James Rebanks > Quotes

“Later I would understand that modern industrial communities are obsessed with the importance of ‘going somewhere’ and ‘doing something with your life’. The implication is an idea I have come to hate, that staying local and doing physical work doesn’t count for much.”
― James Rebanks, The Shepherd's Life: Modern Dispatches from an Ancient Landscape

“This crappy, mean, broken-down school took five years of my life. I’d be mad, but for the fact that it taught me more about who I was than anything else I have ever done. It also made me think that modern life is rubbish for so many people. How few choices it gives them. How it lays out in front of them a future that bores most of them so much they can’t wait to get smashed out of their heads each weekend. How little most people are believed in, and how much it asks of so many people for so little in return.”
― James Rebanks, The Shepherd's Life: Modern Dispatches from an Ancient Landscape

“He asked what I made of the other students, so I told him. They were OK, but they were all very similar; they struggled to have different opinions because they’d never failed at anything or been nobodies, and they thought they would always win. But this isn’t most people’s experience of life. He asked me what could be done about it. I told him the answer was to send them all out for a year to do some dead-end job like working in a chicken-processing plant or spreading muck with a tractor. It would do more good than a gap year in Peru. He laughed and thought this tremendously witty. It wasn’t meant to be funny.”
― James Rebanks, The Shepherd's Life: A People's History of the Lake District

“The modern world worships the idea of the self, the individual, but it is a gilded cage: there is another kind of freedom in becoming absorbed in a little life on the land. In a noisy age, I think perhaps trying to live quietly might be a virtue. *”
― James Rebanks, Pastoral Song

“There is something about planting trees that feels good. If you have done it well, it will outlast you and leave the world a little richer and more beautiful because of your efforts. Planting a tree means you believe in, and care about, a world that will be there after you are gone. It means you have thought about more than yourself, and that you can imagine a future beyond your own lifespan, and you care about that future.”
― James Rebanks, English Pastoral: An Inheritance

“There is no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothes.”
― James Rebanks, The Shepherd's Life: A People's History of the Lake District

“It feels strange to be home, as if I am now just a visitor to the land that I love, no longer really a part of it. I understand for the first time that our sense of belonging is all about participation. We belong because we are part of the work of this place.”
― James Rebanks, The Shepherd's Life: A People's History of the Lake District

“Books were considered a sign of idleness at best and dangerous at worst.”
― James Rebanks, The Shepherd's Life: Modern Dispatches from an Ancient Landscape

“We don't give up, even when things are bad.
We pay our debts.
We work hard.
We act decently.
We help our neighbours if they need it.
We do what we say we will do.
We don't want much attention.
We look after our own.
We are proud of what we do.
We try to be quietly smart.
We take chances sometimes to get on.
We will fail sometimes.
We will be affected by the wider world...
But we hold on to who we are.”
― James Rebanks

“Landscapes like ours were created by and survive through the efforts of nobodies. That's why I was so shocked to be given such a dead, rich, white man's version of its history at school. This is a landscape of modest, hardworking people. The real history of our landscape should be the history of the nobodies.”
― James Rebanks, The Shepherd's Life: A People's History of the Lake District

“It is a curious thing to slowly discover that your landscape is loved by other people. It is even more curious, and a little unsettling, when you discover by stages that you as a native are not really part of the story and meaning they attach to that place.”
― James Rebanks, The Shepherd's Life: A People's History of the Lake District

“The choice for our wider society is not whether we farm, but how we farm. Do we want a countryside that is entirely shaped by industrial-scale, cheap food production with some little islands of wilderness dotted in amongst it, or do we, at least in some places, also value the traditional landscape as shaped by traditional family farms?”
― James Rebanks, The Shepherd's Life: A People's History of the Lake District

“It was like his code of honour. Work that needs doing should be done. Work is its own reward. Never step back from work or you look bad.”
― James Rebanks, The Shepherd's Life: A People's History of the Lake District

“In a noisy age, I think perhaps trying to live quietly might be a virtue.”
― James Rebanks, Pastoral Song: A Farmer’s Journey

“These people lived insular, often deeply private lives focused on their work. Their voices were rarely heard, because they sought no audience. Their identities were constructed from things that couldn’t be bought in shops. They wore old clothes and only went shopping occasionally for essentials. They held “shop-bought” things in great contempt. They preferred cash to credit, and would mend anything that broke, piling up old things to use again someday, rather than throwing them away. They had hobbies and interests that cost nothing, turning their necessary tasks, like catching rats or foxes, into sport. Their friendships were built around their work, and the breeds of cattle and sheep they kept. They rarely took holidays or bought new cars. And it wasn’t all work—a lot of time was spent on farm-related activities that were communal and more relaxed, or in the simple enjoyment of wild things. My grandfather called this way of life “living quietly.”
― James Rebanks, Pastoral Song

“The truth is, a farm swallows you up, takes everything you have, and then asks for more. It is also an exercise in humility: you can’t do it alone.”
― James Rebanks, Pastoral Song

“And then we do it all again, just as our forefathers did before us. It is a farming pattern, fundamentally unchanged from many centuries ago. It has changed in scale (as farms have amalgamated to survive, so there are fewer us of ) but not in its basic content. You could bring a Viking man to stand on our fell with me and he would understand what we were doing and the basic pattern of our farming year. The timing of each task varies depending on the different valleys and farms. Things are driven by the seasons and necessity, but not our will." (p. 32)”
― James Rebanks, The Shepherd's Life: A People's History of the Lake District

“The only way out was to go back the next year and buy his sheep and pay over the odds to make up for it, so he did. Neither of these men cared remotely about “maximizing profit” in the short-term in the way a modern business person in a city would; they both valued their good names and their reputations for integrity far more highly than making a quick buck. If you said you would do a thing, you’d better do it.”
― James Rebanks, The Shepherd's Life: Modern Dispatches from an Ancient Landscape

“This crappy, mean, broken-down school took five years of my life. I'd be mad, but for the fact that it taught me more about who I was than anything else I have ever done. It also made me think that modern life is rubbish for so many people. How few choices it gives them. How it lays out in front of them a future that bored most of them so much they couldn't wait to get smashed out of their heads each weekend. How little most people are believed in, and how much it asks of so many people for so little in return.”
― James Rebanks, The Shepherd's Life: A People's History of the Lake District

“If you read more, worked harder, thought things through smartly, or wrote or argued better than other people, you won.”
― James Rebanks

“When we call it ‘our’ landscape, we mean it as a physical and intellectual reality. There is nothing chosen about it. This landscape is our home and we rarely stray far from it, or endure anywhere else for long before returning. This may seem like a lack of imagination or adventure, but I don’t care. I love this place; for me it is the beginning and the end of everything, and everywhere else feels like nowhere.”
― James Rebanks, The Shepherd's Life: A People's History of the Lake District

“I didn’t know anyone in London, and I never wanted to be there. This was not how my life was meant to be, but needs must. It was as if the gods were showing me how tough everyone else’s lives were, and what I had left behind. I understood for the first time why people wanted to escape to places like the Lake District. I understood then what National Parks were for, so that people whose lives are always like this can escape and feel the wind in their hair and the sun on their faces.”
― James Rebanks, The Shepherd's Life: A People's History of the Lake District

“My grandfather seemed to have found a way to endure it through enjoying the wild things around him, and in taking pride at doing things right. He seemed to be saying to me: learn to see the beauty in mowing thistles, learn to enjoy the skill of the scythe, learn to tell stories or make people laugh so that even the toughest working days won’t break you.”
― James Rebanks, Pastoral Song

“I was discovering something about the wider world—that you could shape your own fate to a much greater degree than I’d ever experienced. If you read more, worked harder, thought things through smartly, or wrote or argued better than other people, you won. For a while I found this newfound freedom quite exciting and liberating. I found it a bit of a buzz just to be good at something, something that was nothing to do with my family or our farm, or anyone else except me.”
― James Rebanks, The Shepherd's Life: A People's History of the Lake District

“He joined the ranks of the great uprooted, but educated, English middle class. He suspected, rightly, that his old friends thought him a ‘snob’. But he made new friends, middle-class ones, who read books and did middle-class things like climbing, walking and daydreaming of adventures in foreign lands. But you can’t help feeling that he was always a little isolated in his new world, never quite fitting in – a little lonely, his cleverness like a millstone around his neck.”
― James Rebanks, The Shepherd's Life: Modern Dispatches from an Ancient Landscape

“[O]ccasionally the sunlight through the library windows would catch my eye, and I knew I should be out in that. I felt as if I had cut myself adrift from everything I loved.”
― James Rebanks, The Shepherd's Life: A People's History of the Lake District

“Our leading agricultural colleges still churn out "business-focused" young farmers, fired up with productive zeal. Students are taught to be at the cutting edge of the new farming, applying science and technology to control nature. They are taught to think about the land like economists. They are taught nothing about tradition, community, or ecological limits. Rachel Carson isn't on the curriculum. Different colleges and courses elsewhere churn out young ecologists who know nothing about farming or rural lives. Education is divided by specialism, and sorts the young people into two separate tribes who can barely understand each other.”
― James Rebanks, Pastoral Song: A Farmer’s Journey

“Thankfully, my father never sent me to agricultural college. He was old-school and thought those places turned out people who knew the cost of everything and the value of nothing.”
― James Rebanks, English Pastoral: An Inheritance

“We are, I guess, all of us, built out of stories.”
― James Rebanks, The Shepherd's Life: A People's History of the Lake District

“Farming is more than the effect on the landscape: it sustains the local food industry, supports tourism, and gives people an income in places that might otherwise be abandoned.”
― James Rebanks, The Shepherd's Life: A People's History of the Lake District