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b5331ee
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We need the tonic of wildness...At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature.
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|
nature
unexplorable
unfathomable
wildness
explore
exploration
wild
land
mystery
sea
mysterious
wilderness
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Henry David Thoreau |
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abd57bd
|
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. It's just in their head. They're all the time talkin' about it, but it's jus' in their head.
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heaven
land
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John Steinbeck |
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6efa3a5
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Actually--and this was where I began to feel seriously uncomfortable--some such divine claim underlay not just 'the occupation' but the whole idea of a separate state for Jews in Palestine. Take away the divine warrant for the Holy Land and where were you, and what were you? Just another land-thief like the Turks or the British, except that in this case you wanted the land without the people. And the original Zionist slogan--'a land without a people for a people without a land'--disclosed its own negation when I saw the densely populated Arab towns dwelling sullenly under Jewish tutelage. You want irony? How about Jews becoming colonizers at just the moment when other Europeans had given up on the idea?
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|
irony
religion
zionism
turkey
holy-land
israeli-palestinian-conflict
land
europe
britain
colonialism
israel
jews
palestine
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Christopher Hitchens |
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0ef6b25
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And the great owners, who must lose their land in an upheaval, the great owners with access to history, with eyes to read history and to know the great fact: when property accumulates in too few hands it is taken away. And that companion fact: when a majority of the people are hungry and cold they will take by force what they need. And the little screaming fact that sounds through all history: repression works only to strengthen and knit the repressed. The great owners ignored the three cries of history. The land fell into fewer hands, the number of the dispossessed increased, and every effort of the great owners was directed at repression. The money was spent for arms, for gas to protect the great holdings, and spies were sent to catch the murmuring of revolt so that it might be stamped out. The changing economy was ignored, plans for the change ignored; and only means to destroy revolt were considered, while the causes of revolt went on.
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owners
the-grapes-of-wrath
john-steinbeck
revolt
land
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John Steinbeck |
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8f932fa
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"You never know!" Neith snapped. "The point is, I'll survive the apocalypse. I can live off the land!" She jabbed a finger at me. "Did you know the palm tree has six different edible parts?" "Um--" "And I'll never be bored," Neith continued, "since I'm also the goddess of weaving. I have enough twine for a millennium of macrame!" I had no reply, as I wasn't sure what macrame was."
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macrame
palm-tree
weaving
land
goddess
rick-riordan
|
Rick Riordan |
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86553d2
|
Some of the owner men were kind because they hated what they had to do, and some of them were angry because they hated to be cruel, and some of them were cold because they had long ago found that one could not be an owner unless one were cold. And all of them were caught in something larger than themselves. Some of them hated the mathematics that drove them, and some were afraid, and some worshiped the mathematics because it provided a refuge from thought and from feeling. If a bank or a finance company owned the land, the owner man said, The Bank - or the Company - needs - wants - insists - must have - as though the Bank or the Company were a monster, with thought and feeling, which had ensnared them. These last would take no responsibility for the banks or the companies because they were men and slaves, while the banks were machines and masters all at the same time. Some of the owner men were a little proud to be slaves to such cold and powerful masters. The owner men sat in the cars and explained. You know the land is poor. You've scrabbled at it long enough, God knows.
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|
the-grapes-of-wrath
john-steinbeck
land
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John Steinbeck |
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e9ef580
|
The land belongs to the future, Carl; that's the way it seems to me. How many of the names on the county clerk's plat will be there in fifty years? I might as well try to will the sunset over there to my brother's children. We come and go, but the land is always here. And the people who love it and understand it are the people who own it--for a little while.
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prairie
land
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Willa Cather |
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490c78b
|
Land is the only thing in the world that amounts to anything.
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land
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Margaret Mitchell |
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5dc991f
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On the sea he wished to meet it, if meet it he must. He was not sure why this was, yet he had a terror of meeting the thing again on dry land. Out of the sea there rise storms and monsters, but no evil powers: evil is of earth. And there is no sea, no running of river or spring, in the dark land where once Ged had gone. Death is the dry place.
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|
death
earthsea
land
sea
water
evil
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Ursula K. Le Guin |
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73363dc
|
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.
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|
heaven
migrants
land
|
John Steinbeck |
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d82be27
|
This land was Mexican once, was Indian always and is. And will be again.
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|
land
méxico
texas
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Gloria E. Anzaldúa |
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dd7faff
|
We owe it to the fields that our houses will not be the inferiors of the virgin land they have replaced. We owe it to the worms and the trees that the building we cover them with will stand as promises of the highest and most intelligent kinds of happiness.
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nature
homes
houses
land
|
Alain de Botton |
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2ac9800
|
I sat against one of the house's clay walls. The kinship I felt suddenly for the old land... it surprised me. I'd been gone long enough to forget and be forgotten. I had a home in a land that might as well be in another galaxy to the people sleeping on the other side of the wall I leaned against. I thought I had forgotten about this land. But I hadn't. And, under the bony glow of a halfmoon, I sensed Afghanistan humming under my feet. Maybe Afghanistan hadn't forgotten me either. I looked westward and marveled that, somewhere over those mountains, Kabul still existed. It really existed, not just as an old memory, or as the heading of an AP story on page 15 of the San Francisco Chronicle. Somewhere over those mountains in the west slept the city where my harelipped brother and I had run kites. Somewhere over there, the blindfolded man from my dream had died a needless death. Once, over those mountains, I had made a choice. And now, a quarter of a century later, that choice had landed me right back on this soil.
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the-voice-of-the-blood
land
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Khaled Hosseini |
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2e0be52
|
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.
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silence
life
matter
land
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Annie Dillard |
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d862582
|
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.
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farming
land
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Ayn Rand |
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fe7edd0
|
Property is not the natural and obvious and inevitable concept that most people think it is.
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people
love
slaves
property
ownership
land
natural
|
Robert A. Heinlein |
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f1bac98
|
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.
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humor
farm
land
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Peter S. Beagle |
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f0ebb25
|
It would not be an exaggeration to say that the land question in Zimbabwe is the single most decisive one.
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politics
land-reform
land-reform-in-zimbabwe
prescience
zimbabwe
land
|
Christopher Hitchens |
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685ddce
|
Men are by nature wanderers...Every people has moved from somewhere, and had to learn the ways of the land from the people who were there before.
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mankind
wanderers
land
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Marion Zimmer Bradley |
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eae253c
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My name's Elai, Ellai's daughter, line of the first Cloud, the first Elly; of Pia, line of the first Jin when they made the world. And you're on my land.
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genealogy
ownership
land
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C.J. Cherryh |
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43a4eed
|
"To those at the great house it means nothing, this handful of earth, but to me it means how much!" (Buck, 57)"
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man
nature
pearl-s-buck
the-good-earth
land
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Pearl S. Buck |
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868576d
|
How we treat our land, how we build upon it, how we act toward our air and water, in the long run, will tell what kind of people we really are. -Laurance S. Rockefeller
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nature
national-parks
environment
land
|
Terry Tempest Williams |
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3058613
|
An unhappy land, then, is one whose citizens no longer know where duty lies, and seek a charismatic leader who tells them what to do. Which, if I remember correctly, is what Hitler promulgated in Mein Kampf.
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heroism
land
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Umberto Eco |
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8978a39
|
We all know who you are, Mr. Coughlin. Famous Yankee gangster. Friend of the colonel. It would be safer for a man to swim into the middle of the ocean and cut his own throat than to threaten you.' He solemnly made the sign of the cross. 'But when people starve and have nowhere to go, where would you have them end up?' 'Not on my land,' Joe said. 'But it is not your land. It's God's. You are renting it. This rum? This life?' He patted his chest. 'We are all just renting from God.
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life
land-ownership
land
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Dennis Lehane |