Don McLean Quotes

The strength that I have comes from irrigating the citrus plantation, ploughing in the vineyard, guarding the melon fields at night. I believe that's what gave me the strength.

I was trying to perform as best as possible. I was a boy at the time, but worked well with the sickle.

The vinery is not made with blessings, but with hoes and spades.

Throughout most of my life, I raised tobacco. I want you to know that my own hands, all of my life, I put in the plant beds and transferred it! I hoed it! I've dug in it! I've sprayed it! I've chopped it! I've shredded it, spiked it, put it in the barn and stripped it and sold it!

You know what would help this boy?" Demeter mused. "Farming." Persephone rolled her eyes. "Mother-" "Six months behind a plow. Excellent character building.

I have a farm in Vermont; that's my main residence, where I do lots of digging and mowing, and ride tractors - just so you don't get the wrong idea that I'm too girlie!

I grew up working on farms. You'd do anything for money. You'd pick blueberries in the summertime for weeks; you'd cut down, like, spruce and fir trees for pulp.

Literally, if someone says I am grounded, everyday I am at home, I actually have my hands in the ground and dirt under my fingernails. I don't have a staff to do it all for me. I still plant a seed and I'm amazed it grows.

From the time I was a small boy, I remember working in the fields with my grandfather and father. We weren't growing grapes, but we were farming crops, creating something good out of the earth.

My first love was, and remains, manual labor; sowing and harvesting, the pastures, the flock, and the cattle.

I was a hard-workin' little boy. Oh, I worked. Pullin' cotton, shockin' grain, cuttin' wheat, loadin' wheat, choppin' cotton, cleanin' chicken houses, milkin' cows, plowin'.

I've worked cornfields.

I've worked the ranch. I've hauled sugar beets from the field.

Everything is work on the farm.

My mom's parents were farmers, so every summer, my sisters and I would help out, hauling pipe and pulling maggots off the corn. We hated it, but it taught me the meaning of good hard work.

There is virtue yet in the hoe and the spade, for learned as well as for unlearned hands. And labor is everywhere welcome; alwayswe are invited to work.

You must get good at one of two things; planting in the spring or begging in the fall.

And blessed are the horny hands of toil.

Where grows?--where grows it not? If vain our toil, We ought to blame the culture, not the soil.

The wino and I know the pain of back bustin'.

I was raised to farm work.

That good gardener, who wept thorns plowing his fields - harvests grace with joy.

You're buying years of work, toil in the sun; you're buying a sorrow that can't talk.

I have often thought that if heaven had given me choice of my position and calling, it should have been on a rich spot of earth, well watered, and near a good market for the productions of the garden. No occupation is so delightful to me as the culture of the earth, and no culture comparable to that of the garden. Such a variety of subjects, some one always coming to perfection, the failure of one thing repaired by the success of another, and instead of one harvest a continued one through the year.