Land Quotes

“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.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden: Or, Life in the Woods

“My people are few. They resemble the scattering trees of a storm-swept plain...There was a time when our people covered the land as the waves of a wind-ruffled sea cover its shell-paved floor, but that time long since passed away with the greatness of tribes that are now but a mournful memory.”
― Chief Seattle, Chief Seattle's Speech (1854)

“The land knows you, even when you are lost.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants

“A person does not grow from the ground like a vine or a tree, one is not part of a plot of land. Mankind has legs so it can wander.”
― Roman Payne, The Wanderess

“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.”
― John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men

“The land is the only thing in the world worth working for, worth fighting for, worth dying for, because it's the only thing that lasts".....Gerald O'Hara, Gone With The Wind.”
― Margaret Mitchell

“Ocean separates lands, not souls..”
― Munia Khan

“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?”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“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.”
― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

“To be native to a place we must learn to speak its language.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants

“Remind me that the most fertile lands were built by the fires of volcanoes.”
― Andrea Gibson, The Madness Vase

“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.”
― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

“Children, language, lands: almost everything was stripped away, stolen when you weren’t looking because you were trying to stay alive. In the face of such loss, one thing our people could not surrender was the meaning of land. In the settler mind, land was property, real estate, capital, or natural resources. But to our people, it was everything: identity, the connection to our ancestors, the home of our nonhuman kinfolk, our pharmacy, our library, the source of all that sustained us. Our lands were where our responsibility to the world was enacted, sacred ground. It belonged to itself; it was a gift, not a commodity, so it could never be bought or sold. These are the meanings people took with them when they were forced from their ancient homelands to new places.”
― Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants

“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 macramé!”
I had no reply, as I wasn’t sure what macramé was.”
― Rick Riordan, The Serpent's Shadow

“As I went walking I saw a sign there
And on the sign it said "No Trespassing."
But on the other side it didn't say nothing,
That side was made for you and me.
This land is your land, this land is my land
From California to the New York island
From the Redwood forest to the Gulf Stream waters
This land was made for you and me.”
― Woody Guthrie

“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.”
― Willa Cather, O Pioneers!

“A true conservationist is a man who knows that the world is not given by his fathers, but borrowed from his children.”
― John James Audubon

“Dreams are our only geography—our native land.”
― Dejan Stojanovic

“Land and water are not really separate things, but they are separate words, and we perceive through words.”
― David Rains Wallace, Untamed Garden and Other Personal Essays

“In the loss of skill, we lose stewardship; in losing stewardship we lose fellowship; we become outcasts from the great neighborhood of Creation. It is possible - as our experience in this good land shows - to exile ourselves from Creation, and to ally ourselves with the principle of destruction - which is, ultimately, the principle of nonentity. It is to be willing in general for being to not-be. And once we have allied ourselves with that principle, we are foolish to think that we can control the results. (pg. 303, The Gift of Good Land)”
― Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays

“They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea.”
― Francis Bacon, The Oxford Francis Bacon IV: The Advancement of Learning

“When Anu the Sublime, King of the Anunnaki, and Bel, the lord of Heaven and earth, who decreed the fate of the land assigned to Marduk, the over-ruling son of Ea, God of righteousness, dominion over earthly man, and made him great among the Igigi, they called Babylon by his illustrious name, made it great on earth, and founded an everlasting kingdom in it, whose foundations are laid so solidly as those of heaven and earth; then Anu and Bel called by name me, Hammurabi, the exalted prince, who feared God, to bring about the rule of righteousness in the land, to destroy the wicked and the evil-doers; so that the strong should not harm the weak, so that I should rule over the black-headed people like Shamash and enlighten the land, to further the well-being of mankind.

...When Marduk sent me to rule over men, to give the protection of right to the land, I did right and righteousness in . . . , and brought about the well-being of the oppressed.

[The oldest known written code of laws from around 1772 BCE]”
― Hammurabi, The Code of Hammurabi

“Any person who, with all the sincerity of heart, is in search for God, on land or in the sea, is worthy of respect.”
― Riaz Ahmed Gohar Shahi, The Religion of God

“I hold life sacred, even more since I’ve tasted freedom,... But I've lost my fear of death... But if you join me, I will gladly give my life for you. Because this land and its people have lost too much.”
― Lily Blake, Snow White & the Huntsman

“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

“On the seventh of May, Cerise Mar, Erian Mar, and Mikita Mar traveled to the aforementioned manor house and found Lagar Sheerile, Peva Sheerile, Arig Sheerile, and several men in their employ on the premises. Cerise Mar voiced a polite and a nonviolent request that they get the hell off our land, which was refused.”
― Ilona Andrews, Bayou Moon

“These people came into the world and left it bound to their soil, proliferating on their own dung-hills with slow deliberation like the uncomplicated soul of trees which scatter their seed about their feet, with little conception of any larger world beyond the dun rocks among which they vegetated.”
― Émile Zola, La Faute de l'abbé Mouret

“Thanks to the centrifugal pump, places like Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas had thrown on the garments of fertility for a century, pretending to greenery and growth as they mined glacial water from ten-thousand-year-old aquifers. They'd played dress-up-in-green and pretended it could last forever. They'd pumped up the Ice Age and spread it across the land, and for a while they'd turned their dry lands lush. Cotton, wheat, corn, soybeans -- vast green acreages, all because someone could get a pump going. Those places had dreamed of being different from what they were. They'd had aspirations. And then the water ran out, and they fell back, realizing too late that their prosperity was borrowed, and there would be no more coming.”
― Paolo Bacigalupi, The Water Knife

“There was nothing to compare with standing on a piece of land you owned free and clear. No one could push you off it, no one could take it from you, no one could tell you what to do with it. The soil belonged to you, and so did every rock, every blade of grass, every tree, and all the water and minerals under the land all the way to the center of the earth. And if the world went to hell in a hand-basket—as it seemed to be doing—you could say good-bye to everyone and retreat to your land, hunkering down and living off it. Land belonged to you and yours forever.”
― Jeannette Walls, Half Broke Horses