Laura Farms Quotes

The true way to live is to enjoy every moment as it passes, and surely it is in the everyday things around us that the beauty of life lies.

Some old-fashioned things like fresh air and sunshine are hard to beat. In our mad rush for progress and modern improvements let's be sure we take along with us all the old-fashioned things worth while.

Tomorrow when the farm boys find this freak of nature, they will wrap his body in newspaper and carry him to the museum. But tonight he is alive and in the north field with his mother. It is a perfect summer evening: the moon rising over the orchard, the wind in the grass. And as he stares into the sky, there are twice as many stars as usual.

A farmer depends on himself, and the land and the weather. If you're a farmer, you raise what you eat, you raise what you wear, and you keep warm with wood out of your own timber. You work hard, but you work as you please, and no man can tell you to go or come. You'll be free and independent, son, on a farm.

The fact is that while there has been a good deal of discussion for and against women in business, farm women have always been business women, and I have never heard a protest.

Every war is more or less a woman's war.

Our inability to see things that are right before our eyes, until they are pointed out to us, would be amusing if it were not at times so serious. We are coming, I think, to depend too much on being told and shown and taught, instead of using our own eyes and brains and inventive faculties, which are likely to be just as good as any other person's.

The Two-headed Calf Tomorrow when the farm boys find this freak of nature, they will wrap his body in newspaper and carry him to the museum. But tonight he is alive and in the north field with his mother. It is a perfect summer evening: the moon rising over the orchard, the wind in the grass. And as he stares into the sky, there are twice as many stars as usual.

Shooting stars are not really stars at all but meteorites, burning their way through our atmosphere, sometimes landing in the oceans and in the middle of farms...you could make wishes on them if you like, but they are really just pieces of rock falling down from the sky, and they could land on your head and kill you just as you look up to make a wish. Really, they're just rocks. They don't care about your wishes at all.

A farmer depends on himself, and the land and the weather. If you’re a farmer, you raise what you eat, you raise what you wear, and you keep warm with wood out of your own timber. You work hard, but you work as you please, and no man can tell you to go or come. You’ll be free and independent, son, on a farm.

Finn fell asleep draped in Kittens and dreamed that the corn walked the earth on skinny white roots, liked to joke with the crows, and wasn't afraid of anything.

You talk of the mines of Australia, They’ve wealth in red gold, without doubt; But, ah! there is gold on the farm, boys— If only you’ll shovel it out. (Chorus:) “Don’t be in a hurry to go! Don’t be in a hurry to go! Better risk the old farm awhile longer, Don’t be in a hurry to go!

In despair, he left that farm and came to Bone Gap when it was a huge expanse of empty fields, drawn here by the grass and the bees and the strange sensation that this was a magical place, that the bones of the world were little looser here, double-jointed, twisting back on themselves, leaving spaces one could slip into and hide.

The days never have been long enough to do the things I would like to do. Every year has held more of interest than the year before.” . . .

It was farmers that took all that land and made it America...It was farmers that went over the mountains, and cleared the land, and settled it, and farmed it, and hung onto their land.

all the land our forefathers had was a little strip of country, here between the mountains and the ocean. All the way from here west was Indian country, and Spanish and French and English country. It was farmers that took all that country and made it America.” “How?” Almanzo asked. “Well, son, the Spaniards were soldiers, and high-and-mighty gentlemen that only wanted gold. And the French were fur-traders, wanting to make quick money. And England was busy fighting wars. But we were farmers, son; we wanted the land. It was farmers that went over the mountains, and cleared the land, and settled it, and farmed it, and hung on to their farms.

People are eating our oceans to death. No fish is safe. What most people don't realize, however, is that meat-eating also greatly diminishes the oceans, because 40% of the fish taken from the sea is fed to pigs, chickens, cowls, domestic cats, and farm-raised fish. In fact, pigs are eating more fish than sharks, chickens are eating more fish than puffins, and cats are eating more fish than seals. So really, when you eat bacon, you're eating the sea.

Across every inhabited continent, just as on the Great Plains, mass land clearing and wheat farming had led to significant drying, exhausting the soils and throwing fragile ecosystems out of whack. Combined with the market forces controlling distribution, human-caused climate change joined with natural weather patterns to wreak absolute havoc.

The real character of men and women comes to the surface under stress. --Laura Ingalls Wilder: What Would You Do?April 5, 1918

It does not so matter what happens. It is what one does when it happens that really counts. -Laura Ingalls Wilder: Get the Habit of Being Ready, October 20, 1917

I'd be okay with that kind of trouble," Amber said, as a pair of flannel-clad farm boys headed toward them.

I am beginning to learn that it is the sweet, simple things of life which are the real ones after all. —Laura Ingalls Wilder, “A Bouquet of Wild Flowers

She praised his 'agricultural theology', having long ago taken such advice as gospel: don't go looking for a better place "but MAKE one.

Nothing is ever gained by allowing anger to have sway. When under its influence we lose the ability to think clearly and the forceful power that is in calmness. -Laura Ingalls Wilder: As A Farm Woman Thinks (3)(November 15, 1921).

The farmhouse was ample in size and very well kept, the presence of two separate clotheslines and dozens of garments in various sizes the only outward indication that a family of seven lived inside. A smaller home situated slightly to the right was where Esther’s grandparents lived. Claire knew from their many conversations that elderly members of the community did not go into nursing homes. Rather, they turned the family farm over to their children and assisted in ways their increased age allowed.

And out in the rural, when Mrs. Laura McGhee--who if she thought it necessary, sat on the porch with her Winchester rifle--permitted movement workers to use her farm outside Greenwood for a rally, the sheriff came to warn her against holding it. She told him that *he* was on *her* property, that *he* was trespassing and hadn't ever offered any protection from the terrorists who kept threatening to shoot up her farms, and that he therefore had nothing to offer her now and had better leave, get off her land. And the sheriff left.

Since the late 1840s settlers used close-planted Osage orange trees along the borders of their farms, creating, as the thorny wood filled in over some years of trimming, a living fence “horse-high, bull-strong and hog-tight.” It was barbed wire in the days before barbed wire was invented.

The new collectives that farming supported gave rise to new diseases–the so-called ‘crowd diseases’ such as measles, smallpox, tuberculosis and influenza. Humans had always been susceptible to infectious disease–leprosy and malaria were causing misery long before the farming revolution–but these were adapted to surviving in small, dispersed human populations. Among their tricks for doing so were not conferring total immunity on a recovered host, so that he or she could be infected again, and retreating to another host–a so-called ‘animal reservoir’–when humans were scarce. Both strategies helped ensure that they maintained a sufficiently large pool of susceptible hosts.

She realized that all her life the teachings of those early days have influenced me and the example set by father and mother has been something I have tried to follow, which failures here and there, with rebellion at times, but always coming back to it as the compass needle to the star, -Laura Ingalls Wilder, 'As A Farm Woman Thinks.' Missouri Ruralist, August 1, 1923; Farm Journalist, p. 290.

He makes lookin' good seem effortless. Like, he lives in that lookin'-good zone. I think I'll wear a long white gown and a short veil, and he and his groomsmen will wear sharp charcoal tuxedos. We'll get married on my farm and- "No, it's Ericka. She doesn't want to be called Ricki Jo anymore," I hear Mackenzie remind Laura. Oh,god. Wolf is looking right at me, wearing a lopsided, perfect, melt-me-into-a-pool-on-my-seat grin.

Remember all those classic books you HAD to read in school? They sucked, right? Well, guess what? They are actually . . . classics. 'Brave New World', '1984', 'The Martian Chronicles' and even 'Animal Farm' are pretty cool it you're not told you HAVE to read them. If you discover them on your own or if you reread them without having a report due that sends you scurrying to buy CliffNotes or access Wikipedia, then you can actually relax and enjoy them. - Chris Mancini

Critical or adoring scholars and readers might agree about one thing: the Little House books are not history. They are not, as Wilder and her daughter had claimed, true in every particular. Yet the truth about our history is in them. The truth about settlement, about homesteading, about farming is there, if we look for it—embedded in the novels’ conflicted, nostalgic portrayal of transient joys and satisfactions, their astonishing feats of survival and jarring acts of dispossession, their deep yearning for security. Anyone who would ask where we came from, and why, must reckon with them.

Father, how was it axes and plows that made this country? Didn’t we fight England for it?” “We fought for Independence, son,” Father said. “But all the land our forefathers had was a little strip of country, here between the mountains and the ocean. All the way from here west was Indian country, and Spanish and French and English country. It was farmers that took all that country and made it America.” “How?” Almanzo asked. “Well, son, the Spaniards were soldiers, and high-and-mighty gentlemen that only wanted gold. And the French were fur-traders, wanting to make quick money. And England was busy fighting wars. But we were farmers, son; we wanted the land. It was farmers that went over the mountains, and cleared the land, and settled it, and farmed it, and hung on to their farms.

Outside the gates the spectacle seemed tame in comparison; for the road bent toward Pontesordo, and Odo was familiar enough with the look of the bare fields, set here and there with oak-copses to which the leaves still clung. As the carriage skirted the marsh his mother raised the windows, exclaiming that they must not expose themselves to the pestilent air; and though Odo was not yet addicted to general reflections, he could not but wonder that she should display such dread of an atmosphere she had let him breathe since his birth. He knew of course that the sunset vapours on the marsh were unhealthy: everybody on the farm had a touch of the ague, and it was a saying in the village that no one lived at Pontesordo who could buy an ass to carry him away; but that Donna Laura, in skirting the place on a clear morning of frost, should show such fear of infection, gave a sinister emphasis to the ill-repute of the region.

One of the more interesting work-alignment tactics I came across while writing this book was that of Sheryl Woodhouse-Keese, who owns an earth-friendly stationery outfit called Twisted Limb Paperworks in Bloomington, Indiana. Woodhouse-Keese put her headquarters on a ten-acre farm (her house is at the other end), and started growing tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, herbs, melons, and so forth. But, of course, there turned out to be a huge overlap between people who wanted to work at a recycled paper stationery company, and people who are interested in small scale, sustainable agriculture. So, quickly, the farm “turned from my personal garden into an employee garden,” Woodhouse-Keese says. Now, many Twisted Limb Paperworks employees take their breaks in the garden while pulling weeds, and load up bags of produce into their trunks rather than stopping by the grocery store on the way home. While the employees don’t necessarily use the garden as a social outlet or place for meetings (as Woodhouse-Keese points out, it gets hot in the summer), its existence lets everyone fit gardening into their lives in a way that might not otherwise be possible given how busy employees at small businesses tend to be.

Tomorrow when the farm boys find this freak of nature, they will wrap his body in newspaper and carry him to the museum. But tonight he is alive and in the north field with his mother. It is a perfect summer evening: the moon rising over the orchard, the wind in the grass. And as he stares into the sky, there are twice as many stars as usual.

New Moon Lane, Lucy saw the shape of Clement in his old shirt and pocketed sportsman's waistcoat. His back was to her as he limped precariously on his crutch in the

THE MOVING PICTURE GIRLS SERIES By LAURA LEE HOPE Author of "The Bobbsey Twins Series." 12mo. BOUND IN CLOTH. ILLUSTRATED. UNIFORM STYLE OF BINDING The adventures of Ruth and Alice DeVere. Their father, a widower, is an actor who has taken up work for the "movies." Both girls wish to aid him in his work and visit various localities to act in all sorts of pictures. THE MOVING PICTURE GIRLS Or First Appearance in Photo Dramas. Having lost his voice, the father of the girls goes into the movies and the girls follow. Tells how many "parlor dramas" are filmed. THE MOVING PICTURE GIRLS AT OAK FARM Or Queer Happenings While Taking

Do you know anything about cattle?" "Olivia, Irish butter is known to be the best in the world. Wher do you think we get it from? Chickens? I grew up on a farm. More over." (Conor)

Against this backdrop of diverse geography, farming and fishing still dominate the economy. Many farmers rely on mule transportation and agricultural techniques that have persisted for generations. They tend citrus and olive groves planted by their forefathers, and cultivate grapes, figs, capers, olives, wheat, and tobacco. Family-run enterprises extract marble, pumice, and iron ore from local sources. The island of Halki derives its name from the Greek word for copper (halkos), a reminder of the copper mines that once covered it. Manufacturers on the island of Chios have longed produced mastichochoria, an aromatic resin used to make cosmetics and employed in other industries as well.

Who wrote it first? Who was borrowing from whom? Such were the questions that roiled the women after the publication of Let the Hurricane Roar and lay uneasily between them as Lane prepared to leave Rocky Ridge Farm for good. For the first time since Wilder had begun writing her children’s series, they would be forced out of their long-established routine of editorial conferences masked as teas and social visits. As they took up their consultations by mail, putting all their queries, complaints, and arguments down on paper, the question of how much the daughter would be allowed to influence the mother’s work—and how much she could borrow for her own—assumed new urgency.

It is as easy to criticize other countries than ours as it is to find fault with other people than ourselves and both usually come from a lack of understanding. If we are looking for defects we are nearly certain to find them, while if we observe others with the purpose of learning and adapting for ourselves what is good in their lives and ways we gain much. -Laura Ingalls Wilder: The Farm Home; July 20, 1920 /

Anger is a destroying force. What all the world needs is its opposite-- an uplifting power. -Laura Ingalls Wilder, As A Farm Woman Thinks (3)(November 1,1921).

It seems such a pity that we can learn to value what we have only thru the loss of it. Truly 'we will never miss the water till the well runs dry.' -Laura Ingalls Wilder, The Farm Home (11) , October 20, 1919

I think there are always compensations. The trouble is we do not recognize them. We usually are so busily longing for things we can't have that we overlook what we have in their place, that is even more worth while. Sometimes we realize our happiness only by comparison after we have lost it. It really appears to be true that, To appreciate Heaven well A man must have some 15 minutes of Hell. Laura Ingalls Wilder; The Farm Home (13) , November 20, 1919

There was no description of the years in town, of supplementing farm income with wages, or of the anxiety engendered by poverty.

Vices are simply overworked virtues, anyway. Economy and frugality are to be commended but follow them on in an increasing ratio and what do we find at the other end? A miser! If we overdo the using of spare moments we may find an invalid at the end, while perhaps if we allowed ourselves more idle time we would conserve our nervous strength and health to more than the value of the work we could accomplish by emulating at all times the little busy bee. Laura Ingalls Wilder; , February 20, 1916

We are told that "There is no great loss without some small gain.' Even so I think that there is no great gain without a little loss. Laura Ingalls Wilder, So We Moved the Spring

Keep up with the march of progress for the time is coming when the cities will be the workshops of the world and abandoned to the workers, while the real cultured, social and intellectual life will be in the city. Laura Ingalls Wilder, Favors The Small Farm Home , Feb. 18, 1911

I cannot stand still in my work. If I do not keep studying and going ahead, I slip back. Laura Ingalls Wilder, Are You Going Ahead? Feb. 20, 1917

We are prone to put so much emphasis on the desirability of mercy that we overlook the beauties of the principle of justice. The quality of mercy is a gracious, beautiful thing, but with more justice in the world there would be less need for mercy and exact justice is most merciful in the end. The difficulty is that we are so likely to make mistakes, we cannot trust our judgement and so must be merciful to offset our own shortcomings, but I feel sure when we are able to comprehend the workings of the principle of justice, we shall find that, instead of being opposed to each other, infallible justice and mercy are one and the same thing. -Laura Ingalls Wilder: Let Us Be Just, September 5, 1917

despair, he left that farm and came to Bone Gap when it was a huge expanse of empty fields, drawn here by the grass and the bees and the strange sensation that this was a magical place, that the bones of the world were a little looser here, double-jointed, twisting back on themselves, leaving spaces one could slip into and hide.

Corn can add inches in a single day; if you listened, you could hear it grow.

The Wilders, of course, paid no attention to her exuberance, continuing to live a frugal existence among their pigs and hens, entertained by a self-re-newing circle of farm cats and their preternaturally gifted Airedale terrier, Nero, who would sit politely at the dinner table like a member of the family, eating off his own plate.

And though Finn was tall, his arms and legs ropey with farm muscle, the Rudes were wider and stronger, and there were about four and a half too many of them.

Joshua 1:9.” Harriet knew it by heart. “Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged, for the Lord your God will be with you wherever you go.

I just don’t understand why you're wasting all your professional experience, Laura.