Farfoff > Farfoff's Quotes

“Too thick to drink,” as the boatmen used to say about the water of the Mississippi River, “too thin to walk on.”
― Paul Schneider, Old Man River: The Mississippi River in North American History

“the total number of dams that alter the Mississippi River watershed is in excess of 50,000.”
― Paul Schneider, Old Man River: The Mississippi River in North American History

“We drank our whiskeys. It was the good stuff and it tasted of salt, sea, rain, wind and the Old Testament.”
― Adrian McKinty, The Cold Cold Ground

“I was the sort of kid who spent a Sunday afternoon prying little trees out of the foundation of his parents’ house. I should have given in to the inevitable truth that this was the sort of person I would become, in the end, but I kept fighting it.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Round House

“What happened in 1518 and 1519 is not. In those years, according to Bartolomé de Las Casas, a missionary priest who lived through the incident, Spanish orange, pomegranate, and cassia plantations were destroyed “from the root up.” Thousands of acres of orchards were “all scorched and dried out, as though flames had fallen from the sky and burned them.” The actual culprit, Wilson argued, was the sap-sucking scale insects. But what the Spaniards saw was S. geminata—“an infinite number of ants,” Las”
― Charles C. Mann, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created

“The viruses that cause smallpox, influenza, hepatitis, measles, encephalitis, and viral pneumonia; the bacteria that cause tuberculosis, diphtheria, cholera, typhus, scarlet fever, and bacterial meningitis—by a quirk of evolutionary history, all were unknown in the Western Hemisphere.”
― Charles C. Mann, 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created

“I like coffee so much that I have tea for breakfast. The first cup of the day in particular is so good that I’m afraid I won’t be able to properly appreciate it when I am half-asleep.”
― Christoph Niemann, Abstract City

“The woman who refuses to object, who doesn’t yell and scream—there’s strength in that, and power. The way she overrides sentiment, won’t enter into blaming or bickering, never gives him an opening, doesn’t allow him to turn it back on her. She knows that her refusal leaves him alone with his choices.”
― A.S.A. Harrison, The Silent Wife

“She’s aware of her fondness for ledger keeping, a term that marriage counselors use to castigate their clients for keeping a running tally of who did what to whom, which is not in the spirit of generosity that supposedly nurtures a healthy relationship. The way she sees it, generosity is admirable but not always practical. Without some discreet retaliation to balance things out, a little surreptitious tit for tat to keep the grievances at bay, most relationships—hers included—would surely combust in a blaze of resentment.”
― A.S.A. Harrison, The Silent Wife

“As for herself, every morning on waking she gives thanks to the God she doesn’t disbelieve in. Although she can’t credit him with saving her, she needs this outlet for her gratitude.”
― A.S.A. Harrison, The Silent Wife

“This is the secret of good storytelling: to lie, but to keep the arithmetic sound. A storyteller, like any other sort of enthusiastic liar, is on an unpredictable adventure. His initial lie, his premise, will suggest many new lies of its own. The storyteller must choose among them, seeking those which are most believable, which keep the arithmetic sound. Thus does a story generate itself.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Vonnegut by the Dozen: Twelve Pieces by Kurt Vonnegut

“August 2, 1977: “Penalties against drug use should not be more damaging to an individual than the use of the drug itself, and where they are, they should be changed. Nowhere is this more clear than in the laws against the possession of marijuana in private for personal use.”
― Tony Dokoupil, The Last Pirate: A Father, His Son, and the Golden Age of Marijuana

“This all fits in neatly with the history of American crime. Briefly, it’s the story of two kinds of lawbreakers: criminals, bad men who do bad things; and outlaws, “good” bad men who do “good” bad things. The distinction developed slowly over time and across cultures, but by the twentieth century certain illegal exploits clearly took on a chivalric glow, the honeyed tones of epic.”
― Tony Dokoupil, The Last Pirate: A Father, His Son, and the Golden Age of Marijuana

“This history argument holds absolutely no weight with my dad. He’s not sentimental in this way, does not linger on the past. Old stuff, in Dad’s mind, means less efficiency, more work, more to repair. But for me the barn is what makes the farm so—“farm-y.”
― Melanie Hoffert, Prairie Silence: A Memoir

“Dad never missed a day of work, regardless of how late he had been out the night before. The intensity of Dad’s dependability, I have always thought, has something to do with an almost genetically present sense of duty in people who work the land.”
― Melanie Hoffert, Prairie Silence: A Memoir

“As a child when I visited my grandparents near the Bighorn Mountains in Wyoming I felt claustrophobic. The mountains seemed to block the sky and my eyes were forced to stop, when they were used to looking for miles across flat fields that didn’t end, but simply rolled up into the sky.”
― Melanie Hoffert, Prairie Silence: A Memoir

“This is a difficult question for me to answer. Somehow I want to explain to them that the land is beautiful, beyond their imagination. But I am stopped, like when I bring my city friends back to the farm. When the houses thin and we are eventually surrounded by nothingness I suddenly lose my vision. The world looks bleak, flat, unpromising, and colorless. I start apologizing as if I had dragged them to an empty art gallery. “The view is kind of ugly this time of year,” I’ll say.”
― Melanie Hoffert, Prairie Silence: A Memoir

“American airmen, when they got to the front, mostly flew in borrowed, patched-up planes provided by the Allies, leaving them in the position of being sent into the most dangerous form of combat in modern times with next to no training in generally second-rate surplus planes against vastly more experienced enemies.”
― Bill Bryson, One Summer: America, 1927

“unstable plane for a day and a half through storm and cloud and darkness while intricately balancing the flow of fuel through five tanks governed by fourteen valves, and navigating his way across a void without landmarks. When he needed to check his position or log a note, he would have to spread his work out on his lap and hold the stick between his knees; if it was nighttime he would have to grip a small flashlight between his teeth.”
― Bill Bryson, One Summer: America, 1927

“Alkaline water tastes dreadful and was the scourge of covered wagon parties crossing Wyoming for neither men nor beasts could drink it for fear of blistering their tonsils and suffering agonizing stomach cramps.”
― Annie Proulx, Bird Cloud: A Memoir of Place

“place. Less than 1 percent of the area is managed for wildlife habitat protection. Where early travelers saw sharp-tailed grouse, bison, bighorn sheep, grizzly bears, numerous beaver and even wolverines, today they see dust, feral horses, and noxious weeds including cheatgrass, halogeton and Russian thistle.”
― Annie Proulx, Bird Cloud: A Memoir of Place

“The mountain pine beetle is a tiny creature that chews through a lodgepole’s bark, gouges out a hollow in the wood and lays its eggs. The larvae hatch hungry and feed on the cambium layer, a tree’s most vital part, the annual layer of cells that makes up a growth ring. To prevent drowning in the tree’s sap, the beetle larvae can eject a choking fungus that not only halts the life-giving flow of sap, but stains the wood a grey-blue color.”
― Annie Proulx, Bird Cloud: A Memoir of Place

“A woman plays the Northumberland pipes; from where I’m sitting, on a wall at the back, it looks like she’s giving physiotherapy to a small marsupial wearing callipers and smoking a bong, but the sound is haunting and hypnotic, mournful and melodic at the same time, every note somehow harmonising with the low, droning purr.”
― Simon Armitage, Walking Home: A Poet's Journey

“The presence of chicory or wild carrot or the lovely Queen Anne’s lace means the soil is low in fertility, a classic problem that arises when you harvest crops without returning nutrients to the soil. Milkweed is a sign that the soil lacks zinc; wild garlic means low sulfur.”
― Dan Barber, The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food

“Substitute any vegetable that grows with its leafy head aboveground for another: a flower for a flower, a root for a root, shoot for shoot, stem for stem, tuber for tuber. (No rules apply to beets.”
― Tamar Adler, An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace

“So, Sasha took charge of the meeting and set for herself the same goal she had every time she babysat her nieces and nephews: no blood; no property damage in excess of a hundred dollars; and everybody eats something.”
― Melissa F. Miller, Irreparable Harm

“He could buy the Psycho Canoe with just the cash stacked in his kitchen freezer. He had $38,140 at last count, eleven green-gray bars, like dull chips of limestone, each individually sealed in plastic Baggies. When he reached $20,000 he had removed the ice trays to make more room. At $30,000 he had thrown out the rest of the frozen burritos.”
― Nathaniel Rich, Odds Against Tomorrow

“This is probably the most annoying thing of all to the French. Not only do we pronounce the battles incorrectly (Crécy should be ‘Cray-see’ and Waterloo ‘Watt-air-loh’), with Agincourt (‘Ah-zan-coor’) we even get the spelling wrong.”
― Stephen Clarke, 1000 Years of Annoying the French

“But at the same time, any mention of the history of Quebec rouses burning anti-British and anti-American outrage in a French person’s heart, as if someone was talking about a favourite café of theirs that had been turned into a Starbucks. Canada”
― Stephen Clarke, 1000 Years of Annoying the French

“The art experience and the theater experience, gyms for the soul, generate heat and exercise the imagination, empathy, creative thinking, patience and tolerance. A gym for the soul is a place where personal investment is required and the return is real.”
― Anne Bogart, What's the Story: Essays about art, theater and storytelling