Bobbie Ann Mason Quotes

My 'Big Bang Theory' costar Johnny Galecki went off the grid. He bought a huge ranch and goes there every weekend. He keeps telling me to do the same thing, but I don't know if I'm that committed. The Valley is as far off the grid as I'm going to go.

I grew up in a very modest home. We grew a lot of our food in our backyard. We fished; my brothers hunted.

I had almost three acres of land in Beverly Hills. And I had a big atrium of chickens because I love that feeling of being in the country and living from the soil.

The ‘poor white’ is actually degraded; the mountain white is a person not yet graded up.

If we grew it, we ate it. If Daddy shot it, Mamma cooked it.

We killed our own hogs, we killed our own beef, we raised our own vegetables, which Mama canned. We did live off the land.

... why do people who live in the country always give themselves such airs?

Homesteading is gone.

It would be nice to live off the land and fix cars.

Being an old farm boy myself, chickens coming home to roost never did make me sad; they've always made me glad.

We are not concerned with the very poor. They are unthinkable, and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet.

When I was little, we lived on 8 acres and my mom had a horse. But when I was 7, my mom kicked my dad out, and then in order to feed us five kids, she got critters cheap or for free and raised them for food. We milked a cow, raised chickens, pigs and beef cattle. We heated our one-story house with wood and stayed cold all winter.

The honest poor can sometimes forget poverty. The honest rich can never forget it.

It has long been a childhood dream of mine to have a farm.

I don't like technology and all that. I'm a farm boy. I would rather live in that time when you had to provide for your family. I don't know. I'm a country kid, so I don't like modern technology.

I actually would love to live in New York. But I need land; I need space. I'd love to move to a place where I could have a lot of land and a goat.

Rich people in poor places want to show off their wealth. And their less affluent counterparts feel pressure to fake it, at least in public. Nobody wants the stigma of being thought poor.

When my mother was raising me, she moved us upstate to the Woodstock area. Our closest neighbor was a mile away. She planted all her own vegetables.

My dream is to become a farmer. Just a Bohemian guy pulling up his own sweet potatoes for dinner.

I grew up on a farm. I didn't have health insurance until I was 24 years old. So, I didn't even know I was poor until the government told me I was poor.

Their humble dwellings were of their own rearing; it was they themselves who had broken in their little fields; from time immemorial, far beyond the reach of history, had they possessed their mountain holdings.

My mother had very humble beginnings - to put it mildly. Her dad built their home out of timber that he cut down on their land. No heat, no air-conditioning - 'no foolishness,' as he would call it.

It would astonish if not amuse the older citizens to learn that I (a strange, friendless, uneducated, penniless boy, working at ten dollars per month) have been put down as the candidate of pride, wealth, and aristocratic family distinction.

Most people live in the city and go to the country at the weekend, and that's posh and aristocratic, but actually to live in the country and come to London when you can't take it any more is different.

We were so poor as kids. I didn't even see a bathtub, running water, hot water, commode - we didn't have any of that. We started with a humble log house, milk cow, garden-raised our own food, killed a hog every year in the fall, and had the meat hanging up in the smokehouse - that was our childhood, me and ol' Si.