Quotes from Janisse Ray

I carry the landscape inside me like an ache. The story of who I am cannot be severed from the story of the flatwoods.

Of what use to humanity, I ask myself, is a man who cannot see beyond his own hurt?

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.

Turning back to embrace the past has been a long, slow lesson not only in self-esteem, but in patriotism—pride in homeland, heritage. It has taken a decade to whip the shame, to mispronounce words and shun grammar when mispronunciation and misspeaking are part of my dialect, to own the bad blood. What I come from has made me who I am.

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.

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.

She was so strong a ship could have been hewn from her body.

I may not have a lot of hope but I have plenty of love, which gives me fight.

In the wild world, relationship is evolutionary, time is geologic, beauty is intelligent. There we find ourselves under a powerful spell.

Some things ought to exist outside capitalism, and wildness should be one of them.

Are you going to farmer up or just lie there and bleed?

Now I lay me down to sleep. I pay the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pay the Lord my soul to take.

Although I was reared on a junkyard by parents who did not waste time hiking or camping, I knew pine trees and pitcher plants, bobcats and brown thrashers, as my people.

What I am saying is that lovely, whimsical, and soulful things happen in a garden, leaving a gardener giddy.

A river can't forgive because it is only capable, in the first place, of love. A river loves the dumpers, the polluters, the slayers, the nest-thieves, the bird-killers, the dammers, the water-stealers. A river loves even the clear-cutters. But I can forgive. I am trying to be like the river.

Most of us, most of our lives, are asked to live small. Most of us quit trying very young to live the bigness we know is possible.

Perhaps no word exists in our terribly inadequate English language to name this abstract, emotional thing that is not forgiveness, is not forgetting, and also is both.

Georgia Author Brenda Sutton Rose captures some of the conflicted and captivating characters of a rapidly changing South.

What is clear is that genius, whether it is represented by a Thomas Edison or an Albert Einstein or an Alberto Ramirez, leaves the world a better place.

Out beyond houses and mailboxes, roads and bridges, a person can see a realm that exists alongside this world in which we humans live.

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.

I want to tell you about the most hopeful thing in the world. It is a seed.

Were my imagination greater I would grant stories to the souls lost to history. Were I able to hear with my bones I wold know the underside of their colossal silence.

Sometimes all we have is a little light that we can shine outward into a big darkness.