Farm Life Quotes

“McDonalds? Never heard of it. We are going to have to find out where it is and take the whole family.”
― R. Gerry Fabian, Just Out Of Reach

“No matter where I go, I’ll never forget home. I can feel its heartbeat a thousand miles away. Home is the place where I grew my wings.”
― Brenda Sutton Rose

“I know you feel too big for this place. But when you get out of here, you'll see how small you are in the world.”
― Hope Larson, Salt Magic

“They got a manure machine in there,” Keller said. He went up to the barn and peeked through a hole between tow boards. “On wheels. It’s fun to ride sometimes, when you don’t care how you smell.”
― Sandra Neil Wallace

“Little Joe was still behind him. Eli could feel it. He wanted to look back, but he couldn’t. The tears were too close. If he were Fancy, he’d turn around and kick and buck and moo and do just about anything to keep his calf near. But Eli wasn’t Fancy; he was a farmer.”
― Sandra Neil Wallace

“With them we may say there died a thing older than themselves, these were the Last of the Peasants, the last of the Old Scots folk. A new generation comes up that will know them not, except as a memory in a song...”
― Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Sunset Song

“As we walked homeward across the fields, the sun dropped and lay like a great golden globe in the low west. While it hung there, the moon rose in the east, as big as a cart-wheel, pale silver and streaked with rose color, thin as a bubble or a ghost-moon. For five, perhaps ten minutes, the two luminaries confronted each other across the level land, resting on opposite edges of the world. In that singular light every little tree and shock of wheat, every sunflower stalk and clump of snow-on-the-mountain, drew itself up high and pointed; the very clods and furrows in the fields seemed to stand up sharply. I felt the old pull of the earth, the solemn magic that comes out of those fields at nightfall. I wished I could be a little boy again, and that my way could end there.”
― Willa Cather, My Ántonia

“She was a battered woman now, not a lovely girl; but she still had that something which fires the imagination, could still stop one's breath for a moment by a look or gesture that somehow revealed the meaning in common things. She had only to stand in the orchard, to put her hand on a little crab tree and look up at the apples, to make you feel the goodness of planting and tending and harvesting at last. All the strong things of her heart came out in her body, that had been so tireless in serving generous emotions.”
― Willa Cather, My Antonia

“Some things were done a certain way and they had been done that same way for ages. Most of the time it was a good thing, a reliable thing, and we grew up being able to count on life being very predictable and very dependable.”
― Arlene Stafford-Wilson, Lanark County Chronicle

“Fall air had an unforgettable fragrance; as the scent of wood smoke drifted across farmers' fields, when hearths and stoves were fired-up again, crackling softly on those cooler, darker nights.”
― Arlene Stafford-Wilson, Lanark County Collection: Winding Our Way Down Memory Lane

“A hot dry day was perfect for cutting hay, but Sunday in those days was a true day of rest, and no hay would be taken from the fields, nor any labour done inside or outside of the house.”
― Arlene Stafford-Wilson, Lanark County Collection: Winding Our Way Down Memory Lane

“I told one of the writers that our fields were so nearly vertical that we planted our corn with a shotgun and had to breed a race of mules with legs shorter on one side than the other for plowing. And when he asked how we transported the corn down off the mountain, I said, in a jug. He appeared to believe me, so I was encouraged to go on and tell him that every church in that corner of the state, except our Indian congregation, either conducted services speaking entirely in tongues or else took up serpents as recommended by Jesus. Both the writer and I had taken a few rounds of Scotch at the time. The story appeared as fact in a well-known national periodical, along with the obligatory descriptions of the beauty and ruggedness and unmatched remoteness and mystery of our mountains.”
― Charles Frazier , Thirteen Moons

“When I'm on a backhoe, I'm shaping clay. I am a sculptor. I am a farm artist.”
― Jarod Kintz, Powdered Saxophone Music

“As I string, a swift rhythm is played out with my hands, a cadence known only to those who have strung tobacco. To many of the poor workers, the meter and rhythm of stringing tobacco is the only poetry they’ve ever known.”
― Brenda Sutton Rose

“They all had the same visions of breathing fresh, clean air and knowing their neighbors. The kids would eat homegrown veggies and learn the value of an honest day's work.”
― Jane Harper, The Dry

“I was well on the way to tacking together a sort of nature religion to make up fro Grandpa's defection, an apotheosis of the back of beyond, in which I was just another thinking thing, neuter, drab, camouflaged. There'd be sermons in stones, and books to read in the haybarn, for ever and ever. Amen.”
― Lorna Sage, Bad Blood

“The maids - by which I mean the long succession of magdalens and half-wits that did the heavy work about the house - lived in one of the back (attic) rooms. Of course it was not considered necessary to give a kitchen wench a decent room - she wasn't accustomed to it and wouldn't have known what to do with it. A creaky bed, a cracked mirror, and a rickety table were all she deserved and all she usually got... a hole into which she could creep at night and which she could emerge at half-past four, eager for another day's work. Now my grandmother was not of that school of thought, but she was not a revolutionary either and, though the maid's room had some amenities such as a wardrobe and a chest of drawers, it was by no means a Paradise in which a lonely girl might be soothed to sweet slumbers. It was long and narrow with a skylight opening on the north. The walls were distempered a cold blue. There the domestics spent their dreary nights diversified with spasms of bucolic love at the week-ends.”
― John R. Allan, Farmer's Boy

“The etiquette of the bothy and stable was equalled in rigidity only by that of the court of Louis IV. Each man had his place and was taught to keep it. For the second horseman to have gone into supper before the first horseman would have created as much indignation as an infringement of precedence at Versailles. The foreman was always the first to wash his face in the bothy at night; it was he who wound the alarm clock and set it for the morning, and so on and so on. The order of seniority was as strictly observed between the second horseman and the third, while the halflin always got the tarry end of the stick... But the foreman had pride of place in everything. He slept at the front end of the first bed - that is, nearest the fire; he sat at the top of the table in the kitchen; he worked the best pair of horses; and he had the right to make the first pass at the kitchen maid.”
― John R. Allan, Farmer's Boy

“The Wilders, of course, paid no attention to her exuberance, continuing to live a frugal existence among their pigs and hens, entertained by a self-re-newing circle of farm cats and their preternaturally gifted Airedale terrier, Nero, who would sit politely at the dinner table like a member of the family, eating off his own plate.”
― Caroline Fraser, Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder

“The crows squawked and scattered from their perch on wooden rail fence, as the rhythmic clip-clop of the horse's hooves grew louder.”
― Arlene Stafford-Wilson, Lanark County Collection: Winding Our Way Down Memory Lane

“The orchard where they stood was on higher ground than the farmhouse, which nestled like a white dove beneath hemlocks and the tall protecting elms. The fields, checkered by stone walls, undulated gently toward the sapphire strip of the distant Sound. A late October haze, faintly lavender, filtered the clear air, and intensified the perfume of burning leaves. Maples on the Cat Rock Hills blazed red and gold, colors repeated even more strongly by a riot of sumach and goldenrod against the gray wall of the little burying ground. Buttercup's bell tinkled rhythmically, as Seth guided her toward the barn and the evening milking.”
― Anya Seton, Dragonwyck

“She turned his face to hers. The stubble at his jawline scuffed against her hand. Their eyes met, and a shared joy was strung between them, like a gossamer thread of spider silk. Edward lowered his lips to hers as the sun flamed pink behind them.
“Promise me something?” she softly pleaded.
He wrapped his arms fully around her. “What?”
“Promise we’ll be happy.”
― Jenny Knipfer, In a Grove of Maples

“Around the time of the summer solstice, when the sun shines brightest on our little corner of the world, field after field of hay is cut, baled and carted away in a non-stop parade of wagons, up and down the rural routes.”
― Arlene Stafford-Wilson, Lanark County Comfort

“If you really want to be a good gardener, you need to understand what is going on in your soil.”
― Jeff Lowenfels, Teaming with Microbes: A Gardener's Guide to the Soil Food Web

“The only thing Birdie was ever interested in was home. There was nothing Birdie loved more than to curl up in her window seat and watch the orchard. She knew what animals burrowed where, and what flowers bloomed when, and what trees produced the best fruit. She listened to the farm’s rhythms through the screen like the beat of the heart of someone she loved.”
― Jodi Lynn Anderson, Peaches

“Farmers are not looking for special favors. They ask only an even chance as compared with other workers. But people don't understand. Perhaps the many books on pioneer life with the usual successful and happy outcome have helped to give a wrong impression and perpetuate the idea that country people live on wild game and fish and fruits and in general on the free bounty of heaven. Many people have no idea of the cash expense of operating a farm to-day, or the work and planning required to keep the wheels going round, to say nothing of a decent living or suitable education for the children.”
― Caroline Henderson, Letters from the Dust Bowl

“She walks the same paths where her father walked, and her grandfather, and her great-grandfather before her. She passes by familiar trees, the towering silent witnesses to over two centuries of history. Many of these majestic woodland giants, like faithful old friends, proudly bear the telltale tap-marks, remnants of a multi-generational maple harvest.”
― Arlene Stafford-Wilson, Lanark County Kitchen: A Maple Legacy from Tree to Table

“Carolina Flores took a sip of her sandía agua fresca on her porch and looked out across the scenic landscape of her lush farm, mesmerized by the clear blue sky overhead, the rows of colorful Swiss chard lined up like little soldiers, and the fields of red onions, ripe for picking. It wasn't strawberry season yet, her favorite, but she loved the calm of the winter months. A cool coastal breeze wafted the fragrant scent of garlic through the air, and Carolina marveled at the contrast between the snowcapped Santa Ynez Mountains in the distance and the food growing on the land.
Mi tierra.”
― Alana Albertson, Kiss Me, Mi Amor

“The last footfall dies into silence. The stillness tingles with the aftermath of noise. All around stand the new cornstacks, unfamiliar shadows, ramparts thrown up suddenly round the yard. An owl detaches itself silently from the darkness of a beam, swoops down into the moonlight and away, now white against a shadow, now black against the moon. A mouse scuttles somewhere in the straw. The gaunt shape of a binder stands in the corner, angular as a skeleton under its cloth. Its work is over until next year.”
― Adrian Bell, Corduroy

“If the reader doesn't connect with your character, they are not going to connect with the story. I try to make my characters very relatable. After all, we are selling their story. The reader has to be able to feel what the character is feeling. They have to laugh and cry with them.”
― Stacy Thowe, God Bless My Broken Road