Joseph Brodsky Quotes

My parents moved to Los Angeles when I was really young, but I spent every summer with my grandparents, and I'd stay with my grandfather on the farm in Longview. He was retired from the railroad, and he had a small farm with some cows and some pigs. I remember part of my youth was feeding hogs and plowing fields and stuff, so that's a part of me.

I was definitely very much a country boy.

I am still the same village girl from Dhing who used to help my father in the paddy field, help mother in household chores, run for hours on the streets of Dhing, play football with my Mon Jai group friends.

IT WAS TESS who told me about the crowd going to the all-night dance. We'd been school friends. We'd picked mushrooms and pretended to have seen a big ship. She had got married since I went away; it was a made match, a man from the midlands, a Donal, who had worked in a garage but took to farming, out all day, draining fields and callows so that he could till them and sow corn.

What makes most people comfortable is some sort of sense of nostalgia. I grew up in a small town, and I could count my friends on one hand, and I still live that way. I think I'll die in a small town. When I can't move my bones around a stage any more, you'll find me living in a place that's spread out and rural and spacious.

I was working on the farm to get in shape, about a mile away from my parents. You know, I did everything as a kid to stay in shape - jogging, work on the farm, driving the tractor. I'll never forget.

As a child, the paddy field was my playground.

I've been writing about my boyhood, when I was a little kid back on my grandfather's farm where we didn't know about black widow spiders or all that stuff. But writing about that is so easy.

When I was 9, we moved to Osseo, Wis., where we owned a couple of hundred acres. My father was well respected in town.

I love Vancouver. I can be with my family, I can reconnect with the guys. It will always be my home.

We used to play baseball back in that field and keep an eye out for the bulls.

I think people get excited about someone discovering something that blew their mind when they were younger. I think it makes people kind of nostalgic and happy. That's one of the really great things about the Internet, that it can bring people together in that way of just being interested in the same stuff.

I worked on a farm. Played ball and loafed along the fishing and swimming holes of the White River, and my boyhood was not a lot different from that of other youngsters.

I grew up in a small, strictly-Catholic fishing village on the coast of Wales. The people there have a different attitude to life than those in Hollywood - people stick together more.

People of a certain age look back on the Mayberry of 'The Andy Griffith Show' and become almost as homesick for that simple fictional hamlet as they do for their own home towns.

I've come to realize how much it really was a part of my upbringing, the Georgia part. We were away from town. It was just dirt and trees and spouses. And a lot of kids - my cousins, who were all like brothers and sisters to me - just a lot of kids at one time.

I love the smell of skunks. Driving down a back road and you smell a skunk that's sprayed or been hit. I love that. It reminds me of home.

Something has been lost, a special feeling of patriotism, of belonging, is vanishing.

There's something that feels very timeless about fandom.

I spent much of my childhood on stations up north, loving that life and with many, many special memories, and so the country holds a very real place in my heart.

I grew up taking care of the pigs. I love this country that, you know, somebody can do something like that.

I spend a lot of time wandering around the countryside just looking at people, seeing how everything fits together.

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

As a child in South Carolina, I spent summers like so many children - sitting on my grandparents' back porch with my siblings, spitting watermelon seeds into the garden or, even worse, swallowing them and trembling as my older brother and sister spoke of the vine that was probably already growing in my belly.

I remember in grade school having a group of friends and enjoying that sense of community, enjoying living in an imaginary world that wasn't just by yourself or your sibling but a whole group of people.