Land Quotes

“Until we understand what the land is, we are at odds with everything we touch. And to come to that understanding it is necessary, even now, to leave the regions of our conquest - the cleared fields, the towns and cities, the highways - and re-enter the woods. For only there can a man encounter the silence and the darkness of his own absence. Only in this silence and darkness can he recover the sense of the world's longevity, of its ability to thrive without him, of his inferiority to it and his dependence on it. Perhaps then, having heard that silence and seen that darkness, he will grow humble before the place and begin to take it in - to learn from it what it is. As its sounds come into his hearing, and its lights and colors come into his vision, and its odors come into his nostrils, then he may come into its presence as he never has before, and he will arrive in his place and will want to remain. His life will grow out of the ground like the other lives of the place, and take its place among them. He will be with them - neither ignorant of them, nor indifferent to them, nor against them - and so at last he will grow to be native-born. That is, he must reenter the silence and the darkness, and be born again.
(pg. 27, "A Native Hill")”
― Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays

“I NAME THIS LAND TOMORROW, FOR IT SHALL LAST FOREVERMORE!”
― Cressida Cowell, How to Break a Dragon's Heart

“Land is the only thing in the world that amounts to anything.”
― Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind

“It is possible, I think, to say that... a Christian agriculture [is] formed upon the understanding that it is sinful for people to misuse or destroy what they did not make. The Creation is a unique, irreplaceable gift, therefore to be used with humility, respect, and skill.”
― Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture

“To husband is to use with care, to keep, to save, to make last, to conserve. Old usage tells us that there is a husbandry also of the land, of the soil, of the domestic plants and animals - obviously because of the importance of these things to the household. And there have been times, one of which is now, when some people have tried to practice a proper human husbandry of the nondomestic creatures in recognition of the dependence of our households and domestic life upon the wild world. Husbandry is the name of all practices that sustain life by connecting us conservingly to our places and our world; it is the art of keeping tied all the strands in the living network that sustains us.

And so it appears that most and perhaps all of industrial agriculture's manifest failures are the result of an attempt to make the land produce without husbandry.”
― Wendell Berry, Bringing it to the Table: On Farming and Food

“But land is land, and it's safer than the stocks and bonds of Wall Street swindlers.”
― Eugene O'Neill, Long Day’s Journey into Night

“In no man's land, alien is the queen.”
― Toba Beta

“A farmer, as one of his farmer correspondents once wrote to Liberty Hyde Bailey, is "a dispenser of the 'Mysteries of God.'"

The husband, unlike the "manager" or the would-be objective scientist, belongs inherently to the complexity and the mystery that is to be husbanded, and so the husbanding mind is both careful and humble.”
― Wendell Berry, Bringing it to the Table: On Farming and Food

“I seen hundreds of men come by on the road an’ on the ranches, with their bindles on their back an’ that same damn thing in their heads . . . every damn one of ’em’s got a little piece of land in his head. An’ never a God damn one of ’em ever gets it. Just like heaven. Ever’body wants a little piece of lan’. I read plenty of books out here. Nobody never gets to heaven, and nobody gets no land.”
― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

“Over a long time, the coming and passing of several generations, the old farm had settled into its patterns and cycles of work - its annual plowing moving from field to field; its animals arriving by birth or purchase, feeding and growing, thriving and departing. Its patterns and cycles were virtually the farm's own understanding of what it was doing, of what it could do without diminishment. This order was not unintelligent or rigid. It tightened and slackened, shifted and changed in response to the markets and the weather. The Depression had changed it somewhat, and so had the war. But through all changes so far, the farm had endured. Its cycles of cropping and grazing, thought and work, were articulations of its wish to cohere and to last. The farm, so to speak, desired all of its lives to flourish.
Athey was not exactly, or not only, what is called a "landowner." He was the farm's farmer, but also its creature and belonging. He lived its life, and it lived his; he knew that, of the two lives, his was meant to be the smaller and the shorter.”
― Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow

“for years now there had been no country here but the war.”
― Michael Herr, Dispatches

“When a handful of students came to RBG in 1970 and asked her to teach the first-ever Rutgers class on women and the law, she was ready to agree. It took her only about a month to read every federal decision and every law review article about women’s status. There wasn’t much. One popular textbook included the passage “Land, like woman, was meant to be possessed.”
― Irin Carmon, Notorious RBG: The Life and Times of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“Your topsoil's a disaster area — it's starved for nitrogen, it's been fertilized for years by the criminally insane, and whatever thief put in your irrigation system ought to be flogged through the fleet.”
― Peter S. Beagle, Tamsin

“The fields are black and ploughed, and they lie like a great fan before us, with their furrows gathered in some hand beyond the sky, spreading forth from that hand, opening wide apart as they come toward us, like black pleats that sparkle with thin, green spangles.”
― Ayn Rand, Anthem

“There was only silence. It was the silence of matter caught in the act and embarrassed. There were no cells moving, and yet there were cells. I could see the shape of the land, how it lay holding silence. Its poise and its stillness were unendurable, like the ring of the silence you hear in your skull when you're little and notice you're living the ring which resumes later in life when you're sick.”
― Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters

“I always have believed that we should not call it an Arab-Israeli issue or a Palestinian-Arab dispute or a peace negotiation. I think we should call it what it is: an occupation of Palestine, full stop. This is not a popular position in mixed company.”
― Talal Abu-Ghazaleh, Blankets become Jackets

“It would not be an exaggeration to say that the land question in Zimbabwe is the single most decisive one.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Inequalities in Zimbabwe

“Without the land there is no nation.”
― Sero Khanzadyan

“We’re not eight kingdoms, but an entire land with one heartbeat. It’s why people like you and I need to record our people’s stories so we can find those moments when our paths cross, and only then will we know true peace.”
― Melina Marchetta, Ferragost

“Sure, cried the tenant men, but it's our land. We measured it and broke it up. We were born on it, and we got killed on it, died on it. Even if it's no good, it's still ours. That's what makes it ours-being born on it, working it, dying on it.”
― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

“There wasn’t a question of what compromise there should be or what kind of peace process we should engage in. There was only one discussion: How do we remove the colonial power that is occupying our
country?”
― Talal Abu-Ghazaleh, Blankets become Jackets

“I have always found it difficult not to be moved by Jerusalem, even when I hated it—and God knows I have hated it for the sheer human cost of it. But the sight of it, from afar or inside the labyrinth of its walls, softens me. Every inch of it holds the confidence of ancient civilizations, their deaths and their birthmarks pressed deep into the city's viscera and onto the rubble of its edges. The deified and the condemned have set their footprints in its sand. It has been conquered, razed and, rebuilt so many times that its stones seem to possess life, bestowed by the audit trail of prayer and blood. Yet somehow, it exhales humility. It sparks an inherent sense of familiarity in me—that doubtless, irrefutable Palestinian certainty that I belong to this land. It possesses me, no matter who conquers it, because its soil is the keeper of my roots, of the bones of my ancestors. Because it knows the private lust that flamed the beds of all my foremothers. Because I am the natural seed of its passionate, tempestuous past. I am a daughter of the land, and Jerusalem reassures me of this inalienable right, far more than the yellowed property deeds, the Ottoman land registries, the iron keys to our stolen homes, or UN resolutions and decrees of superpowers could ever do.”
― Susan Abulhawa, Mornings in Jenin

“To heal the land is to heal ourselves.”
― Lawrence Nault

“Even if I am in heaven, surrounded by beautiful white gods, white angels, white gardens, white rainbows, and white food—white everything—living in eternal happiness, if I hear that Papuans on this planet called Earth have regained their stolen land and sovereignty, I will leave that heaven immediately, without telling the gods who rule that dimension, and return to my home: Papua.

Even if I am in hell, surrounded by darkness, fire, pain, suffering, death, and monsters—if I hear that my land and my home's sovereignty has been stolen for good and occupied by foreigners, and I am allowed to return, I will never leave that hell.”
― Yamin Kogoya, WE ARE THE LAST VOICE OF THE FIRST PEOPLES & THE FIRST VOICE OF THE LAST PEOPLES: 63 Sacred Sayings from the Edge of Extinction: Remembering 63 Years of Invasion, Betrayal, and Resistance

“Fences keep people out. Markers keep the law in. If you confuse the two, you will lose both.”
― Olawale Daniel, True Ownership: How to Buy Generational Land: A Practical Guide to Building Lasting Land Legacy in Nigeria

“Every landscape remembers. The question is whether we are willing to listen before the next storm rewrites the story.”
― Robert W Collin

“Today, the fight for Native American rights is, above all, a fight for our land and environment. The land is a living part of ourselves. Once it is gone, we are gone.”
― Mary Brave Bird, Ohitika Woman

“The white man can live disembodied within an artificial universe without ties to a particular tract of land. We cannot. We are bound to our Indian country.”
― Mary Brave Bird, Ohitika Woman

“When the asset becomes central to a nation's wealth and financial systems, an increase or a slump in its price creates huge risks for households, businesses, governments or all three.  When land climbs in value, it inevitably creates gaping disparities between the fortunate owners in newly expensive hubs and the unfortunate souls who bet on the wrong locations, especially in left-behind places in economic decline.  Surging land prices means greater and greater borrowing on the part of new buyers and landowners with growing lines of credit, which in turn raises the risk of national and international financial crises. ”
― Mike Bird, The Land Trap: A New History of the World's Oldest Asset

“land is a zero-sum asset”
― Mike Bird, The Land Trap: A New History of the World's Oldest Asset