The Shepherd's Life Quotes

“Later I would understand that modern industrial communities are obsessed with the importance of ‘going somewhere’ and ‘doing something with your life’. The implication is an idea I have come to hate, that staying local and doing physical work doesn’t count for much.”
― James Rebanks, The Shepherd's Life: Modern Dispatches from an Ancient Landscape

“This crappy, mean, broken-down school took five years of my life. I’d be mad, but for the fact that it taught me more about who I was than anything else I have ever done. It also made me think that modern life is rubbish for so many people. How few choices it gives them. How it lays out in front of them a future that bores most of them so much they can’t wait to get smashed out of their heads each weekend. How little most people are believed in, and how much it asks of so many people for so little in return.”
― James Rebanks, The Shepherd's Life: Modern Dispatches from an Ancient Landscape

“He asked what I made of the other students, so I told him. They were OK, but they were all very similar; they struggled to have different opinions because they’d never failed at anything or been nobodies, and they thought they would always win. But this isn’t most people’s experience of life. He asked me what could be done about it. I told him the answer was to send them all out for a year to do some dead-end job like working in a chicken-processing plant or spreading muck with a tractor. It would do more good than a gap year in Peru. He laughed and thought this tremendously witty. It wasn’t meant to be funny.”
― James Rebanks, The Shepherd's Life: A People's History of the Lake District

“There is no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothes.”
― James Rebanks, The Shepherd's Life: A People's History of the Lake District

“It feels strange to be home, as if I am now just a visitor to the land that I love, no longer really a part of it. I understand for the first time that our sense of belonging is all about participation. We belong because we are part of the work of this place.”
― James Rebanks, The Shepherd's Life: A People's History of the Lake District

“Books were considered a sign of idleness at best and dangerous at worst.”
― James Rebanks, The Shepherd's Life: Modern Dispatches from an Ancient Landscape

“Landscapes like ours were created by and survive through the efforts of nobodies. That's why I was so shocked to be given such a dead, rich, white man's version of its history at school. This is a landscape of modest, hardworking people. The real history of our landscape should be the history of the nobodies.”
― James Rebanks, The Shepherd's Life: A People's History of the Lake District

“The choice for our wider society is not whether we farm, but how we farm. Do we want a countryside that is entirely shaped by industrial-scale, cheap food production with some little islands of wilderness dotted in amongst it, or do we, at least in some places, also value the traditional landscape as shaped by traditional family farms?”
― James Rebanks, The Shepherd's Life: A People's History of the Lake District

“It was like his code of honour. Work that needs doing should be done. Work is its own reward. Never step back from work or you look bad.”
― James Rebanks, The Shepherd's Life: A People's History of the Lake District

“It is a curious thing to slowly discover that your landscape is loved by other people. It is even more curious, and a little unsettling, when you discover by stages that you as a native are not really part of the story and meaning they attach to that place.”
― James Rebanks, The Shepherd's Life: A People's History of the Lake District

“I didn’t know anyone in London, and I never wanted to be there. This was not how my life was meant to be, but needs must. It was as if the gods were showing me how tough everyone else’s lives were, and what I had left behind. I understood for the first time why people wanted to escape to places like the Lake District. I understood then what National Parks were for, so that people whose lives are always like this can escape and feel the wind in their hair and the sun on their faces.”
― James Rebanks, The Shepherd's Life: A People's History of the Lake District

“When we call it ‘our’ landscape, we mean it as a physical and intellectual reality. There is nothing chosen about it. This landscape is our home and we rarely stray far from it, or endure anywhere else for long before returning. This may seem like a lack of imagination or adventure, but I don’t care. I love this place; for me it is the beginning and the end of everything, and everywhere else feels like nowhere.”
― James Rebanks, The Shepherd's Life: A People's History of the Lake District

“This crappy, mean, broken-down school took five years of my life. I'd be mad, but for the fact that it taught me more about who I was than anything else I have ever done. It also made me think that modern life is rubbish for so many people. How few choices it gives them. How it lays out in front of them a future that bored most of them so much they couldn't wait to get smashed out of their heads each weekend. How little most people are believed in, and how much it asks of so many people for so little in return.”
― James Rebanks, The Shepherd's Life: A People's History of the Lake District

“And then we do it all again, just as our forefathers did before us. It is a farming pattern, fundamentally unchanged from many centuries ago. It has changed in scale (as farms have amalgamated to survive, so there are fewer us of ) but not in its basic content. You could bring a Viking man to stand on our fell with me and he would understand what we were doing and the basic pattern of our farming year. The timing of each task varies depending on the different valleys and farms. Things are driven by the seasons and necessity, but not our will." (p. 32)”
― James Rebanks, The Shepherd's Life: A People's History of the Lake District

“The only way out was to go back the next year and buy his sheep and pay over the odds to make up for it, so he did. Neither of these men cared remotely about “maximizing profit” in the short-term in the way a modern business person in a city would; they both valued their good names and their reputations for integrity far more highly than making a quick buck. If you said you would do a thing, you’d better do it.”
― James Rebanks, The Shepherd's Life: Modern Dispatches from an Ancient Landscape

“We are, I guess, all of us, built out of stories.”
― James Rebanks, The Shepherd's Life: A People's History of the Lake District

“Farming is more than the effect on the landscape: it sustains the local food industry, supports tourism, and gives people an income in places that might otherwise be abandoned.”
― James Rebanks, The Shepherd's Life: A People's History of the Lake District

“[O]ccasionally the sunlight through the library windows would catch my eye, and I knew I should be out in that. I felt as if I had cut myself adrift from everything I loved.”
― James Rebanks, The Shepherd's Life: A People's History of the Lake District

“I was discovering something about the wider world—that you could shape your own fate to a much greater degree than I’d ever experienced. If you read more, worked harder, thought things through smartly, or wrote or argued better than other people, you won. For a while I found this newfound freedom quite exciting and liberating. I found it a bit of a buzz just to be good at something, something that was nothing to do with my family or our farm, or anyone else except me.”
― James Rebanks, The Shepherd's Life: A People's History of the Lake District

“He joined the ranks of the great uprooted, but educated, English middle class. He suspected, rightly, that his old friends thought him a ‘snob’. But he made new friends, middle-class ones, who read books and did middle-class things like climbing, walking and daydreaming of adventures in foreign lands. But you can’t help feeling that he was always a little isolated in his new world, never quite fitting in – a little lonely, his cleverness like a millstone around his neck.”
― James Rebanks, The Shepherd's Life: Modern Dispatches from an Ancient Landscape

“The whole landscape here is a complex web of relationships between farms, flocks and families. My old man can hardly spell common words, but has an encyclopaedic knowledge of landscape. I think it makes a mockery of conventional ideas about who is and isn't 'intelligent'. Some of the smartest people I have ever known are semi-literate.”
― James Rebanks, The Shepherd's Life: A People's History of the Lake District

“The idea that we, our fathers and mothers, might be proud, hard-working and intelligent people doing something worthwhile, or even admirable, seemed to be beyond her. For a woman who saw success as being demonstrated through education, ambition, adventure and conspicuous professional achievement, we must have seemed a poor sample. I don't think anyone ever mentioned "university" in this school; no one wanted to go anyway - people that went away ceased to belong; they changed and could never really come back, we knew that in our bones. Schooling was a "way out", but we didn't want it, and we'd made our choice. Later I would understand that modern industrial communities are obsessed with the importance of "going somewhere" and "doing something with your life". The implication is an idea I have come to hate, that staying local and doing physical work doesn't count for much.”
― James Rebanks, The Shepherd's Life: A People's History of the Lake District

“I'm not just a grandson, I am the one that carries on his life's work, I am the thread that goes on to the future. He lives in me. His voice. His values. His stories. His farm. These things are carried forwards.”
― James Rebanks, The Shepherd's Life: A People's History of the Lake District

“She didn't really understand our world [and] lived with the unquestioning belief that these things were foolishness and fancies, the rubbish of now. So she taught us good rules that no longer made sense.”
― James Rebanks, The Shepherd's Life: A People's History of the Lake District

“Later mum had a fridge magnet that said 'Dull women have immaculate homes”
― James Rebanks, The Shepherd's Life: A People's History of the Lake District

“...seeing, understanding, and respecting people in their own landscape is crucial to their culture and way of life being sustained and valued. What you don't see you don't care about.”
― James Rebanks, The Shepherd's Life: A People's History of the Lake District

“Meidät oli lähetetty jonottamaan opinto-ohjaajan oven taakse ja saamaan häneltä ammattiapua tulevaisuutemme suhteen. Hän oli erittäin ylpeä tietokoneensa uraohjelmasta ja esitti minulle sarjan monivalintakysymyksiä. Naputti vastaukset yhdellä sormella. Haluatko työskennellä sisällä vai ulkona? Ulkona. Haluatko työskennellä eläinten vai ihmisten parissa? Jne. Kun tätä oli kestänyt varttitunnin, tietokone alkoi täristä ja sylkäisi pian paperin. Sen mukaan minusta pitäisi tulla "ELÄINTARHAN HOITAJA". Kuten isä asiasta kuullessaan totesi: "Jumalauta! Helvetin ääliöt." Sitten hän hytkyi naurusta eikä saanut sitä loppumaan millään.”
― James Rebanks, The Shepherd's Life: A People's History of the Lake District

“Muistan kuinka "ministeriön" (maatalousministeriön) virkamiehet tulivat puhumaan hänelle heinäpeltojemme "biodiversiteetistä" ja siitä, mitä he olettivat hänen tekevän kukkien ja lintujen hyväksi vastineeksi tukiaisista. He katselivat puolentoista tunnin ajan, miten hän nyökkäili kaikelle ja oli kaikesta samaa mieltä, minkä jälkeen he lähtivät pois ja minä kysyin, mitä he oikein tahtoivat. Hän sanoi: "Ei aavistustakaan... Tuon lajin pellejen kanssa pitää toimia niin, että vastataan kaikkeen kyllä, ja kun he ovat menneet, jatketaan vanhaan malliin.”
― James Rebanks, The Shepherd's Life: A People's History of the Lake District

“Neither of these men cared remotely about “maximizing profit” in the short-term in the way a modern business person in a city would; they both valued their good names and their reputations for integrity far more highly than making a quick buck. If you said you would do a thing, you’d better do it. My grandfather and father would go out of their way to do good deeds for their neighbours because goodwill counted for a lot. If anyone bought a sheep from us and had the slightest complaint about it, we took it back and repaid them or replaced it with another. And most people did the same.”
― James Rebanks, The Shepherd's Life: A People's History of the Lake District

“the entire history of our family has played out in the fields and villages stretching away beneath that fell, between Lake District and Pennines, for at least six centuries, and probably longer. We shaped this landscape, and we were shaped by it in turn. My people lived, worked, and died down there for countless generations. It is what it is because of them and people like them. It is, above all, a peopled landscape. Every acre of it has been defined by the actions of men and women over the past ten thousand years. Even the mountains were mined and quarried, and the seemingly wild woodland behind us was once intensively harvested and coppiced. Almost everyone I am related to and care about lives within sight of that fell. When we call it our landscape, we mean it as a physical and intellectual reality.”
― James Rebanks, The Shepherd's Life: A People's History of the Lake District