacks and Latinos, and his hot temperament, and perceived arrogance, and policy flip-flops, and campaign glitches. Well, there's a lot going on here. ~ Jon Stewart

Below birds crossing the lake of the sky
and purple martins on power lines, down
to the trees and one thing my brother said
that stays with me from Long Island to Vermont,
something about trees being conductors
of spirit ... ~ Anne Marie Macari

I live here in Vermont, in a village of barely a thousand people halfway up the state's third highest mountain. ~ Chris Bohjalian

In high school, I went to a place called the Mountain School. It's on a farm in Vermont, and I read Emerson and Thoreau and ran around the woods. Now I go hiking with a bunch of my comedy buddies. We talk about our emotions. I also do a lot of writing on hikes, just to get the blood flowing and the ideas moving. ~ Nick Kroll

As the longest serving Independent in the history of the United States Congress, as somebody who came into office by defeating an incumbent Democratic mayor in Burlington, Vermont, I know something about third party politics. And I respect Jill [Stein]. ~ Bernie Sanders

The Civil War was fought in 10,000 places, from Valverde, New Mexico, and Tullahoma, Tennessee, to St. Albans, Vermont, and Fernandina on the Florida coast. More than 3 million Americans fought in it, and over 600,000 men, 2 percent of the population, died in it. ~ Bruce Catton

In the eight months he had been away, he had almost forgotten the gaze he found there, the gaze which came in moments like this, for it was not one of the looks that New Englanders use or have ever used to express a turn of mind or heart; it was a gaze more cold, more mean, more cruel even than the gaze a Vermont farmer gives a stranger asking directions; more cold, more mean, more cruel because it was completely blank, that very blankness a sign of the renunciation of alternatives, of tenderness or brutality, of pleasure or pain, of understanding or ignorance, of belief or disbelief, of compassion or intolerance, of reason or unswerving fanaticism; it was a gaze which signals the flicking off of the switch which controls the mechanism making man a human being; it said: Now we must fight. There is no time or need for talking; violence is already with us, part of us. ~ William Melvin Kelley

Forty-eight states and the District of Columbia prohibit inmates from voting while incarcerated for a felony offense. Only two states - Maine and Vermont - permit inmates to vote. The vast majority of states continue to withhold the right to vote when prisoners are released on parole. Even after the term of punishment expires, some states deny the right to vote for a period ranging from a number of years to the rest of one's life.

This is far from the norm in other countries - like Germany, for instance, which allows (and even encourages) prisoners to vote. In fact, about half of European countries allow all incarcerated people to vote, while others disqualify only a small number of prisoners from the polls. Prisoners vote either in their correctional facilities or by some version of absentee ballot in their town of previous residence. Almost all of the countries that place some restrictions on voting in prison are in Eastern Europe, part of the former Communist bloc.

No other country in the world disenfranchises people who are released from prison in a manner even remotely resembling the United States. In fact, the United Nations Human Rights Committee has charged that U.S. disenfranchisement policies are discriminatory and violate international law. In those few European countries that permit limited postprison disqualification, the sanction is very narrowly tailored and the number of people disenfranchised is probably in the dozens or hundreds. In th ~ Michelle Alexander

The United States remains the only major country on earth that doesn't guarantee health care to all of our people. And yet we are spending almost twice as much per capita. We have a massively dysfunctional health care system. And I do believe in a Medicare for all single-payer system, whether a small state like Vermont can lead the nation, which I certainly hope we will, or whether it's California or some other state. ~ Hillary Clinton

The town of North Falls consisted of twenty-eight square miles positioned on a high plateau in the southern region of the Green Mountain range. It had the highest altitude of any village in the state, which meant the snow came early and it came often. It also meant that the first thing anybody noticed about the town was the church steeple. The rotting whitewashed wood and the slatted oval window and the copper spire all connected to the simple wood framing. It was the highest point in the state, and people liked to say that it was closer to God than anywhere else in Vermont. Not that it did the town much good. ~ Ian Pisarcik

I've got the best parents you could ever ask for. My parents are from New Jersey, and they met in Vermont in college. My Dad grew up listening to heavy, psychedelic music. He's my biggest fan. ~ King Tuff

Last night, I had a telephone townhall for my constituents back in Vermont, and we had 11,500 people on it. And I had people on Social Security saying if getting fewer benefits will help us on the debt, they're for it. And I had a farmer saying that he's had subsidies for 35 years but we can't afford them anymore. ~ Peter Welch

Where I live, in Vermont, there's this thing that women know about men, which is this disease: their childhood was so idyllic that nothing in the rest of their life can ever be satisfying. It's almost a plague. ~ Colin Trevorrow

I went to college in Vermont, and then stayed in the East Coast. ~ Bret Easton Ellis

Vermont will always be my home in my heart, but I really love L.A. ~ King Tuff

We learn to appreciate what we achieve, no matter how small the achievement, because we do it ourselves. - Midge Rylander in Eighteen Months To Live ~ Rachele Baker

Is it an endearing quirk among European explorers to imagine that every geographical feature they clap eyes on for the first time is in need of a new name, or is if just a plain silly one? As far as I understand, humans have been knocking around this part of Africa for - give or take a birthday candle- three million years. The existence of a large wet patch smack in the middle of them had not gone unnoticed. How large? Bigger than Lake Michigan, bigger than Tasmania, bigger than Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont and Rhode Island all rolled into one. It is so big that people on one side gave it one name, people on the other side gave it another, and people in between gave it several more. But that didn't matter to Dr Livingstone. Along he came and he didn't ask the locals what they called this large lake at the top end of the Nile. He gave it yet another name, in honour of the elder of a tribe of white people on a small island five thousand miles away. ~ Nicholas Drayson

I bought Windows 2.0, Windows 3.0, Windows 3.1415926, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows RSVP, The Best of Windows, Windows Strikes Back, Windows Does Dallas, and Windows Let's All Buy Bill Gates a House the Size of Vermont. ~ Dave Barry

ELECTION DAY, NOVEMBER, 1884.

If I should need to name, O Western World, your powerfulest
scene and show,
'Twould not be you, Niagara - nor you, ye limitless prairies - nor
your huge rifts of canyons, Colorado,
Nor you, Yosemite - nor Yellowstone, with all its spasmic geyser-
loops ascending to the skies, appearing and disappearing,
Nor Oregon's white cones - nor Huron's belt of mighty lakes -
nor Mississippi's stream:
- This seething hemisphere's humanity, as now, I'd name - the
still small voice vibrating - America's choosing day,
(The heart of it not in the chosen - the act itself the main, the
quadriennial choosing,)
The stretch of North and South arous'd - sea-board and inland
- Texas to Maine - the Prairie States - Vermont, Virginia,
California,
The final ballot-shower from East to West - the paradox and con-
flict,
The countless snow-flakes falling - (a swordless conflict,
Yet more than all Rome's wars of old, or modern Napoleon's:)
the peaceful choice of all,
Or good or ill humanity - welcoming the darker odds, the dross:
- Foams and ferments the wine? it serves to purify - while the
heart pants, life glows:
These stormy gusts and winds waft precious ships,
Swell'd Washington's, Jefferson's, Lincoln's sails. ~ Walt Whitman

The violence in New York feels really mundane and banal to me. Whereas in the privacy of one's own home, say, like the farm I grew up on in Vermont, the kinds of things that can happen seem much more extreme. Maybe because it's more personal. Or maybe because you block out the things that happen in the city. But it's like seeing things born, live, die, fall apart, and start over again, without any intermediary clean-up steps from some corporate organization. ~ Elizabeth Neel

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

What does 'happy' mean? Happiness is not a state like Vermont. ~ Abraham Maslow

When I think of Vermont, I think of Connecticut. ~ Jarod Kintz

from Canada, between 1840 and 1930 over 900,000 Quebecois traveled to the United States, and primarily to Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island. ~ Patrice DeMers Kaneda

A year in Vermont, according to an old saw, is nine months of winter followed by three months of very poor sledding. ~ Bill Bryson

TV's Tony Snow becomes the White House press secretary. How will he make the difficult transition from Fox News reporter to Republican apologist? ... Mr. President, it is time to hire the folks who've never let you down. Limbaugh at Health and Human Services. Hannity at State. Then give Rummy the Medal of Freedom and install Bill O'Reilly as secretary of defense. Only problem, you might find yourself invading Vermont. And I'll replace Chertoff at Homeland Security. The man's done nothing to control the bear population. ~ Stephen Colbert

Growing up in Vermont, no matter what I did, I didn't get much recognition. ~ Keegan Bradley

I had A Lover's Quarrel With The World Robert Lee Frost (Old Bennington Cemetery, Bennington, Vermont) Our Darling Eva We Love You. ~ Eva Gabor

Peter Lucas and I live in Durham but spend a great of time in North Wales, where we have a cottage in the mountains, and in Vermont, USA, with my sister - who is a children's writer married to a poet. ~ Anne Stevenson

Even in the domain of conventional currencies, this trend is in evidence. Today, 14 U.S. states, namely, Colorado, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Missouri, Montana, New Hampshire, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, and Washington, have taken action to create their own state currency, usually backed by a precious metal such as gold or silver.24 In the case of Utah, for example, the Utah Legislature has passed a bill allowing gold and silver coins to be used as legal tender in the state - and for the value of their precious metal, not just the face value of the coins. Utah's bill allows stores to accept gold and silver coins as legal tender. It also exempts gold and silver transactions from the state's capital gains tax, though that does not shield exchanges from federal taxes. ~ Bernard A. Lietaer

Earlier today former Vermont Governor Howard Dean became the new head of the Democratic National Committee
no word on who will be the neck. ~ Amy Poehler

For example, when I was writing Leviathan, which was written both in New York and in Vermont - I think there were two summers in Vermont, in that house I wrote about in Winter Journal, that broken-down house ... I was working in an out-building, a kind of shack, a tumble-down, broken-down mess of a place, and I had a green table. I just thought, "Well, is there a way to bring my life into the fiction I'm writing, will it make a difference?" And the fact is, it doesn't make any difference. It was a kind of experiment which couldn't fail. ~ Paul Auster

I am the longest- serving independent in the history of the United States Congress. People of Vermont sent me to Washington as an independent. That is true. ~ Bernie Sanders

From remote and sparsely populated Vermont, Indiana seemed hopeless; a collection of turtle-shooting subliterates--people opposed to evolution, pluralism, and poetry.

And yet. Those leaves. ~ Brian Kimberling

Whether you are a low-income elderly woman living at the end of a dirt road in Vermont or a wealthy CEO living on Park Avenue, you get your mail six days a week. And you pay for this service at a cost far less than anywhere else in the industrialized world. ~ Bernie Sanders

When I was in high school I moved from the big city to a tiny village of 500 people in Vermont. It was like The Waltons! ~ Daphne Zuniga

I felt so revived in spirit that I put five dollars in the plate, and afterward, in front of the church, shook hands warmly with the minister and as many of the congregation as I could. It gave me a lovely sense of evil-doing that lasted clear through till Tuesday. I even considered beating Charley to give him some satisfaction too, because Charley is only a little less sinful than I am. All across the country I went to church on Sundays, a different denomination every week, but nowhere did I find the quality of that Vermont preacher. ~ John Steinbeck

I graduated from my Master of Fine Arts program for writing for children and young adults at Vermont College of Fine Arts. Of course, for a master's program, you have to do a ton of reading. I would get up, usually around 5:30, to do my reading; otherwise, I would fall behind. ~ Lisa Papademetriou

If the finest genius studies at one of our colleges, and is not installed in an office within one year afterwards in the cities or suburbs of Boston or New York, it seems to his friends and to himself that he is right in being disheartened, and in complaining the rest of his life. A sturdy lad from New Hampshire or Vermont, who in turn tries all the professions, who teams it, farms it, peddles, keeps a school, preaches, edits a newspaper, goes to Congress, buys a township, and so forth, in successive years, and always, like a cat, falls on his feet, is worth a hundred of these city dolls. He walks abreast with his days, and feels no shame in not `studying a profession,' for he does not postpone his life, but lives already. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

How great indeed is our debt to [Joseph Smith]. His life began in Vermont and ended in Illinois, and marvelous were the things that happened between that simple beginning and that tragic ending. It was he who brought us a true knowledge of God the Eternal Father and His Risen Son, the Lord Jesus Christ. During the short time of his great vision he learned more concerning the nature of Deity than all of those who through centuries had argued that matter in learned councils and scholarly forums. He brought us this marvelous book, the Book of Mormon, as another witness for the living reality of the Son of God. To him, from those who held it anciently, came the priesthood, the power, the gift, the authority, the keys to speak and act in the name of God. He gave us the organization of the Church and its great and sacred mission. Through him were restored the keys of the holy temples, that men and women might enter into eternal covenants with God, and that the great work for the dead might be accomplished. . . . "He was the instrument in the hands of the Almighty. ~ Gordon B. Hinckley

LINCKLAEN, JOHN. (Agent of the Holland Land Company.) Journals of Travels into Pennsylvania, New York and Vermont (1791-1792). Translated from French by Helen Lincklaen Fairchild. With biographical sketch and notes. New York, Putnams: 1897. ~ Anonymous

All in all, Vermont is a jewel state, small but precious. ~ Pearl S. Buck