Ellen Glasgow Quotes

When you grow up on a dairy farm, cows don't take a day off. So you work every day and my dad always said, 'No one can outwork you.'

My grandmother was the daughter of pioneers, as was my grandfather, and they were farmers. And they worked the land, and there is a grounded value system that becomes inherent in knowing what's real and what's powerful. And understanding the material nature of not only man, but beasts and profit and all of those things that you fight for.

The strength that I have comes from irrigating the citrus plantation, ploughing in the vineyard, guarding the melon fields at night. I believe that's what gave me the strength.

Growing up on a dairy farm, you certainly learn discipline and a commitment to purpose.

We were sharecroppers - we were a little bit of everything. We farmed and tried to make something.

I sincerely regret the loss of that set of men who are called yeomen ... who really kept up the independence of the nation, and I am loth to see their lands now in the hands of monopolizing lords.

I used to work a lot on ranches where I grew up, and I had to rise at 5:30 in the morning.

The land belongs to those who work it with their hands.

I have six acres in front of my own house, which I very rarely work on. Most of the work occurs on farmers' fields around me. And I like the discipline of working on other people's land.

As much land as a man tills, plants, improves, cultivated, and can use the product of, so much is his property. He by his labour does, as it were, enclose it from the common.

The Lord gave us farmers two strong hands so we could grab as much as we could with both of them.

Fortunately, unlike my teachers and classmates, my parents never forced gender roles or even a ended identity on me. I grew up on a farm, so all that mattered was working hard.

Under no circumstances must we touch land belonging to fellahs or worked by them. Only if a fellah leaves his place of settlement, should we offer to buy his land, at an appropriate price.

One of my chores was to milk the cows, which meant getting up before dawn and going out to that cold dark barn. I didn't expect to make it all the way to the big leagues; I just had to get way from them damn cows.

To watch the corn grow, and the blossoms set; to draw hard breath over ploughshare or spade; to read, to think, to love, to hope, to pray, — these are the things that make men happy.

It is a rule of nature that taking a day off on the farm sets a person back at least a week.

If he does not plant the field that was given over to him as a garden, if it be arable land, the gardener shall pay the owner the produce of the field for the years that he let it lie fallow, according to the product of neighboring fields, put the field in arable condition and return it to its owner.

The way Mom saw it, women should let menfolk do the work because it made them feel more manly. That notion only made sense if you had a strong man willing to step up and get things done, and between Dad's gimp, Buster's elaborate excuses, and Apache's tendency to disappear, it was often up to me to keep the place from falling apart. But even when everyone was pitching in, we never got out from under all the work. I loved that ranch, though sometimes it did seem that instead of us owning the place, the place owned us.

There is virtue yet in the hoe and the spade, for learned as well as for unlearned hands. And labor is everywhere welcome; alwayswe are invited to work.

Farmers are patient men. They got to be. Got to see those seeds come up week by week, fraction by fraction, and sweat it out for some days not knowing yet is it weeds or vegetables.

I don't mind parting with the corn, but not with the field in which it was raised.

My parents would make huge crops of sometimes 55 to 60 bales of cotton. Being from a big family where there were 20 children, it wasn't too hard to pick that much cotton. But my father, year after year, didn't get too much money and I remember he just kept going.

The land belongs to the future.

"I have no more than twenty acres of ground," he replied, "the whole of which I cultivate myself with the help of my children; and our labor keeps off from us the three great evils - boredom, vice, and want."

It's just that when I work on someone else's land, it makes me aware of the social nature of that landscape.