The Seed Underground Quotes

“The assumption is that hope is a prerequisite for action. Without hope one becomes depressed and then unable to act.
I want to stress that I do not act because I have hope. I act whether I have hope or not. It is useless to rely on hope as motivation to do what's necessary and just and right. Why doesn't anybody ever talk about love as motivation to act?
I may not have a lot of hope but I have plenty of love, which gives me fight.
We are going to have to fall in love with place again and learn to stay put.”
― Janisse Ray, The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food

“Rural places have hemorrhaged their best and brightest children, their intellectuals, thinkers, organizers, leaders, and artists-those who would create change and who would parent another generation of thinkers. All gone.

Our seeds are disappearing.”
― Janisse Ray, The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food

“Something happens to me when I garden. I am fully, reliably, blissfully present to who I am and where I am in that moment. I am an animal with a hundred different senses and all of them are switched on.”
― Janisse Ray, The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food

“I may not have a lot of hope but I have plenty of love, which gives me fight.”
― Janisse Ray, The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food

“By 2005, Monsanto had filed ninety lawsuits against U.S. farmers for patent infringement, meaning GM genes found in the fields of farmers that had not paid for the right, and Monsanto had been awarded over $15 million. I’ll tell you here and now: We have a screwed-up justice system. These lawsuits and seeds are nothing less than corporate extortion of American farmers, said Andrew Kimbrell, director of the Center for Food Safety, as reported in the Seed Savers Summer Edition 2005.”
― Janisse Ray, The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food

“What I am saying is that lovely, whimsical, and soulful things happen in a garden, leaving a gardener giddy.”
― Janisse Ray, The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food

“Are you going to farmer up or just lie there and bleed?”
― Janisse Ray, The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food

“I want to tell you about the most hopeful thing in the world. It is a seed.”
― Janisse Ray, The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food

“If you haven't heard what's happening with seeds, let me tell you. They're disappearing, about like every damn thing else. You know the story already, you know it better than I do, the forests and the songbirds, the Appalachian Mountains, the fish in the ocean. But I'm not going to talk about anything that makes us feel hopeless, or despairing, because there's no despair in a seed. There's only life, waiting for the right conditions--sun and water, warmth and soil--to be set free. Every day millions upon millions of seeds lift their two green wings.”
― Janisse Ray, The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food

“Here in the country, on a little farm in southern Georgia, I am building a quiet life of resistance. I am a radical peasant, and every day I take out my little hammer, and I keep building.”
― Janisse Ray, The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food

“For a vegetable to flower has been considered by gardeners as a mistake--oops, it went to seed, yank it out! Going to seed has meant that a person has gone wayward, and seedy places are unsavory. A seed, however, finds its nativity in a flower, a thing of beauty, color, fragrance, form, and variety. Flowers are food for the soul. And the seeds they fashion are life, sustenance, the future. We are utterly dependent on them. Seeds are the bridge between us and the sun, emissaries of the solar system, bundles of cosmic energy.”
― Janisse Ray, The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food