Homesteading Quotes

“We had no choice. Sadness was a dangerous as panthers and bears. the wilderness needs your whole attention.”
― Laura Ingalls Wilder

“I declare to goodness, I don't know but sometimes I believe in women's rights. If women were voting and making laws, I believe they'd have better sense. (Mrs. McKee to Laura, regarding homesteading laws)”
― Laura Ingalls Wilder, These Happy Golden Years

“I declare to goodness, I don't know but sometimes I believe in women's rights. If women were voting and making laws, I believe they'd have better sense. (Mrs. McKee to Laura regarding the homestead laws)”
― Laura Ingalls Wilder

“The the street was quiet again. Country quiet.

That's partly what took city natives like the Whitlams by surprise, Falk thought: the quiet. He could understand them seeking out the idyllic country lifestyle, a lot of people did. The idea had an enticing, wholesome glow when it was weighed out from the back of a traffic jam, or while crammed into a gardenless apartment. They all had the same visions of breathing fresh clean air and knowing their neighbors. The kids would eat home-grown veggies and learn the value of an honest day's work.

On arrival, as the empty moving truck disappeared form sight, they looked around and were always taken aback by the crushing vastness of the open land. The space was the thing that hit them first. There was so much of it. There was enough to drown in. To look out and see not another soul between you and the horizon could be a strange and disturbing sight.

Soon, they discovered that the veggies didn't grow as willingly as they had in the city window box. That every single green shoot had to be coaxed and prized from the reluctant soil, and the neighbors were too busy doing the same on an industrial scale to muster much cheer in their greetings. There was no daily bumper-to-bumper commute, but there was also nowhere much to drive to.

Falk didn't blame the Whitlams, he'd seen it many times before when he was a kid. The arrivals looked around at the barrenness and the scale and the sheer bloody hardness of the land, and before long their faces all said exactly the same thing. "I didn't know it was like this."

He turned away, remembering how the rawness of local life had seeped into the kids' paintings at the school. Sad faces and brown landscapes.”
― Jane Harper, The Dry

“The fact that we heated most of the old farmhouse with nothing but a woodstove was a source of great pride for my father and endless inspiration for witticisms like, “Chop your own wood it’ll warm you twice!”
― Mike Rowe, The Way I Heard It

“A privileging of individual rights over group goods can lead to serious problems, as we’ve seen with the antivaccination movement.”
― Emily Matchar, Homeward Bound: Why Women are Embracing the New Domesticity

“I'm a duck farmer. Am I the world's best duck farmer? Probably not, but there's no official ranking, and I'm a modest guy, so I claim the number two spot.”
― Jarod Kintz, Powdered Saxophone Music

“When I'm on a backhoe, I'm shaping clay. I am a sculptor. I am a farm artist.”
― Jarod Kintz, Powdered Saxophone Music

“[Leslie Bennett] You have a teenager who desperately wants to separate...If you don't have a career, these New Domesticity types are likely to find themselves standing in the kitchen with all these domestic skills and no outlet for them, no way to earn a living.... [A]t that point your kids are not thanking you for having made the hand-pureed baby food and for giving them homemade cookies. They don't feel you've done them a big favor; they say, "Why didn't she ever grow up and take responsibility for her own life?”
― Emily Matchar, Homeward Bound: Why Women are Embracing the New Domesticity

“It is only our limited time frame that creates the whole "natives versus exotics" controversy. Wind animals, sea currents, and continental drift have always dispersed species into new environments... The planet has been awash in surging , swarming species movement since life began. The fact that it is not one great homogeneous tangled weed lot is persuasive testimony to the fact that intact ecosystems are very difficult to invade.”
― Toby Hemenway

“Aspirins and sleeping pills are not going to cure America's tensions although they may help temporarily. To get at the real source of our anxieties we must find serenity within ourselves.”
― Bradford Angier

“For me, nearly all of our problems are solved with a recipe composed mostly of homesteading and permaculture.”
― Paul Wheaton, Building a Better World in Your Backyard - Instead of Being Angry at Bad Guys

“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

“There are many more ways we can adapt. For example, instead of using up our energies harping about big farmers (whom of course we need right now to provide enough food for all of us), buy your own little patch of land to turn into an oasis of food and wildlife abundance. More and more people are doing this rather than standing around wringing their hands about global warming. Your little sanctuary will not be prone to disappear when the inevitable financial crises hit the big commercial farms.”
― Gene Logsdon, Gene Everlasting: A Contrary Farmer's Thoughts on Living Forever

“My ducks give me eggs, and I took two of those eggs and nurtured them under a dome to produce two ducklings. In a way, I am their mother, and I think Hallmark should make a special card to honor me.”
― Jarod Kintz, Powdered Saxophone Music

“You need skills to be good at homesteading. You need farming, carpentry, and above all, you need to be able to impersonate Elvis. When society collapses, that’s probably what will save your life.”
― Jarod Kintz, A Memoir of Memories and Memes

“From the moment that the first plow blade bit into the crust, the homesteaders began to destroy the foundations of their new life, and in a very few years the crust was gone--used up, scattered, blown away by the dry summer winds.”
― Jonathan Raban, Bad Land: An American Romance

“Autumn brings the harvest. There's a race to gather the final fruits of the year's labor, and then to dry, preserve, and store them for winter. (Because most of us no longer homestead, this autumnal hoarding impulse often expresses itself as frenzied holiday shopping.)”
― Jill McKeever, The Spirit of Botany: Aromatic Recipes and Rituals

“Everyone across America had the same idea at the same time. Chickens became the toilet paper of the spring.”
― Melissa Gilbert, Back to the Prairie: A Home Remade, A Life Rediscovered

“The medieval mystics had a word for it—derelict. It's a good word, conjuring up as it does empty stables with their rotting planks leaning outwards like gaping teeth, their innards just rusting machinery and corroded pipework. Dereliction. The state of not being cared for.”
― Catherine Chanter, The Well

“Whether they've made the land, or the land's made them, it's hard to say, if you take my meaning. It's wonderfully quiet here. Nothing seems to be going on, and nobody seems to want it to.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

“The homesteading generation's belief in education created the same Hobson's choice that so many farm families had to face. Children educated to become nurses, teachers, lawyers, pharmacists, insurance agents, doctors or police officers do not in general return to carry the family farm into the future. To use their education, they have to leave home and farming. And to complete this bittersweet irony, their children's success in other occupations were exactly what the homesteader generation had hoped for them. In a phenomenon familiar in both white and Black communities, the farming generation's deep commitment to educating their children produces children who were not, for the most part, interested in farming.”
― Richard Edwards, Great Plains Homesteaders

“When Gene was building his log workshop a few years ago, a helicopter flew over, circling back to the clearing next to our cabin. It was one of the Mirelli boys. Todd Mirelli plunked his chopper down in the clearing, jumped out, and came over to chat. He was building his own log cabin and wanted some tips from Gene. He truly did “drop in,” in the very sense of those words.”
― Diane Landry, Finding Peace in the Wilderness: Journey to a Simpler Life