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Homesteading Quotes

Browse 36 quotes about Homesteading.

Homesteading Quotes

“[Leslie Bennett] You have a teenager who desperately wants to separate...If you don't have a career, these New Domesticity types are likely to find themselves standing in the kitchen with all these domestic skills and no outlet for them, no way to earn a living.... [A]t that point your kids are not thanking you for having made the hand-pureed baby food and for giving them homemade cookies. They don't feel you've done them a big favor; they say, "Why didn't she ever grow up and take responsibility for her own life?”

IndependenceWorking WomenHomesteadingStay At Home MothersNew Domesticity
Book:Homeward Bound: Why Women Are Embracing the New Domesticity
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“The the street was quiet again. Country quiet. That's partly what took city natives like the Whitlams by surprise, Falk thought: the quiet. He could understand them seeking out the idyllic country lifestyle, a lot of people did. The idea had an enticing, wholesome glow when it was weighed out from the back of a traffic jam, or while crammed into a gardenless apartment. They all had the same visions of breathing fresh clean air and knowing their neighbors. The kids would eat home-grown veggies and learn the value of an honest day's work. On arrival, as the empty moving truck disappeared form sight, they looked around and were always taken aback by the crushing vastness of the open land. The space was the thing that hit them first. There was so much of it. There was enough to drown in. To look out and see not another soul between you and the horizon could be a strange and disturbing sight. Soon, they discovered that the veggies didn't grow as willingly as they had in the city window box. That every single green shoot had to be coaxed and prized from the reluctant soil, and the neighbors were too busy doing the same on an industrial scale to muster much cheer in their greetings. There was no daily bumper-to-bumper commute, but there was also nowhere much to drive to. Falk didn't blame the Whitlams, he'd seen it many times before when he was a kid. The arrivals looked around at the barrenness and the scale and the sheer bloody hardness of the land, and before long their faces all said exactly the same thing. "I didn't know it was like this." He turned away, remembering how the rawness of local life had seeped into the kids' paintings at the school. Sad faces and brown landscapes.”

Rural LifeHomesteading
Book:The Dry
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“It is only our limited time frame that creates the whole "natives versus exotics" controversy. Wind animals, sea currents, and continental drift have always dispersed species into new environments... The planet has been awash in surging , swarming species movement since life began. The fact that it is not one great homogeneous tangled weed lot is persuasive testimony to the fact that intact ecosystems are very difficult to invade.”

GardeningEcologyPermacultureSustainable LivingHomesteadingEcological Gardening
Author:Toby Hemenway
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“There are many more ways we can adapt. For example, instead of using up our energies harping about big farmers (whom of course we need right now to provide enough food for all of us), buy your own little patch of land to turn into an oasis of food and wildlife abundance. More and more people are doing this rather than standing around wringing their hands about global warming. Your little sanctuary will not be prone to disappear when the inevitable financial crises hit the big commercial farms.”

AgricultureFarmingHomesteadingUrban Farm
Book:Gene Everlasting: A Contrary Farmer's Thoughts on Living Forever
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“The homesteading generation's belief in education created the same Hobson's choice that so many farm families had to face. Children educated to become nurses, teachers, lawyers, pharmacists, insurance agents, doctors or police officers do not in general return to carry the family farm into the future. To use their education, they have to leave home and farming. And to complete this bittersweet irony, their children's success in other occupations were exactly what the homesteader generation had hoped for them. In a phenomenon familiar in both white and Black communities, the farming generation's deep commitment to educating their children produces children who were not, for the most part, interested in farming.”

EducationHomesteading
Book:Great Plains Homesteaders
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“When Gene was building his log workshop a few years ago, a helicopter flew over, circling back to the clearing next to our cabin. It was one of the Mirelli boys. Todd Mirelli plunked his chopper down in the clearing, jumped out, and came over to chat. He was building his own log cabin and wanted some tips from Gene. He truly did “drop in,” in the very sense of those words.”

HomesteadingCabinWilderness Stories
Book:Finding Peace in the Wilderness: Journey to a Simpler Life
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“Simplicity in its essence demands neither a vow of poverty nor a life of rural homesteading. As an ethic of self-conscious material moderation, it can be practiced in cities and suburbs, townhouses and condominiums. It requires neither a log cabin nor a hairshirt but a deliberate ordering of priorities so as to distinguish between the necessary and superfluous, useful and wasteful, beautiful and vulgar.”

SelfBeautifulCitiesPovertyMaterialsDemandEthicsConsciousEssenceSimplicityPrioritiesConsumerismModerationVulgarDeliberateVowSelf ConsciousSuburbsOverconsumptionSuperfluousCabinsHomesteadingLog Cabins
Author:David Shi
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“The libertarian view is that human actors are self-owners and these self-owners are capable of appropriating unowned scarce resources by Lockean homesteading − some type of first use or embordering activity. Obviously, an actor must already own his body if he is to be a homesteader; self-ownership is not acquired by homesteading but rather is presupposed in any act or defense of homesteading.”

IfsFirstsHumansSelfUseBodyActorsViewsTypeActivityCapableResourcesDefenseLibertarianOwnersOwnershipScarceScarce ResourcesHomesteadingSelf Ownership
Author:Stephan Kinsella
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“The open frontier, the hardships of homesteading from scratch, the wealth of natural resources, the whole vast challenge of a continent waiting to be exploited, combined to produce a prevailing materialism and an American drive bent as much, if not more, on money, property, and power than was true of the Old World from which we had fled.”

IfsWorldWholeWaitingNaturalChallengesWealthMoneyProduceResourcesPropertyMaterialismHardshipContinentsConsumerismBentScratchesFrontiersNatural ResourcesPrevailingOverconsumptionOld WorldHomesteading
Book:Practicing History: Selected Essays
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“Astolaine Bombast, catalogue woman, ordered up like a rare steak, 'plees make shore she is pritty and a whyt gurl if you have enny'.Well, she's pritty enough for homesteading but takes no ribbons at the fair. After three dead babies that fellow wanted his money back, pack her up in a box and ship her east to the wife factory.”

IfsWellsEnoughWantedThreeWifeBabyFairsFellowsBoxesEastShipsShoreFactoriesPacksSteakRibbonsCataloguesHomesteadingDead Baby
Author:Catherynne M. Valente
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