Archie Lieberman

“Powerful forces led me to the Hammers and then to the neighbors and suggested that the qualities I witnessed in their lives – strength, goodness, harmony, universal order – were worth preserving. Out of friendship alone, nothing more, they consented to become my allegories for those things. In authentic ways, their lives say for me what I cannot say without them about the spiritual and the American heritage of farm families and rural life.

With them and with other fragments of experience, I have learned that what I was taught as a child is, or can be, mostly true. I learned that there has been only one true creative act, the making of something out of nothing, an act performed only by the sole Creator. All else is circumstance, experience, invention, innovation, discovery – more than anything else – and a putting together in a particular fashion of things that have always existed. Perhaps every act and every discovery, as Bill Hammer, Jr. would say, "was meant to be.”
― Archie Lieberman, Neighbors: A Forty-Year Portrait of an American Farm Community