It’s a fair-sized job to write a book that people can be bothered just to read; when they begin to steal copies, you are really getting some place.

Farmers are philosophical; they have learned that it is less wearing to shrug than to beat their breasts. But there is another angle to their attitude. Things happen rapidly in the country; something new always comes along to divert them and it isn't necessarily another calamity.

There is peace in the garden. Peace and results.

It’s a fair-sized job to write a book that people can be bothered just to read; when they begin to steal copies, you are really getting some place.

To the Memory of those faithful brown slave-men of the plantations throughout the South, Daddy's contemporaries all, who during the war while their masters were away fighting in a cause opposed to their emancipation, brought their blankets and slept outside their mistresses' doors, thus keeping night-watch over otherwise unprotected women and children -- a faithful guardianship of which the annals of those troublous times record no instance of betrayal.

The unmulched garden looks to me like some naked thing which for one reason or another would be better off with a few clothes on.

There is a privacy about it which no other season gives you.... In spring, summer and fall people sort of have an open season on each other; only in the winter, in the country, can you have longer, quiet stretches when you can savor belonging to yourself.