James E. Faust Quotes

I grew up in Texas in a family that fished and hunted, so I've shot guns as a kid.

My family lived off the land and summer evening meals featured baked stuffed tomatoes, potato salad, corn on the cob, fresh shelled peas and homemade ice cream with strawberries from our garden. With no air conditioning in those days, the cool porch was the center of our universe after the scorching days.

The happiest moments of my childhood were spent on my grandmother's front porch in Durham, N.C., or at her sister's farmhouse in Orange County, where chickens paraded outside the kitchen's screen door and hams were cured in the smokehouse.

We would load up the yellow Cutlass Supreme station wagon and pick blackberries during blackberry season or spring onions during spring onion season. For us, food was part of the fabric of our day.

When my parents went off to Knoxville to work, I lived with my father's mother. She was strict - the kind who starched and ironed dresses. I had to sit more than I played. Oh, I was miserable. I liked being out with the animals. I'd come in the house with my hair pulled out, sash off the dress, dirty as heck. I was always getting spanked.

My grandmother raised me. She was a real no-nonsense but very funny lady. I drove tractors, made hay, milked cows, fed the chicken, fed the pigs.

My parents wanted me to grow up around horses and open spaces.

My parents were kind of over protective people. Me and my sister had to play in the backyard all the time. They bought us bikes for Christmas but wouldn't let us ride in the street, we had to ride in the backyard. Another Christmas, my dad got me a basketball hoop and put it in the middle of the lawn! You can't dribble on grass.

Mom and Dad would stay in bed on Sunday morning, but the kids would have to go to church.

I grew up hunting and fishing. I've always been into archery. I've always been into cars... In my family, that was just stuff we did. That's just the way it was.

Our parents didn't let us watch a lot of television growing up. We had Disney on Sunday nights, and at 8:30, they were like, 'Turn it off! Go to bed!'

My earliest memory was going to my grandma's house, milking the cows, and collecting the eggs from the chickens.

My granddad had a 1,500-acre hobby farm that he had built up from scratch in Western Australia, so my siblings and I spent our childhoods going there a lot.

I had very strict parents, I could never go outside or go to parties.

My parents never let me have everything.

You might be a redneck if on your first date you had to ask your Dad to borrow the keys to the tractor.

The local shepherd, I vividly remember his old Barbour jacket, with a hipflask in the pocket. It just feels very familiar - like part of my childhood. The smell of the wax. Whenever I put one on now, it just feels comforting.

I can relate to ranchers and roughnecks and professional game guides and farmers and homemakers.

Not knowing my birthday had never seemed strange. I knew I'd been born near the end of September, and each year I picked a day, one that didn't fall on a Sunday because it's no fun spending your birthday in church.

My favorite thing to do in the summer was to sleep out in the forest on the farm I grew up on.

When we were kids, my favorite thing was coming to upstate New York where my family is from and hanging out with my grandparents' friends pre-Internet and them asking if we had stores or 'Do you have TV in Alaska?'

If I seem to write most happily about the ordinary things that boys do who live in the country, it is because this is the part of my childhood that I look back upon with the greatest affection.

I grew up with a cabin so we'd always go out and hunt and fish and all that good stuff. All of the cliche Southern things one would imagine.

I was born on a pig farm in Norfolk. We grew up in the city called Norwich in Norfolk, then I moved to London when I was thirteen.

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