Land Quotes

Rising Sun jostles hard to evaporate doom filled clouds,hovering ancient land.

~ Aniruddha Sastikar

On the sea he wished to meet it, if meet it he must. He was not sure why this was, yet he had a terror of meeting the thing again on dry land. Out of the sea there rise storms and monsters, but no evil powers: evil is of earth. And there is no sea, no running of river or spring, in the dark land where once Ged had gone. Death is the dry place.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

The ceremonies that persist—birthdays, weddings, funerals— focus only on ourselves, marking rites of personal transition. […]We know how to carry out this rite for each other and we do it well. But imagine standing by the river, flooded with those same feelings as the Salmon march into the auditorium of their estuary. Rise in their honor, thank them for all the ways they have enriched our lives, sing to honor their hard work and accomplishments against all odds, tell them they are our hope for the future, encourage them to go off into the world to grow, and pray that they will come home. Then the feasting begins. Can we extend our bonds of celebration and support from our own species to the others who need us?Many indigenous traditions still recognize the place of ceremony and often focus their celebrations on other species and events in the cycle of the seasons. In a colonist society the ceremonies that endure are not about land; they’re about family and culture, values that are transportable from the old country. Ceremonies for the land no doubt existed there, but it seems they did not survive emigration in any substantial way. I think there is wisdom in regenerating them here, as a means to form bonds with this land.

~ Robin Wall Kimmerer

Property is not the natural and obvious and inevitable concept that most people think it is.

~ Robert A. Heinlein

There was only silence. It was the silence of matter caught in the act and embarrassed. There were no cells moving, and yet there were cells. I could see the shape of the land, how it lay holding silence. Its poise and its stillness were unendurable, like the ring of the silence you hear in your skull when you're little and notice you're living the ring which resumes later in life when you're sick.

~ Annie Dillard

In this landI have made myself sick with silenceIn this landI have wandered, lostIn this landI hunkered down to seeWhat will become of me.In this landI held myself tightSo as not to scream.-But I did scream, so loudThat this land howled back at meAs hideouslyAs it builds its houses.In this landI have been sownOnly my head sticksDefiant, out of the earthBut one day it too will be mownMaking me, finallyOf this land.-Charlie's poem

~ Anna Funder

Men are by nature wanderers...Every people has moved from somewhere, and had to learn the ways of the land from the people who were there before.

~ Marion Zimmer Bradley

Atheism is the philosophical equivalent of a fish denying the existence of land because he lacks the means to experience it.

~ J.adam Snyder

The practices we now call conservation are, to a large extent, local alleviations of biotic pain. They are necessary, but they must not be confused with cures. The art of land doctoring is being practiced with vigor, but the science of land health is yet to be born.

~ Aldo Leopold

How can you expect people never to hurt you? That is not possible, not even in disney land.

~ Paul Bamikole

When you are on the air, there is no land you need to call home.

~ Grigoris Deoudis

It doesn’t take a farm to invoke the iron taste of leaving in your mouth. Anyone who loves a small plot of ground — a city garden, a vacant lot with some guerilla beds, a balcony of pots — understands the almost physical hurt of parting from it, even for a minor stint. I hurt every day I wake up in our city bed, wondering how the light will be changing over the front field or across the pond, whether the moose will be in the willow by the cabin again, if the wren has fledged her young ones yet and we’ll return to find the box untended. I can feel where the farm is at any point in my day, not out of some arcane sixth sense developed from years of summer nights out there with the coyotes under the stars, but because of the bond between that earth and this body. Some grounds we choose; some are our instinctive homes.

~ Jenna Butler

Children, language, lands: almost everything was stripped away, stolen when you weren’t looking because you were trying to stay alive. In the face of such loss, one thing our people could not surrender was the meaning of land. In the settler mind, land was property, real estate, capital, or natural resources. But to our people, it was everything: identity, the connection to our ancestors, the home of our nonhuman kinfolk, our pharmacy, our library, the source of all that sustained us. Our lands were where our responsibility to the world was enacted, sacred ground. It belonged to itself; it was a gift, not a commodity, so it could never be bought or sold. These are the meanings people took with them when they were forced from their ancient homelands to new places.

~ Robin Wall Kimmerer

I seen hundreds of men come by on the road an’ on the ranches, with their bindles on their back an’ that same damn thing in their heads . . . every damn one of ’em’s got a little piece of land in his head. An’ never a God damn one of ’em ever gets it. Just like heaven. Ever’body wants a little piece of lan’. I read plenty of books out here. Nobody never gets to heaven, and nobody gets no land.

~ John Steinbeck

There is honey in this land sweeter than any I know of, and I have cut cane in places where the dirt itself tasted like sugar, so that's saying a heap.

~ Toni Morrison

When God speaks about equity, that choice of word, makes us understand that God is not referring to the leaders of the land or the elite this time around. He is actually talking about how ordinary citizens of the land relate to each other in fairness and impartiality

~ Sunday Adelaja

The eyes of such a nation (living godly) shall view a land that stretches afar. Talking about global influence, authority, dignity and respect.

~ Sunday Adelaja

Communication land lines are going to be around for a long time, the internet runs on them, as do the wireless cell phone towers.

~ Steven Magee

Do not say the land ahead does not exist, simply because you cannot see it.

~ Robert H. Barlow

If we keep seeking, we shall find the sacred land.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

You were placed there by God for a reason, which is to possess the land for the glory of the KING!

~ Sunday Adelaja

The hardest part of being a Canadian kid is having to color in Nunavut with a crayon in school, hell on earth.

~ Rebecca Mcnutt

To anyone with a drop of Irish blood in them the land they live on is like their mother. It's the only thing that lasts, that's worth working for, for fighting for...

~ Alexandra Ripley

Behold, the Spring has come; the earth has received the embraces of the sun and we shall soon see the results of that love!Every seed is awakened and so has all animal life. It is through this mysterious power that we too have our being, and we therefore yield to our neighbors, even our animal neighbors, the same right as ourselves, to inhabit this land.Yet, hear me, people, we have now to deal with another race – small and feeble when our fathers first met them but now great and overbearing. Strangely enough they have a mind to till the soil and the love of possession is a disease with them. These people have made many rules that the rich may break but the poor may not. They take their tithes from the poor and weak to support the rich and those who rule.They claim this mother of ours, the earth, for their own and fence their neighbors away; they deface her with their buildings and their refuse. The nation is like a spring freshet that overruns its banks and destroys all that are in its path.We cannot dwell side by side. Only seven years ago we made a treaty by which we were assured that the buffalo country should be left to us forever. Now they threaten to take that away from us. My brothers, shall we submit or shall we say to them: 'First kill me before you take possession of my land

~ Sitting Bull

So, yeah, my people figured that maybe there's something at the back of it all, a creator, a great spirit, and so we say thank you to it, because it's always good to say thank you. But we never built churches. We didn't need to. The land was the church. The land was the religion. The land was older and wiser than the people who walked on it.

~ Neil Gaiman

They are ill discoverers that think there is no land, when they can see nothing but sea.

~ Francis Bacon

No wonder God chose this dark land to send prophets to, for a candle only shines in the dark.

~ Rami Ollaik

In the loss of skill, we lose stewardship; in losing stewardship we lose fellowship; we become outcasts from the great neighborhood of Creation. It is possible - as our experience in this good land shows - to exile ourselves from Creation, and to ally ourselves with the principle of destruction - which is, ultimately, the principle of nonentity. It is to be willing in general for being to not-be. And once we have allied ourselves with that principle, we are foolish to think that we can control the results. (pg. 303, The Gift of Good Land)

~ Wendell Berry

Appreciation and enjoyment of the creatures are the hallmark of God's dominion and therefore the standard by which our own attempt to exercise dominion must be judged.

~ Ellen F. Davis

For a nation to be truly transformed, there must be movements, civil societies, NGOs that are spread all across the land to educate people on the issues of Personal Responsibility. If a nation or rather active citizens of a nation could successfully launch such campaigns and a good percentage of the populace begin to live by the principles of Personal Responsibility, which is “don’t blame others”, think of what you can do to fix it. Such a nation would cross the huddle of civilization in a record time.

~ Sunday Adelaja

The land wherein the need to be alone and the need to be around people is dissolved together is a complete anarchy.

~ Pavitraa Parthasarathy

Your ideas about possession must increase until you get to a state of full possession of the land, city and nation

~ Sunday Adelaja

These memories are part of my heritage, the fabric of my personality, and as real to me as the land itself.

~ Karen Jones Gowen

Some of the owner men were kind because they hated what they had to do, and some of them were angry because they hated to be cruel, and some of them were cold because they had long ago found that one could not be an owner unless one were cold. And all of them were caught in something larger than themselves. Some of them hated the mathematics that drove them, and some were afraid, and some worshiped the mathematics because it provided a refuge from thought and from feeling. If a bank or a finance company owned the land, the owner man said, The Bank - or the Company - needs - wants - insists - must have - as though the Bank or the Company were a monster, with thought and feeling, which had ensnared them. These last would take no responsibility for the banks or the companies because they were men and slaves, while the banks were machines and masters all at the same time. Some of the owner men were a little proud to be slaves to such cold and powerful masters. The owner men sat in the cars and explained. You know the land is poor. You've scrabbled at it long enough, God knows.

~ John Steinbeck

For capitalism to develop, customary ties between people and the land must be severed, and communal obligations among people disrupted.

~ David Mcnally

A person does not grow from the ground like a vine or a tree, one is not part of a plot of land. Mankind has legs so it can wander.

~ Roman Payne

We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.

~ Aldo Leopold

National Transformation must begin with every citizen of the land.

~ Sunday Adelaja

For most of human history people owned other people. Then, only a hundred and fifty years ago, our ancestors figured out that was a bad idea. One day we’ll figure out, or our descendants will figure out, that people owning land they don’t live on or work is a bad idea too.

~ Dennis Vickers

Thanks to the centrifugal pump, places like Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas had thrown on the garments of fertility for a century, pretending to greenery and growth as they mined glacial water from ten-thousand-year-old aquifers. They'd played dress-up-in-green and pretended it could last forever. They'd pumped up the Ice Age and spread it across the land, and for a while they'd turned their dry lands lush. Cotton, wheat, corn, soybeans -- vast green acreages, all because someone could get a pump going. Those places had dreamed of being different from what they were. They'd had aspirations. And then the water ran out, and they fell back, realizing too late that their prosperity was borrowed, and there would be no more coming.

~ Paolo Bacigalupi