Janisse Ray > Quotes

“Of what use to humanity, I ask myself, is a man who cannot see beyond his own hurt?”
― Janisse Ray

“I carry the landscape inside me like an ache. The story of who I am cannot be severed from the story of the flatwoods.”
― Janisse Ray, Ecology of a Cracker Childhood

“The assumption is that hope is a prerequisite for action. Without hope one becomes depressed and then unable to act.
I want to stress that I do not act because I have hope. I act whether I have hope or not. It is useless to rely on hope as motivation to do what's necessary and just and right. Why doesn't anybody ever talk about love as motivation to act?
I may not have a lot of hope but I have plenty of love, which gives me fight.
We are going to have to fall in love with place again and learn to stay put.”
― Janisse Ray, The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food

“I drink old-growth forest in like water. This is the homeland that built us. Here I walk shoulder to shoulder with history -- my history. I am in the presence of something ancient and venerable, perhaps of time itself, its unhurried passing marked by immensity and stolidity, each year purged by fire, cinched by a ring. Here mortality's roving hands grapple with air. I can see my place as human in a natural order more grand, whole, and functional than I’ve ever witnessed, and I am humbled, not frightened, by it. Comforted. It is as if a roundtable springs up in the cathedral of pines and God graciously pulls out a chair for me, and I no longer have to worry about what happens to souls.”
― Janisse Ray, Ecology of a Cracker Childhood

“I think of my own life, how it embraces a great quest to know every cog of nature--the names of oaks and ferns, the secret lives of birds, the taste of venison and Ogeechee lime, wax myrtle's smell and rattlesnake's, the contour of bobcat tracks, the number of barred owl cackles, the feel of Okefenokee Swamp water on my skin under a blistering sun.
I search for a vital knowledge of the land that my father could not teach me, as he was not taught, and guidance to know and honor it, as he was not guided, as if this will shield me from the errancies of the mind, or bring me back from that dark territory should I happen to wander there. I search as if there were peace to be found.”
― Janisse Ray, Ecology of a Cracker Childhood

“Rural places have hemorrhaged their best and brightest children, their intellectuals, thinkers, organizers, leaders, and artists-those who would create change and who would parent another generation of thinkers. All gone.

Our seeds are disappearing.”
― Janisse Ray, The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food

“Turning back to embrace the past has been a long, slow lesson not only in self-esteem, but in patriotism—pride in homeland, heritage. It has taken a decade to whip the shame, to mispronounce words and shun grammar when mispronunciation and misspeaking are part of my dialect, to own the bad blood. What I come from has made me who I am.”
― Janisse Ray, Ecology of a Cracker Childhood

“Some things ought to exist outside capitalism, and wildness should be one of them.”
― Janisse Ray, Wild Spectacle: Seeking Wonders in a World Beyond Humans

“In the wild world, relationship is evolutionary, time is geologic, beauty is intelligent. There we find ourselves under a powerful spell.”
― Janisse Ray, Wild Spectacle: Seeking Wonders in a World Beyond Humans

“Something happens to me when I garden. I am fully, reliably, blissfully present to who I am and where I am in that moment. I am an animal with a hundred different senses and all of them are switched on.”
― Janisse Ray, The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food

“She was so strong a ship could have been hewn from her body.”
― Janisse Ray, Ecology of a Cracker Childhood

“Most of us, most of our lives, are asked to live small. Most of us quit trying very young to live the bigness we know is possible.”
― Janisse Ray, Wild Spectacle: Seeking Wonders in a World Beyond Humans

“My homeland is about as ugly as a place gets. There's nothing in south Georgia, people will tell you, except straight, lonely roads, one-horse towns, sprawling farms, and tracts of planted pines. It’s flat, monotonous, used-up, hotter than hell in summer and cold enough in winter that orange trees won’t grow. No mountains, no canyons, no rocky streams, no waterfalls. The rivers are muddy, wide and flat, like somebody’s feet. The coastal plain lacks the stark grace of the desert or the umber panache of the pampas”
― Janisse Ray, Ecology of a Cracker Childhood

“By 2005, Monsanto had filed ninety lawsuits against U.S. farmers for patent infringement, meaning GM genes found in the fields of farmers that had not paid for the right, and Monsanto had been awarded over $15 million. I’ll tell you here and now: We have a screwed-up justice system. These lawsuits and seeds are nothing less than corporate extortion of American farmers, said Andrew Kimbrell, director of the Center for Food Safety, as reported in the Seed Savers Summer Edition 2005.”
― Janisse Ray, The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food

“Something happens to you in an old-growth forest. At first you are curious to see the tremendous girth and height of the trees, and you sally forth, eager. You start to saunter, then amble, slower and slower, first like a fox and then an armadillo and then a tortoise, until you are trudging at the pace of an earthworm, and then even slower, the pace of a sassafras leaf's turning. The blood begins to languish in your veins, until you think it has turned to sap. You hanker to touch the trees and embrace them and lean your face against their bark, and you do. You smell them. You look up at leaves so high their shapes are beyond focus, into far branches with circumferences as thick as most trees.
Every limb of your body becomes weighted, and you have to prop yourself up. There's this strange current of energy running skyward, like a thousand tiny bells tied to your capillaries, ringing with your heartbeat. You sit and lean against one trunk-it's like leaning against a house or a mountain. The trunk is your spine, the nerve centers reaching into other worlds, below ground and above. You stand and press your body into the ancestral and enduring, arms wide, and your fingers do not touch. You wonder how big the unseen gap.
If you stay in one place too long, you know you'll root.”
― Janisse Ray

“I may not have a lot of hope but I have plenty of love, which gives me fight.”
― Janisse Ray, The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food

“The moral of the story, Son," Pun would say, "is Don't take more on your heart than you can shake off on your heels."
Of all lessons, that one I never learned and I hope I never do. My heart daily grows new foliage, always adding people, picking up new heartaches like a wool coat collects cockleburs and beggar's-lice seeds. It gets fuller and fuller as I walk slow as a sloth, carrying all the pain Pun and Frank and so many others tried to walk from. Especially the pain of the lost forest. Sometimes there is no leaving, no looking westward for another promised land. We have to nail our shoes to the kitchen floor and unload the burden of our heart. We have to set to the task of repairing the damage done by and to us.”
― Janisse Ray, Ecology of a Cracker Childhood

“A river can't forgive because it is only capable, in the first place, of love. A river loves the dumpers, the polluters, the slayers, the nest-thieves, the bird-killers, the dammers, the water-stealers. A river loves even the clear-cutters. But I can forgive. I am trying to be like the river.”
― Janisse Ray, Drifting into Darien: A Personal and Natural History of the Altamaha River

“Are you going to farmer up or just lie there and bleed?”
― Janisse Ray, The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food

“Although I was reared on a junkyard by parents who did not waste time hiking or camping, I knew pine trees and pitcher plants, bobcats and brown thrashers, as my people.”
― Janisse Ray, Wild Spectacle: Seeking Wonders in a World Beyond Humans

“Now I lay me down to sleep. I pay the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pay the Lord my soul to take.”
― Janisse Ray, Ecology of a Cracker Childhood

“Perhaps no word exists in our terribly inadequate English language to name this abstract, emotional thing that is not forgiveness, is not forgetting, and also is both.”
― Janisse Ray, Wild Spectacle: Seeking Wonders in a World Beyond Humans

“Georgia Author Brenda Sutton Rose captures some of the conflicted and captivating characters of a rapidly changing South.”
― Janisse Ray

“What I am saying is that lovely, whimsical, and soulful things happen in a garden, leaving a gardener giddy.”
― Janisse Ray, The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food

“I want to tell you about the most hopeful thing in the world. It is a seed.”
― Janisse Ray, The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food

“For a vegetable to flower has been considered by gardeners as a mistake--oops, it went to seed, yank it out! Going to seed has meant that a person has gone wayward, and seedy places are unsavory. A seed, however, finds its nativity in a flower, a thing of beauty, color, fragrance, form, and variety. Flowers are food for the soul. And the seeds they fashion are life, sustenance, the future. We are utterly dependent on them. Seeds are the bridge between us and the sun, emissaries of the solar system, bundles of cosmic energy.”
― Janisse Ray, The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food

“Here in the country, on a little farm in southern Georgia, I am building a quiet life of resistance. I am a radical peasant, and every day I take out my little hammer, and I keep building.”
― Janisse Ray, The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food

“Were my imagination greater I would grant stories to the souls lost to history. Were I able to hear with my bones I wold know the underside of their colossal silence.”
― Janisse Ray, Drifting into Darien: A Personal and Natural History of the Altamaha River

“What is clear is that genius, whether it is represented by a Thomas Edison or an Albert Einstein or an Alberto Ramirez, leaves the world a better place.”
― Janisse Ray, Ecology of a Cracker Childhood

“Sometimes all we have is a little light that we can shine outward into a big darkness.”
― Janisse Ray, Wild Spectacle: Seeking Wonders in a World Beyond Humans