Rice Farming Quotes

And books, they offer one hope -- that a whole universe might open up from between the covers, and falling into that universe, one is saved.

I am in love with you', I responded. He laughed the most beguiling and gentle laugh. 'Of course you are,' he replied. 'I understand perfectly because I'm in love with myself. The fact that I'm not transfixed in front of the nearest mirror takes a great deal of self-control.' It was my turn to laugh.

But you love books, then,” Aunt Queen was saying. I had to listen. “Oh, yes,” Lestat said. “Sometimes they are the only thing that keeps me alive.” “What a strange thing to say at your age,” she laughed. “No, but one can feel desperate at any age, don’t you think? The young are eternally desperate,” he said frankly. “And books, they offer one hope —- that a whole universe might open up from between the covers, and falling into that new universe, one is saved.

No, but one can feel desperate at any age, don’t you think? The young are eternally desperate,” he said frankly. “And books, they offer hope — that a whole universe might open up from between the covers, and falling into that universe one is saved.

As we move on year by year in this life, we learn that telling doesn't necessarily purge; telling something is merely a reliving, and it's a torment.

In a way, I will be glad when we are almost home and the scenery will turn into rice fields and farm plots, and I will be reminded of how far I have come, instead of what I cannot reach.

If 22 bushels (1,300 pounds) of rice and 22 bushels of winter grain are harvested from a quarter acre field, then the field will support five to ten people each investing an average of less than one hour of labour per day. But if the field were turned over to pasturage, or if the grain were fed to cattle, only one person could be supported per quarter acre. Meat becomes a luxury food when its production requires land which could provide food directly for human consumption. This has been shown clearly and definitely. Each person should ponder seriously how much hardship he is causing by indulging in food so expensively produced.

Don’t regret it when you don’t come to see me. I think I’m timeless. You’re here now and you’ve remembered me. That’s what counts.

Knowledge drifts in and out of my mind", said Lestat with a little look of honest distress and a shake of his head. "I devour it and then I lose it and sometimes I can't reach for any knowledge that I ought to possess. I feel desolate, but then knowledge returns or I seek it out in a knew source." (...) "But you love books, then", Aunt Queen was saying. I had to listen. "Oh, yes," Lestat said. "Sometimes they're the only thing that keeps me alive." "What a thing to say at your age", she laughed. "No, but one can feel desperate at any age, don't you think? The young are eternally desperate," he said frankly. "And books, they offer one hope - that a whole universe might open up from between the covers, and falling into that universe, one is saved.

Okay.' I can feel the letters vomit off my tongue. O. K. A. Y. I watch the vet insert the syringe into the catheter and inject the second drug. And then the adventures come flooding back: The puppy farm. The gentle untying of the shoelace. THIS! IS! MY! HOME! NOW! Our first night together. Running on the beach. Sadie and Sophie and Sophie Dee. Shared ice-cream cones. Thanksgivings. Tofurky. Car rides. Laughter. Eye rain. Chicken and rice. Paralysis. Surgery. Christmases. Walks. Dog parks. Squirrel chasing. Naps. Snuggling. 'Fishful Thinking.' The adventure at sea. Gentle kisses. Manic kisses. More eye rain. So much eye rain. Red ball. The veterinarian holds a stethoscope up to Lily's chest, listening for her heartbeat. All dogs go to heaven. 'Your mother's name is Witchie-Poo.' I stroke Lily behind her ears the way that used to calm her. 'Look for her.' OH FUCK IT HURTS. I barely whisper. 'She will take care of you.

And do stop trying to determine if I am a man or a woman. The fact is I'm a good part both and therefore neither one. I was just explaining to your Aunt Queen. I was born endowed with the finest traits of both sexes and I drift this way and that as I choose.

If I could, I'd deliver you from old age and death, from aches and pains, from the blandishments of ghosts, from the torment of your familiar, Goblin. I'd deliver you from heat and cold and from the arid dullness of the noonday sub. I'd deliver you into the placid light of the moon and into the domain of the Milky Way forever.

Perhaps there is after all nothing mysterious in Zen. Everything is open to your full view. If you eat your food and keep yourself cleanly dressed and work on the farm to raise your rice or vegetables, you are doing all that is required of you on this earth, and the infinite is realized in you.

Maybe this was the way it had always happened, with no fate ever involved; you simply fell in with the people around you, and no matter what else happened in history or the great world, for the individual it was always a matter of local acquaintances—the village, the platoon, the work unit, the monastery or madressa, the zawiyya or farm or apartment block, or ship, or neighborhood—these formed the true circumference of one’s world, some twenty or so speaking parts, as if they were in a play together.

The Agricultural Revolution was history's biggest fraud. Who was responsible? Neither kings, nor priests, nor merchants. The culprits were a handful or plant species, including wheat, rice and potatoes. These plants domesticated Homo Sapiens, rather than vice versa.

Now farming became industry, and the owners followed Rome, although they did not know it. They imported slaves, although they did not call them slaves: Chinese, Japanese, Mexicans, Filipinos. They live on rice and beans, the business men said. They don’t need much.

I’m in love with you,” I responded. He laughed the most beguiling and gentle laugh. “Of course you are,” he replied. “I understand perfectly because I’m in love with myself. The fact that I’m not transfixed in front of the nearest mirror takes a great deal of self-control.

Perhaps the deepest indication of our slavery is the monetization of time. It is a phenomenon with roots deeper than our money system, for it depends on the prior quantification of time. An animal or a child has “all the time in the world.” The same was apparently true for Stone Age peoples, who usually had very loose concepts of time and rarely were in a hurry. Primitive languages often lacked tenses, and sometimes lacked even words for “yesterday” or “tomorrow.” The comparative nonchalance primitive people had toward time is still apparent today in rural, more traditional parts of the world. Life moves faster in the big city, where we are always in a hurry because time is scarce. But in the past, we experienced time as abundant. The more monetized society is, the more anxious and hurried its citizens. In parts of the world that are still somewhat outside the money economy, where subsistence farming still exists and where neighbors help each other, the pace of life is slower, less hurried. In rural Mexico, everything is done mañana. A Ladakhi peasant woman interviewed in Helena Norberg-Hodge’s film Ancient Futures sums it all up in describing her city-dwelling sister: “She has a rice cooker, a car, a telephone—all kinds of time-saving devices. Yet when I visit her, she is always so busy we barely have time to talk.” For the animal, child, or hunter-gatherer, time is essentially infinite. Today its monetization has subjected it, like the rest, to scarcity. Time is life. When we experience time as scarce, we experience life as short and poor. If you were born before adult schedules invaded childhood and children were rushed around from activity to activity, then perhaps you still remember the subjective eternity of childhood, the afternoons that stretched on forever, the timeless freedom of life before the tyranny of calendar and clocks. “Clocks,” writes John Zerzan, “make time scarce and life short.” Once quantified, time too could be bought and sold, and the scarcity of all money-linked commodities afflicted time as well. “Time is money,” the saying goes, an identity confirmed by the metaphor “I can’t afford the time.” If the material world

It's always the young ones who end it. The ones for whom mortality holds magic. As we grow older it's eternity that is our boon.

I’m theatrical and incorrigible. A regular beast when it comes to the exaggerated and the eccentric.

Right before my eyes he was seemingly as solid as I was; and then I felt the tingling all through my limbs as he merged with me, and the tiny stabs on my hands and my neck and my face. I struggled as if I were caught in a perfect net.

When humans took up farming, they became more disruptive still. According to the paleoclimatologist William Ruddiman, the adoption of wet rice cultivation in Asia some five thousand years ago may have released so much methane into the atmosphere from rotting vegetation as to have changed the climate. “A good case can be made,” he suggests, that “the people in the Iron Age and even the late Stone Age had a much greater per-capita impact on the earth’s landscape than the average modern-day person.

No, but one can feel desperate at any age, don’t you think? The young are eternally desperate,” he said frankly. “And books, they offer one hope –that a whole universe might open up from between the covers, and falling into that new universe, one is saved.

Field by field, farm by farm, person by person, we were wresting the country back from the Guerrilla’s clutches. Every kidnap we prevented meant one fewer family devastated and one fewer Guerrilla bargaining chip against the government. Every bag of rice confiscated from Buitre’s logistics network made the Guerrilla hungrier and more demoralised.

Vietnam is still, as it was thirty years ago, a poor country of rice paddy farms and sandy harbors, where fishermen cast nets from boats with eyes painted on the bows. It is overcrowded, prey to floods and sweatshops, dotted by modern cities and tiny hamlets of thatched huts with TV antennae. It is not a great capital of industry, or an international oil field or bread basket. There is nothing in Vietnam, now, that America truly needs. And there was even less thirty years ago. This country, these people, posed no real threat to us. It was a strange place to send our youth - not to learn a new culture or to enjoy the beaches, but to kill and be killed, to be maimed and to patch up the maimed. I am convinced that, to our government, Vietnam really, truly Didn't Mean Nothing.

There are more than fifty subgroups within the main songbun castes, and once you become an adult, your status is constantly being monitored and adjusted by the authorities. A network of casual neighborhood informants and official police surveillance ensures that nothing you do or your family does goes unnoticed. Everything about you is recorded and stored in local administrative offices and in big national organizations, and the information is used to determine where you can live, where you can go to school, and where you can work. With a superior songbun, you can join the Workers’ Party, which gives you access to political power. You can go to a good university and get a good job. With a poor one, you can end up on a collective farm chopping rice paddies for the rest of your life. And, in times of famine, starving to death.

Consequently, in 1958 the Chinese government was informed that annual grain production was 50 per cent more than it actually was. Believing the reports, the government sold millions of tons of rice to foreign countries in exchange for weapons and heavy machinery, assuming that enough was left to feed the Chinese population. The result was the worst famine in history and the death of tens of millions of Chinese.3 Meanwhile, enthusiastic reports of China’s farming miracle reached audiences throughout the world. Julius Nyerere, the idealistic president of Tanzania, was deeply impressed by the Chinese success. In order to modernise Tanzanian agriculture, Nyerere resolved to establish collective farms on the Chinese model. When peasants objected to the plan, Nyerere sent the army and police to destroy traditional villages and forcibly relocate hundreds of thousands of peasants onto the new collective farms. Government propaganda depicted the farms as miniature paradises, but many of them existed only in government documents. The protocols and reports written in the capital Dar es Salaam said that on such-and-such a date the inhabitants of such-and-such village were relocated to such-and-such farm. In reality, when the villagers reached their destination, they found absolutely nothing there. No houses, no fields, no tools. Officials nevertheless reported great successes to themselves and to President Nyerere. In fact, within less than ten years Tanzania was transformed from Africa’s biggest food exporter into a net food importer that could not feed itself without external assistance. In 1979, 90 per cent of Tanzanian farmers lived on collective farms, but they generated only 5 per cent of the country’s agricultural output.4

Our table was round,” recalled one of the artists who, from a farming family in Nīgata, returned every planting season to help his now elderly parents plant rice. “A square table has edges, but edges divide people. As a family, we weren't cut off from one another. We ate together and we listened to one another.” Eating together, listening to one another, sharing food. The memory evoked a familiar, now nostalgic, sense of touch in them all.

The more monetized society is, the more anxious and hurried its citizens. In parts of the world that are still somewhat outside the money economy, where subsistence farming still exists and where neighbors help each other, the pace of life is slower, less hurried. In rural Mexico, everything is done mañana. A Ladakhi peasant woman interviewed in Helena Norberg-Hodge's film Ancient Futures sums it all up in describing her city-dwelling sister: "She has a rice cooker, a car, a telephone — all kinds of time-saving devices. Yet when I visit her, she is always so busy we rarely have time to talk." For the animal, child, or hunter-gatherer, time is essentially infinite. Today its monetization has subjected it, like the rest, to scarcity. Time is life. When we experience time as scarce, we experience life as short and poor. If you were born before adult schedules invaded childhood and children were rushed around from activity to activity, then perhaps you still remember the subjective eternity of childhood, the afternoons that stretched on forever, the timeless freedom of life before the tyranny of calendar and clocks. "Clocks," writes John Zerzan, "make time scarce and life short." Once quantified, time too could be bought and sold, and the scarcity of all money-linked commodities afflicted time as well. "Time is money," the saying goes, an identity confirmed by the metaphor "I can't afford the time.

I SEEK SOLACE IN THE CRIMSON SUNRISE, That splashes the east with beauty; I am captivated by the azure skies, Which follow with an air of serenity! I watch the color of the seas That paints the canvas of my heart; I brush my thoughts with the elegant breeze That translates my ideas to art! The dainty garden of beauteous flowers - Red, yellow, lilac and white - Toss and frolic in breezy hours Spreading the waves of lucid delight. The hills covered with foliage green, And the faded ones, blue and grey, Enthrall me as my eyes glean Their glimpses while I move away. Each speck of dust, each grain of rice, And the farms reflect life and mirth; Colors of nature, at ease, entice, Bringing the sweet scent of earth. I chase the mesmerizing butterflies Laden with hues of heaven, Solitude becomes a joyous exercise. When by beauty, I am madly driven! The world is filled with colors galore, Each day is a colorful festivity; Every moment you amass more and more, There is no end to beauty!

Sura 2:223 says that ‘your wife is as your farm to you, so treat her as you would your farm.’ The ulema have quoted this as if it meant you could treat women like the dirt under your feet, but these clerics, who stand as unneeded intercessors between us and God, are never farmers, and farmers read the Quran right, and see their wives are their food, their drink, their work, the bed they lie on at night, the very ground under their feet! Yes, of course you treat your wife as the ground under your feet!

I needed to talk to Vargina, to straighten this out, but felt suddenly faint, headed for the deli across the street. Just standing in the vicinity of comfort food was comfort. The schizophrenic glee with which you cold load your plastic shell with spinach salad, pork fried rice, turkey with cranberry, chicken with pesto, curried yams, clams casino, breadsticks, and yogurt, pay for it by the pound, this farm feed for human animals in black chinos and pleated chinos, animals whose enclosure included the entire island of Manhattan, this sensation I treasured deeply.

FOODS RICH IN ZINC Oysters, farmed, eastern, cooked, 3 medium—13 mg Alaska king crab, cooked, 1 leg—10.2 mg Beef, top sirloin, 4 oz—5.6 mg Raw, unhulled sesame seeds, 2 oz—4.4 mg Raw or roasted pumpkin seeds, 2 oz—4.2 mg Adzuki beans, cooked, 1 cup—4.1 mg Raw pine nuts, 2 oz—3.6 mg Raw cashews, 2 oz—3.2 mg Sunflower seeds, raw, 2 oz—2.8 mg Wild rice, cooked, 1 cup—2.2 mg Edamame, cooked, shelled, 1 cup—2.1 mg Black beans, kidney beans, cooked, 1 cup—1.9 mg Shiitake mushrooms, cooked, 1 cup—1.9 mg Fava beans, cooked, 1 cup—1.7 mg Broccoli, cooked, 2 cups—1.6 mg Tahini, raw, 2 tbsp—1.4 mg Kale, cooked, 2 cups—1.2 mg

love Africa. Wish it didn’t have to be this way, but if we weren’t here, the French would take over this fortress in the blink of an eye. And everybody’s doing it. The British. The French. The Dutch. The Americans. Even the bloody Africans have been mixed up in the trade for an eternity.” “That doesn’t make it right.” “If we didn’t take the slaves, other Africans would kill them. Butcher them live. At least we provide a market, and keep them alive.” “If you stopped, the market would wither.” “You have not been to England, so let me tell you something. Ninety-nine Englishmen out of one hundred take their tea with sugar. We live for our tea, cakes, pies and candies. We live for the stuff, and we will not be deprived.” “But you don’t need slaves to make sugar,” I said. “In the West Indies, only the blacks work in the cane fields. Only the blacks can stand it.” “You could do something else with this fortress.” “What, like your beloved John Clarkson in Freetown?” I nodded. Armstrong pounded his fist on a table. “Has the Colony in Freetown produced a single export? Where is the sugar cane? Where is the coffee? Are you exporting boatloads of elephant teeth or camwood? You’re not even growing corn, or rice. You have no farms under cultivation. You aren’t even self-sufficient.” I wasn’t ready for this argument. My mind circled around, looking for a response. “There is no profit in benevolence,” Armstrong said. “None. The colony in Freetown is child’s play, financed by the deep pockets of rich abolitionists who don’t know a thing about Africa.

The road climbed higher into the mountains of Nikko National Park, the terraced farm fields giving way grudgingly to forests of tiny trees that seemed to be trimmed, the growth around them carefully cultivated. From a narrow defile the car was passed through a massive wooden gate that swung on a huge arch ornately carved with the figures of fierce dragons. From there a perfectly maintained road of crushed white gravel led up the valley to a broad forested ledge through which a narrow stream bubbled and plunged over the sheer edge. The view from the top was breathtaking. Perched on the far edge was a traditionally styled Japanese house, low to the ground and rambling in every direction. Tiled roofs, rice-paper screens and walls, carved beams, courtyards, broad verandas, gardens, ponds, and ancient statues and figures gave the spot an unreal air, as if it were a setting in a fairy tale

Another set of mismatch diseases that can be caused by farming diets are nutrient deficiencies. Many of the molecules that make grains like rice and wheat nutritious, healthful, and sustaining are the oils, vitamins, and minerals present in the outer bran and germ layers that surround the mostly starchy central part of the seed. Unfortunately, these nutrient-rich parts of the plant also spoil rapidly. Since farmers must store staple foods for months or years, they eventually figured out how to refine cereals by removing the outer layers, transforming rice or wheat from “brown” into “white.” These technologies were not available to the earliest farmers, but once refining became common the process removed a large percentage of the plant’s nutritional value. For instance, a cup of brown and white rice have nearly the same caloric content, but the brown rice has three to six times as much B vitamins, plus other minerals and nutrients such as vitamin E, magnesium, potassium, and phosphorus. Refined

Knowledge about the nutritious properties and growth cycles of what would later become staple crops, feeding vast populations – wheat, rice, corn – was initially maintained through ritual play farming of exactly this sort. Nor was this pattern of discovery limited to crops. Ceramics were first invented, long before the Neolithic, to make figurines, miniature models of animals and other subjects, and only later cooking and storage vessels. Mining is first attested as a way of obtaining minerals to be used as pigments, with the extraction of metals for industrial use coming only much later. Mesoamerican societies never employed wheeled transport; but we know they were familiar with spokes, wheels and axles since they made toy versions of them for children. Greek scientists famously came up with the principle of the steam engine, but only employed it to make temple doors that appeared to open of their own accord, or similar theatrical illusions. Chinese scientists, equally famously, first employed gunpowder for fireworks.

In the northern colonies, European Americans tended to own one or two slaves who worked on the family farm or were hired out. Rhode Island and Connecticut had a few large farms, where twenty or thirty slaves would live and work. Plantation-based slavery was more common in the South, where hundreds of slaves could be owned by the same person and forced to work in tobacco, indigo, or rice fields. In most cities, slaveholdings were small, usually one or two slaves who slept in the attic or cellar of the slave owner’s home. Abigail Smith Adams, a Congregational minister’s daughter, grew up outside Boston in a household that owned two slaves, Tom and Pheby. As an adult, she denounced slavery, as did her husband, John Adams, the second President of the United States. Historians recently discovered the remains of slaves found in the African Burial Ground near today’s City Hall in New York City. By studying the skeletons, scientists discovered that the slaves of New York suffered from poor nutrition, disease, and years of backbreaking labor. Most of them died young.

There is a story that illustrates this view. A long time ago in China there lived a very greedy monk. Whenever there was some temple donation, or a distribution of money from a rich layman, this monk was always the first in line. He officiated at many ceremonies, accumulating enough money to buy even the nicest house in town! He was so greedy for money, it seemed he took pleasure only in the joy of collecting it, and never spent any of it. He never even bothered to spend it on himself. His clothes were still quite shabby despite the fact that everyone knew he had a lot of money. “There’s the greedy monk in his ragged clothes,” the laypeople would say. “He’s so cheap he won’t even buy something for himself.” Then one day, it started to rain, and the rain did not stop for several weeks. The little town below the temple was washed out. Houses were destroyed, farms were submerged weeks before the big harvest, and cattle perished. The whole town faced a terrible winter without food or housing. The villagers were very sad and frightened. Then one day, the villagers woke up to find a great number of carts filling the village square. The carts were loaded with many bags of rice and beans, blankets, clothing, and medicine. There were several new ploughs, and four sturdy oxen to pull them! Standing in the middle was the “greedy monk,” in his shabby, patched clothes. He used half his money to buy these supplies, and he gave the rest to the mayor of the town. “I am a meditation monk,” he told the mayor. “Many years ago I perceived that in the future this town would experience a terrible disaster. So ever since then I have been getting money for this day.” When the villagers saw this, they were ashamed of their checking minds. “Waaah, what a great bodhisattva he is!” This is the story of the greedy monk.

How did wheat convince Homo sapiens to exchange a rather good life for a more miserable existence? What did it offer in return? It did not offer a better diet. Remember, humans are omnivorous apes who thrive on a wide variety of foods. Grains made up only a small fraction of the human diet before the Agricultural Revolution. A diet based on cereals is poor in minerals and vitamins, hard to digest, and really bad for your teeth and gums. Wheat did not give people economic security. The life of a peasant is less secure than that of a hunter-gatherer. Foragers relied on dozens of species to survive, and could therefore weather difficult years even without stocks of preserved food. If the availability of one species was reduced, they could gather and hunt more of other species. Farming societies have, until very recently, relied for the great bulk of their calorie intake on a small variety of domesticated plants. In many areas, they relied on just a single staple, such as wheat, potatoes or rice. If the rains failed or clouds of locusts arrived or if a fungus infected that staple species, peasants died by the thousands and millions. Nor could wheat offer security against human violence. The early farmers were at least as violent as their forager ancestors, if not more so. Farmers had more possessions and needed land for planting. The loss of pasture land to raiding neighbours could mean the difference between subsistence and starvation, so there was much less room for compromise. When a foraging band was hard-pressed by a stronger rival, it could usually move on. It was difficult and dangerous, but it was feasible. When a strong enemy threatened an agricultural village, retreat meant giving up fields, houses and granaries. In many cases, this doomed the refugees to starvation. Farmers, therefore, tended to stay put and fight to the bitter end.

Every time we sit down to breakfast, we are likely to be benefiting from a dozen such prehistoric inventions. Who was the first person to figure out that you could make bread rise by the addition of those microorganisms we call yeasts? We have no idea, but we can be almost certain she was a woman and would most likely not be considered ‘white’ if she tried to immigrate to a European country today; and we definitely know her achievement continues to enrich the lives of billions of people. What we also know is that such discoveries were, again, based on centuries of accumulated knowledge and experimentation – recall how the basic principles of agriculture were known long before anyone applied them systematically – and that the results of such experiments were often preserved and transmitted through ritual, games and forms of play (or even more, perhaps, at the point where ritual, games and play shade into each other). ‘Gardens of Adonis’ are a fitting symbol here. Knowledge about the nutritious properties and growth cycles of what would later become staple crops, feeding vast populations – wheat, rice, corn – was initially maintained through ritual play farming of exactly this sort. Nor was this pattern of discovery limited to crops. Ceramics were first invented, long before the Neolithic, to make figurines, miniature models of animals and other subjects, and only later cooking and storage vessels. Mining is first attested as a way of obtaining minerals to be used as pigments, with the extraction of metals for industrial use coming only much later. Mesoamerican societies never employed wheeled transport; but we know they were familiar with spokes, wheels and axles since they made toy versions of them for children. Greek scientists famously came up with the principle of the steam engine, but only employed it to make temple doors that appeared to open of their own accord, or similar theatrical illusions. Chinese scientists, equally famously, first employed gunpowder for fireworks.

Manfred was the patriarch, and William was his son. William begat Gravier. Gravier begat Pops. And Pops, late in life when he and Sweetheart had despaired of having a child, begat Patsy. At age sixteen, Patsy gave birth to me and named me Tarquin Anthony Blackwood. As to my father, let me state now plainly and unequivocally that I don’t have one. “Patsy

In spite of Pops trying to restrain me I followed the sheriff all the way to his car, hammering on him about those two bodies: ‘You’ve got to check and see who’s missing! I’m telling you, I saw it. Two bodies, just dumped out there. You’ve got to search.

books, they offer one hope—that a whole universe might open up from between the covers, and falling into that new universe, one is saved.

There is really nothing else to do but turn to the window. We are on the highway now and it is unbelievable how much construction is going on even as we speed further and further away from Gangnam. Each building is topped with a gargantuan orange crane reeling large beams and planks through the air. The scale of these new apartment complexes takes my breath away – I cannot imagine them all filling with people and furniture and light. Hundreds, no, thousands of apartments, so far away from the heart of the capital, and yet I will never be able to afford a single one, no matter how much I save all my life. In a way, I will be glad when we are almost home and the scenery will turn into rice fields and farm plots, and I will be reminded of how far I have come, instead of what I cannot reach.

But I did love Blackwood Manor, with the irrational and possessive love that only great houses can draw from us—houses that say, “I was here before you were born and I’ll be here after you”; houses that seem a responsibility as much as a haven of dreams.

Knowledge drifts in and out of my mind,” said Lestat with a little look of honest distress and a shake of his head. “I devour it and then I lose it and sometimes I can’t reach for any knowledge that I ought to possess. I feel desolate, but then knowledge returns or I seek it out in a new source.

I grew up in a farming household where tsukemono pickles were a common topic of kitchen conversation. We would speculate whether the cucumber pickle might be ready or wish we had some of Mom's special long-fermented pickles--all we needed with a bowl of rice for a satisfying meal.

Iran was the glamour and glitz of Tehran, Shiraz, Esfahan. (...) she was struck by the high fashion and opulence of the cities. Parties overflowing with champagne. Women dressed in the latest Paris haute couture. But when Louise left Iran in search of horses, the landscape quickly changed from high rises to the high peaks of the Alborz Mountains, and overflowing rice paddies replaced champagne parties. (...) This was Persia. Roads that ended in orchards. Mountains rising and rivers tumbling in white and blue. All shades of green contouring farming fields and jagged peaks. (...) Iran was politics; Persia was poetry.

Just because rice has served as our staple crop for thousands of years doesn't guarantee its perpetual role. The shift in climate necessitates crops that exhibit greater resilience and reduced dependence on resources.

One researcher in China found that the divorce rate for people in historic wheat-farming regions was 50 percent higher than the divorce rate for those from historic rice-farming regions.

Here we have filet of roasted halibut, caught this morning right here in Cape Cod Bay. It's pan-seared in a sauce of black garlic, blistered cherry tomatoes, and shishito peppers, both from Longnook Farms, served over a bed of coconut-lime rice with sautéed bok choy." She set the second dish down in front of Diana. "Here we have a confit of Maple Hill Farm duck leg and roasted duck breast in a balsamic-fig reduction, served over sweet-potato hash, with local roasted ramps.

The nitrous oxide that rises from industrial fertilization traps heat at three hundred times the rate of CO2 and stays in the atmosphere for a century and more. Fertilizers alone account for 2 gigatons of CO2-equivalent emissions. All told, more than 15 percent of the entire emissions emergency, around 9 gigatons a year, can be attributed directly to our food system—to industrial farming, livestock (especially beef cattle), rice production, and emissions from fertilizers and food waste.

The cultures of our ancestors (even the aspects we no longer practice or ascribe to) influence our present-day behaviors.

Some pull back. Some cry. Some scrabble for crying babies, rot-gutted women, soft-eyed men, shivering children clustered about us in the dim cold before dawn. To this death before death. To this selling. Nan and Cleo and my mother talked about what it was to be sold—we all did, since we heard stories about what it was like, stories carried from one farm to another, one work camp to another. Bog bottomed, the boy sent to trade scrap metal with our blacksmith said. Manacle awash, the man sent to trade livestock said. Smoked and sunk, the farrier sent through the rice counties to shoe horses said. Hell, my mother said, and more of us marching there every day.

them. Now farming became industry, and the owners followed Rome, although they did not know it. They imported slaves, although they did not call them slaves: Chinese, Japanese, Mexicans, Filipinos. They live on rice and beans, the business men said. They don’t need much. They wouldn’t know what to do with good wages. Why, look how they live. Why, look what they eat. And if they get funny—deport them. And all the time the farms grew larger and the owners fewer. And there were pitifully few farmers on the land any more. And the imported serfs were beaten and frightened and starved until some went home again, and some grew fierce and were killed or driven from the country. And the farms grew larger and the owners fewer. And the crops changed. Fruit trees took the place of grain fields, and vegetables to feed the world spread out on the bottoms: lettuce, cauliflower, artichokes, potatoes—stoop crops. A man may stand to use a scythe, a plow, a pitchfork; but he must crawl like a bug between the rows of lettuce, he must bend his back and pull his long bag between the cotton rows, he must go on his knees like a penitent across a cauliflower patch. And it came about that owners no longer worked on their farms. They farmed on paper; and they forgot the land, the smell, the feel of it, and remembered only that they owned it, remembered only what they gained and lost by it. And some of the farms grew so large that one man could not even conceive of them any more, so large that it took batteries of bookkeepers to keep track of interest and gain and loss; chemists to test the soil, to replenish; straw bosses to see that the stooping men were moving along the rows as swiftly as the material of their bodies could stand. Then such a farmer really became a storekeeper, and kept a store. He paid the men, and sold them food, and took the money back. And after a while he did not pay the men at all, and saved bookkeeping. These farms gave food on credit. A man might work and feed himself; and when the work was done, he might find that he owed money to the company. And the owners not only did not work the farms any more, many of them had never seen the farms they owned.

When your chicks first arrive, prepare a special place for them in the hen house. Depending on how many chicks you have, this can be a large cardboard box or a set of boards to partition the hen house floor. Cover the floor with least 1 inch (2.5 centimeters) of wood shavings, rice hulls, sand, or straw. Don’t use cedar shavings, fine sawdust, or treated wood chips. Cover the floor with newspapers the first day so the chicks will eat the feed and not the litter.

El vasto cielo estaba cubierto de nubes y luego nos abrimos paso hasta las mismísimas estrellas.

I hope that one day, I can again believe in you and sing a song for you while holding you in my arms near the terraced rice fields that glow golden in the late afternoon light.

Spreading straw might be considered rather unimportant, but it is fundamental to my method of growing rice and winter grain. It is connected with everything, with fertility, with germination, with weeds, with keeping away sparrows, with water management. In actual practice and in theory, the use of straw in farming is a crucial issue. This is something that I cannot seem to get people to understand.

By spreading straw, growing clover, and returning to the soil all organic residues, the earth comes to possess all the nutrients needed to grow rice and winter grain in the same field year after year. By natural farming, fields that have already been damaged by cultivation or the use of agricultural chemicals can be effectively rehabilitated.

So you can't make a living as a novelist—why not try farming or teaching? Or even begging—what difficulties would that present? Were you born into the world to make a living? Or have you another aim, that of becoming a novelist or something akin? If you want to become a novelist but are worried about how you will eat, then let me share my bowl of rice with you (though I am not as well off as I once was). If, in return, you become a great novelist, it will be my greatest joy. . . . I do not presume to urge you to become a novelist. I say only this—be firm of purpose and don't worry about trivialities. And remember the saying: the final tax you pay to achieve your goal is your life.

Charles, a footman who had once worked on his father's farm and who loved animals, appeared and came over to help her prepare dishes of boiled chicken and brown rice for the cats and dogs waiting eagerly at their feet. When guests were staying, Charles often assisted with the care of her furry brood. Without asking, he set to work, even taking a few moments to gather fresh meat scraps for Aeolus, her wounded hawk, and cut-up apple and beetroots for Poppy, a convalescing rabbit who had an injured leg. He gave her several more apple quarters for the horses, who got jealous if she didn't bring them treats as well. Once all her cats and dogs were fed, Esme set off for the stables, laden pail in hand, Burr trotting at her heels. She stopped along the way to chat with the gardener and his assistant, who gave her some timothy grass, comfrey and lavender to supplement the hay she regularly fed Poppy.

Italy’s climate is well suited to growing a variety of crops. However, in such a mountainous country, flat and fertile land is in short supply. Wheat is the main cereal crop and is grown in the lowlands of central and northern Italy. Sugar beet, potatoes, and maize also are cultivated, and some rice is grown in the Po valley. The majority of Italy’s farms are small, averaging only 17 acres in size. Each farm is usually run by one family. Tractors and other farm machinery have become more common in the past 20 years, and bullock carts are now rarely seen. Since the 1950s the government has paid for ways to improve farmland by irrigating dry areas and draining swampy ones. Despite these problems, Italy is the world’s leading producer of both olive oil and wine. More than half the farms in the country grow at least some grapes, and each region has its own special wine. Fishing ports are dotted all around Italy’s long coastline. There are still some small, family-owned fishing boats. But the fishing industry is becoming more mechanized, with fleets of large boats.

At the farm, in our hut, they cooked plain rice porridge and added soy sauce for taste, which nearly rivaled the thrill of drinking water. That was all I ate for a week.

It was the early eighties, and the food situation went from bad to worse. A common slogan at the time was “Communism means rice!” It was repeated all over. Farm laborers and students worked together to make terraced rice fields on mountainsides. But when the rainy season came, most of the fields were washed away due to poor planning. Even the fields that survived weren’t in good enough shape to grow anything properly. Oh, and we still had to plant the seedlings very close to one another

the 1770s hundreds of thousands of slaves were working cotton, tobacco and rice plantations in the southern colonies of America—there were 60,000 black slaves in South Carolina and 140,000 in Virginia alone—as well as in the West Indies. Many of the most prominent Americans lobbying for independence were slave owners. George Washington inherited ten slaves when he was eleven years old and cultivated his farm on the labor of 100 slaves; Thomas Jefferson inherited fifty-two slaves when he turned twenty-one and had a “slave family” numbering more than 170 on his plantation. But even in London, it was hard to ignore the issue of double standards

ambiguous

He didn't want to hear Cade's fury. He wasn't ready yet for whatever Cade would decide. Travis had been on his own since he was fifteen. Lily and their son and Juanita were as close as he had ever come to family since then. Even the little brat, Serena, had carved a place in his heart. He wasn't made like Cade. He longed for the warmth of human emotion. He even missed that old rascal Ephraim. He didn't care about the damned land or the cattle or whatever else it was that drove men to fight. Travis required Juanita's shy adoration, Roy's admiring phrases, Lily's rare laughter. Ricardo could have the damned hacienda. Travis wanted the women and children. He was afraid Cade wouldn't think the same. These past weeks had made it obvious that Cade had a single-minded fascination with the Spanish family and the hacienda he had been denied all these years. When he was coherent, he had spoken of the changes he would make, the plans he had for that mesquite-studded acreage. When he was fevered, he had cursed Ricardo, cursed every obstacle that had ever stood in his way, and sworn oaths that made Travis shiver. Behind that stoic facade lay a lifetime of hate and longing. He didn't want to think about the decision that Cade had to make now. Lily and her small farm had only been an afterthought in that lifetime. When

She was not alone. “There’s a definite panic on the hip scene in Cambridge,” wrote student radical Raymond Mungo that year, “people going to uncommonly arduous lengths (debt, sacrifice, the prospect of cold toes and brown rice forever) to get away while there’s still time.” And it wasn’t just Cambridge. All over the nation at the dawn of the 1970s, young people were suddenly feeling an urge to get away, to leave the city behind for a new way of life in the country. Some, like Mungo, filled an elderly New England farmhouse with a tangle of comrades. Others sought out mountain-side hermitages in New Mexico or remote single-family Edens in Tennessee. Hilltop Maoists traversed their fields with horse-drawn plows. Graduate students who had never before held a hammer overhauled tobacco barns and flipped through the Whole Earth Catalog by the light of kerosene lamps. Vietnam vets hand-mixed adobe bricks. Born-and-bred Brooklynites felled cedar in Oregon. Former debutants milked goats in Humboldt County and weeded strawberry beds with their babies strapped to their backs. Famous musicians forked organic compost into upstate gardens. College professors committed themselves to winter commutes that required swapping high heels for cross-country skis. Computer programmers turned the last page of Scott and Helen Nearing’s Living the Good Life and packed their families into the car the next day. Most had no farming or carpentry experience, but no matter. To go back to the land, it seemed, all that was necessary was an ardent belief that life in Middle America was corrupt and hollow, that consumer goods were burdensome and unnecessary, that protest was better lived than shouted, and that the best response to a broken culture was to simply reinvent it from scratch.

America destroys her big houses. Some them don’t even last a hundred years.

After every feeding, I am embraced by him, and blood is drawn from me into him by a thousand infinitesimal wounds, strengthening the image him, and binding to his presence a soft fragrance which Goblin never had before. With each passing month, Goblin becomes stronger and his assaults on me more prolonged.

I pray that my stories will keep you from destroying me.

It was my own head, in semi-profile, carved skillfully from a fine piece of double-strata sardonyx so that the image was entirely white and remarkably detailed. The background was a pure and shining black.

His eyes were on me and I didn’t have the slightest intention of looking away. Nevertheless, I looked him up and down because I couldn’t help it, and becuase he was as breathtaking as he has always described himself to be. and I had to see him, truly see him, even if he was to be the last thing I ever saw.

His skin was a pale golden that offset his violet blue eyes wonderfully, and his hair was a true mane of yellow, tousled and curling just above his shoulders. His colored glasses almost the same violet tint as his eyes, were pushed up into his hair, and h was staring at me, golden eyebrows scowled slightly, waiting perhaps for me to regain my senses; I honestly didn’t know.

What engraved itself into my consciousness was his face-square and taut, the eyes very big and the well-shaped mouth voluptuous, and the jaw somewhat hard, the whole more truly well proportioned and appealing than he could ever have claimed.

He smiled suddenly and he looked as if he couldn’t hurt anyone for the world. He was too attractive, too friendly, too young. But the smile vanished as quickly as it had come.

He glanced up at me and then the figure who was questioning him, and I struggled, because I couldn’t help it, to see what he was seeing-this vampire whose skin still glowed though it was tanned, and whose eyes were prismatic and undeniably fierce.

The fabled beauty of Lestat seemed potent as a drug. And the crowning light of the chandelier was merciless or splendid depending on one’s point of view.

I came because I could resist it. I came because perhaps I didn’t quite believe in you. I didn’t believe in spite of all I’d read and been told.

He glanced at me again, a flash of brilliant eyes and a smile that was gone in an instant as I looked back to the man in the chair.

Do you know how it wounds me to leave behind the one city in the world with which I’m truly in love?

We respect you,” said Stirling, “more than you deserve.

What a lure that was-the sleeping vampire who no longer bothered with the trappings of a coffin.

When I spoke of my vote, I was speaking of a symbolic voice rather than a literal one.

I think the Elders thought in their venerable minds, and God knows, I don’t know their venerable minds, that the Declaration would bring certain of our members back to us who had been inducted into your ranks.

You dared to publish a chronicle using the name Merrick Mayfair. You dared to do this even though a great family by the name of Mayfair lives in this city and its environs to this day. You had no care when you did that.

You accuse me of audacity! You’re living and breathing now entirely because I want it.

The Mayfairs, what are they to me? And what is a great family, a rich family?

Vampires loath witches, whether they’re rich or poor. Anyone who reads the story of Merrick Mayfair can see why.

Vampires loathe witches, whether they’re rich or poor. Anyone who reads the story of Merrick Mayfair can see why.

You seek a family, always and everywhere.

Lestat appeared to be studying Stirling, who had fallen silent, staring at Lestat, perhaps doing that little mental trick of memorizing all the details about which h would write later on. Members of the Talamasca were especially trained to do it.

I don’t play by anybody’s rules but my own.

You move against this boy,” said Lestat, “you try to take up your combative posture where he is concerned, and as God is my witness, I’ll wipe you out. I’ll leave you nothing but your empty libraries and your overflowing vaults. I’ll start with the Motherhouse in Louisiana and then I’ll move to the Motherhouses all over the world. It’s a cinch for me to do it. I’ll pick you off one at a time. Even if the ancients do rise to protect you, it won’t happen immediately, and what I can immediately is an enormous amount of harm.

This is a young one, an innocent one, and I’ll make the decision as to whether he survives or not.

Quinn,” he said, “my brave Quinn.

He took my head in both his hands. There was no dreadful pressure; there was no pain. It was gentle, the manner in which he was holding me.

The air was rushing past me. I was clinging to him, though I don’t think I needed to, and we were out in the night, and we were moving towards the clouds.