Quotes from Sue Hubbell

Vivimos en un mundo que no sólo es más extraño de lo que pensamos, sino más extraño de lo que podemos pensar." Sir James Hopwood Jeans

We humans are a minority of giants stumbling around in the world of little things.

Los visitantes con esperanzas puestas en el comercio apícola me resultan interesantes y conmovedores; muchos son jóvenes y despiertan a la madre que hay en mí. Suelen tener trabajos aburridos que detestan, y la idea de poseer una granja con abejas en el campo es para ellos una fantasía reconfortante. Procuro no desanimarlos, pero a veces no me queda más remedio. En estos tiempos, casi cualquier tipo de trabajo rural condena a los novatos a la bancarrota.

Today my life has frogs aplenty and this delights me, but I am not so pleased with myself. My life hasn't turned out as I expected it would, for one thing. For another, I no longer know all about anything. I don't even know the first thing about frogs, for instance.

I've never been much for becoming a member of a group.

I have stopped sleeping inside. A house is too small, too confining. I want the whole world, and the stars too.

I am beekeeper, but I am also a writer, and some years ago, I sat down at a typewriter to experiment with words, to try to tease out of the amorphous, chaotic and wordless part of myself the reason why I was staying on this hilltop in the Ozarks after my first husband, with whom I had started a beekeeping business, and I had divorced.

Our family was like no one else's. My schoolfriends had fathers and grandfathers and uncles who did things, but in my family, women had been the doers.

I've lived all over the country - Michigan, California, Texas, New Jersey, Rhode Island and, now, Maine - but I never understood springtime until I spent 25 years farming in the Ozarks.

For a long, long time, nearly 40 years, I never had any bees. I can't think why.

Our human calendars take little notice of such dates, but nighthawk migrations tell of shortening days and a season's end.

Sometimes, I wonder where we older women fit into the social scheme of things once nest-building has lost its charm.

We humans are a minority of giants stumbling around in a world of little things.

It wasn't that there weren't menfolk in my grandmother's stories. There were lots of them but they died young or were drifters and dreamers who disappeared or turned to drink or succumbed to melancholia or slow mortal diseases. The women, on the other hand, lived a long time and were full of spit and vinegar until the end.