Rural Experience Quotes

I was privileged because my father was a policeman, and we lived in town. Many people in Malawi are from typical villages. My grandmother insisted I should be in both worlds, and so I needed to be acquainted with village life.

I had heard my father say that he never knew a piece of land run away or break.

I remember one winter, when I was about five or six, I spent three days with another boy, tracking a bobcat that had been sighted in another county fifty miles away, but which I was sure had come into our neighborhood.

They were beaten to start with. They were beaten when they took them from their farms and put them in the army. That is why the peasant has wisdom, because he is defeated from the start. Put him in power and see how wise he is.

The opportunity I had growing up in Montana isn't the opportunities for a whole lot of people.

On the farm, I had chores. I had a calf. We had a herd of cattle in the pasture. We'd go and get me a calf at a cow auction with Amish people, which I would raise. I gave it a bottle every day, in this cute little coop, like a giant dog coop almost. I've always been a big animal person.

To grow up five miles outside of the greatest city in the world is a bizarre experience.

I went horseback riding and got a big chunk of horse manure kicked into my face. It has a way of slapping you right back into reality.

Country life is different from city life, but I think it was good for me. Working on the farm, I got a balance in my life.

I think the city of Washington itself is insular to a certain extent. You have to get out in the country to realize what is going on and discover that the perceptions in Washington aren't necessarily accurate.

Yeah, I spent my teen years in West Virginia, and when I was a kid, in Louisiana. I definitely have that exposure to two different sorts of rural: the South and Appalachia.

I was shooting for 'Kahaani' and 'GOW' back to back. I was in a village on work, where a man extended a paper to me. For a minute I thought he wanted another actor's autograph. I looked back and forth, but there was no one. That was quite an experience.

Then a neighbor, Mr Smith, had a dairy cow and an couple bulls. He showed me how to bluff a bull.

The thing about living in a place like Nebraska is there aren't that many people, so your circle of acquaintances is going be much more diverse. Everyone would go to the same bar, like the local politicians and construction workers. The class intersections were fascinating to me. And of course there's a whole other conversation about what a huge source of growth it was for me in terms of understanding people and the world in a way that I hadn't in New York. I used to say that L.A. is essentially New York with yards.

I had a mild case of polio - not enough to put me in an iron lung, but enough to keep me bedridden for weeks. As I came out of it, my mom wanted to do something for me. She realized that, growing up in the city, I'd missed out on a lot of nature.

They threw me off the haytruck about noon.

When I lived in rural Oxfordshire, I was walking home across a field when I stroked a cow. The damn thing butted me in the orchestras.

To sing like a hillbilly, you had to have lived like a hillbilly. You had to have smelt a lot of mule manure.

Those of us who spent time in the agricultural sector and in the heartland, we understand how unfair the death penalty is.

Nature is a vast repository of manly enjoyments.

I used to live in a village, and I always loved listening to old people. Unfortunately, it was always women who were talking, because after the war, very few men were around. I spent my entire life living in the village. The village is always talking about itself; people are talking to each other as the village makes sense of itself.

I used to be frightened of the countryside after dark. Now I enjoy it. There is something wonderful about those strange country and wildlife noises.

Visits to 'the country' were very important to me growing up, especially working on the farm, experiencing all the wonders of cats and chickens and pigs and calves and outhouses!

It's rather an exhilarating feeling. It's 6 or 7 when you get up and go out into the fields wearing your Wellingtons or high boots. You know that at this very hour half the nation does the same thing, which gives you, with the benefit of hindsight, a satisfaction in doing those things, too, a knowledge, a sense of the nation. I was a city boy until then.

Offhand, the only North American writers I can think of who have come from a background of rural poverty and gone on to write about it have been Negroes.