The Dirty Life Quotes

“In his view, we were already a success, because we were doing something hard and it was something that mattered to us. You don't measure things like that with words like success or failure, he said. Satisfaction comes from trying hard things and then going on to the next hard thing, regardless of the outcome. What mattered was whether or not you were moving in a direction you thought was right.”
― Kristin Kimball, The Dirty Life: On Farming, Food, and Love

“‎A farm is a manipulative creature. There is no such thing as finished. Work comes in a stream and has no end. There are only the things that must be done now and things that can be done later. The threat the farm has got on you, the one that keeps you running from can until can't, is this: do it now, or some living thing will wilt or suffer or die. Its blackmail, really.”
― Kristin Kimball, The Dirty Life: On Farming, Food, and Love

“I was forced to confront my own prejudice. I had come to the farm with the unarticulated belief that concrete things were for dumb people and abstract things were for smart people. I thought the physical world - the trades - was the place you ended up if you weren't bright or ambitious enough to handle a white-collar job. Did I really think that a person with a genius for fixing engines, or for building, or for husbanding cows, was less brilliant than a person who writes ad copy or interprets the law? Apparently I did, though it amazes me now.”
― Kristin Kimball, The Dirty Life: On Farming, Food, and Love

“There is no such thing as escape after all, only an exchange of one set of difficulties for another. It wasn't Mark or the farm or marriage I was trying to shake loose from but my own imperfect self, and even if I kept moving, she would dog me all the way around the world, forever.”
― Kristin Kimball, The Dirty Life: On Farming, Food, and Love

“Cook things, eat them with other people. If you can tire your own bones while growing the beans, so much the better for you.”
― Kristin Kimball, The Dirty Life: On Farming, Food, and Love

“...farming takes root in you and crowds out other endeavors, makes them seem paltry. Your acres become a world. And maybe you realize that it is beyond those acres or in your distant past, back in the realm of TiVo and cubicles, of take-out food and central heat and air, in that country where discomfort has nearly disappeared, that you were deprived. Deprived of the pleasure of desire, of effort and difficulty and meaningful accomplishment.”
― Kristin Kimball, The Dirty Life: On Farming, Food, and Love

“So there I was eating haute cuisine in a mobile home. He cooked for me as seduction, a courtship, so that I'd never again be impressed with a man who simply took me out to dinner. And I fell in love with him over a deer's liver.”
― Kristin Kimball, The Dirty Life: On Farming, Food, and Love

“There's no better cure for snobbiness than a good a** kicking.”
― Kristin Kimball, The Dirty Life: On Farming, Food, and Love

“There was something else, too, and I don't know why nobody talks about it. Marriage asks you to let go of a big chunk of who you were before, and that loss must be grieved. A choice for something and someone is a choice against absolutely everything else, and that's one big fat good-bye.”
― Kristin Kimball, The Dirty Life: On Farming, Food, and Love

“But raw milk from a Jersey cow is a totally different substance from what I'd thought of as milk. If you do not own a cow or know someone who owns a cow, I must caution you never to try raw milk straight from the teat of a Jersey cow, because it would be cruel to taste it once and not have access to it again. Only a few people in America remeber this type of milk now, elderly people mostly, who grew up with a cow. They come to the farm sometimes, looking for that taste from their childhood.”
― Kristin Kimball, The Dirty Life: On Farming, Food, and Love

“Grow it right, and you feel insanely rich, no matter what you own.”
― Kristin Kimball, The Dirty Life: On Farming, Food, and Love

“Maybe most important, farm food itself is totally different from what most people now think of as food: none of those colorful boxed and bagged products, precut, parboiled, ready to eat, and engineered to appeal to our basest desires. We were selling the opposite: naked, unprocessed food, two steps from the dirt.”
― Kristin Kimball, The Dirty Life: On Farming, Food, and Love

“Sitting at the table, watching the cards being dealt, I heard a man say that the difference between an amateur and a pro is that the pro doesn't have an emotional reaction to losing anymore. It's just the other side of winning. I guess I'm a farmer now, because I'm used to loss like this, to death of all kinds, and to rot. It's just the other side of life. It is your first big horse and all he meant to you, and it is also his bones and skin breaking down in the compost pile, almost ready to be spread on the fields.”
― Kristin Kimball, The Dirty Life: On Farming, Food, and Love

“You don’t measure things like that with words like success or failure, he said. Satisfaction comes from trying hard things and then going on to the next hard thing, regardless of the outcome. What mattered was whether or not you were moving in a direction you thought was right.”
― Kristin Kimball, The Dirty Life: On Farming, Food, and Love

“My Dad was sad that he saw us working so hard on something that was destined to fail.”
― Kristin Kimball, The Dirty Life: On Farming, Food, and Love

“I wasn't asking him to guarantee that we'd be rich, I just wanted him to assure me that we'd be solvent, that we'd be, as I put it, okay. Mark laughed. "What is the worst thing that could happen?" he asked. "We're smart and capable people. We live in the richest country in the world. There is food and shelter and kindness to spare. What in the world is there to be afraid of?”
― Kristin Kimball, The Dirty Life: On Farming, Food, and Love

“Farming, I discovered, is a great and ongoing war. The farmers are continually fighting to keep nature behind the hedgerow, and nature is continually fighting to overtake the field.”
― Kristin Kimball, The Dirty Life: On Farming, Food, and Love

“I thought about how I must look, wet, red-fingered from cold, cutting a hole in a perfectly good barn for no reason. "I don't want to tell you what to do," Shep began. This, I'd found, was a very common statement in the North Country. You're not considered rude if you don't return phone calls, or if you get drunk while working, or fail to show up as promised, but telling someone how to do something is bad form and requires a disclaimer.”
― Kristin Kimball, The Dirty Life: On Farming, Food, and Love

“When we walked the mowed margins of the field in the evenings, a school of black crickets sprang ahead of us like dolphins in front of a ship.”
― Kristin Kimball, The Dirty Life: On Farming, Food, and Love

“We drove out of New Paltz heading due north. Squeezed into my tiny hatchback, among our boxes and bags, were my dog, Nico, the hens, and the humming hive of bees, its openings covered over with tape. The dog eyed the hive, the chickens eyed the dog, and if the bees weren't nervous they were the only ones.”
― Kristin Kimball, The Dirty Life: On Farming, Food, and Love

“Without me to struggle against, without the constant chaos of our first growing season, without the pressure of our impending wedding, he seemed to have found his own steady rhythm. I worked my way into it, looking for the harmony this time, instead of conflict. We found easy joy in working together, becoming real partners, instead of combatants, for the first time.”
― Kristin Kimball, The Dirty Life: On Farming, Food, and Love

“They looked like a group of thick-middled matrons on a Tijuana bender.”
― Kristin Kimball, The Dirty Life: On Farming, Food, and Love

“This humble wish seemed impossible. It was so different from the life I was living, and no one in my circle had those things, or wanted them, or would admit it if they did. I thought I could acknowledge the ache and learn to live with it, the way you live with the pain that lingers long after you've broken a bone, the kind that foretells a shift in the weather.”
― Kristin Kimball, The Dirty Life: On Farming, Food, and Love

“Meanwhile I was trying to stave off the ache I'd developed. I noticed it first at the airport, coming home from a trip. There was a crowd on the other side of customs, holding flowers, the little kids dressed up and excited, waiting for their loved ones, who were returning home. I hated walking past that gauntlet of waiting people, because none of them were waiting for me. I stood in the cab line and felt the weight of my aloneness come down on me.”
― Kristin Kimball, The Dirty Life: On Farming, Food, and Love

“He had never owned a car. He biked or hitchhiked where he needed to go. He had recently turned against the word should, and doing so had made him a happier person. He found the market economy and it's anonymous exchange boring. He'd like to imagine a farm where no money changed hands, only goodwill and favors. He had a theory that you had to start out by giving stuff away- preferably big stuff, worth, he figured, about a thousand dollars. At first, he said, people are discomfited by such a big gift. They try to make it up to you, by giving something big in return. And then you give them something else, and they give you something else, and pretty soon nobody is keeping score. There is simply a flow of things from place of excess to place of need. It's personal, and it's satisfying, and everyone feels good about it. This guy is completely nuts, I thought. But what if he's right?”
― Kristin Kimball, The Dirty Life: On Farming, Food, and Love

“When I think of it now, I can see that our wedding day was exactly like our marriage, and like our farm, both exquisite and untidy, sublime and untamed. What I knew even then, though, in the middle of the chaos, was that the love at its center was not just the small human love between Mark and me. It was an expression of a larger loving-kindness, and, when I remember it, I have the feeling of being held in the hands of our friends, family, community, and whatever mysterious force made the fields yield abundant food. It is the feeling of falling, and of being gently caught.”
― Kristin Kimball, The Dirty Life: On Farming, Food, and Love

“I was in love with the work, too, despite its overabundance. The world had always seemed disturbingly chaotic to me, my choices too bewildering. I was fundamentally happier, I found, with my focus on the ground. For the first time, I could clearly see the connection between my actions and their consequences. I knew why I was doing what I was doing, and I believed in it. I felt the gap between who I thought I was and how I behaved begin to close, growing slowly closer to authentic. I felt my body changing to accommodate what I was asking of it. I could lift the harness onto Sam's back without asphyxiating myself. I could carry two full five-gallon buckets with ease, tottering down the aisle of the barn like a Chinese peasant. I had always been attracted to the empty, sparkly grab bag of instant gratification, and I was beginning to learn something about the peace you can find inside an infinite challenge.”
― Kristin Kimball, The Dirty Life: On Farming, Food, and Love

“My new life was marking me. It was happening so quickly. There were intermittent spells of resistance, during which I'd pluck and moisturize and exfoliate, and then there was a period of grieving for my old self, who seemed to be disappearing toward the horizon, and then I relaxed into it.”
― Kristin Kimball, The Dirty Life: On Farming, Food, and Love

“Mark came home late one frozen Sunday carrying a bag of small, silver fish. They were smelts, locally known as icefish. He’d brought them at the store in the next town south, across from which a little village had sprung up on the ice of the lake, a collection of shacks with holes drilled in and around them. I’d seen the men going from the shore to the shacks on snowmobiles, six-packs of beer strapped on behind them like a half dozen miniature passengers. “Sit and rest,” Mark said. “I’m cooking.” He sautéed minced onion in our homemade butter, added a little handful of crushed, dried sage, and when the onion was translucent, he sprinkled n flour to make a roux, which he loosened with beer, in honor of the fishermen. He added cubed carrot, celery root, potato, and some stock, and then the fish, cut into pieces, and when they were all cooked through he poured in a whole morning milking’s worth of Delia’s yellow cream. Icefish chowder, rich and warm, eaten while sitting in Mark’s lap, my feet so close to the woodstove that steam came off my damp socks.”
― Kristin Kimball, The Dirty Life: On Farming, Food, and Love