Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
My siblings and I had to earn our own pocket money so from the age of about 10 I had a job. I did a paper round, helped with the farmer's delivery at the weekend, cut hedges for neighbours and worked on a market stall. Then I'd go and buy a record with my hard-won money.
I wanted to be a farmer's wife. I thought it would be quite fun to wake up of a morning, collect eggs and have sheep and pigs as pets. I know now that it would also involve having to sleep with the farmer, but at the time I wasn't thinking about the sexual implications - I was 11.
Is there anything sadder than the foods of the 1950s? Canned, frozen, packaged concoctions, served up by the plateful, three meals per day, in an era in which the supermarket was king, the farmer's market was, well, for farmers, and the word 'locavore' sounded vaguely like a mythical beast.
I like to give pennies to children, but unfortunately, a man cannot do these things if he lives in a small village or town where his face is known and seen every day. For children take advantage, as I know to my cost, and would gather round him like hens around a farmer when he scatters grain.
My daddy wanted me to be a farmer; feel the smoothness of Alabama clay and become one of the first blacks in my town to own land. But, I was worried about my history being caked with that southern clay, and I subscribed to a different kind of teaching and learning in my bones and in my spirit.
Big meetings and big talk are not enough in a world that is hungry for change. Big action - world leaders keeping their promises, and developing countries committing resources while listening ardently to the voice of the small farmer - is needed to bring big results and prosperity to the world's poor.
But, in North Korea, it's just the opposite. There's one story. It's written by the Kim regime. And 23 million people are conscripted to be secondary characters. There, as a youth, your aptitude towards certain jobs is measured, and the rest of your life is dictated, whether you'll be a fisherman or a farmer or an opera singer.
I was perhaps about 10 years old when a local farmer rang us up to say he had found a young badger and would we take it in. So we did; it was a female called Bessy and she lived in the boiler room. She was extremely intelligent, had a very low opinion of cats but loved the dogs. She was pretty well trained; she went in the car.
Mum is from West Waterford, Dungarvan. She's a farmer's daughter. She's a nurse. She left home very young - I think she was 18 - and went off to train as a nurse in England. My dad is from India, just south of Mumbai. He was one of the first in his family to go to college, and he went to England in the '70s; he emigrated there.
There is no employing class, no working class, no farming class. You may pigeonhole a man or woman as a farmer or a worker or a professional man or an employer or even a banker. But the son of the farmer will be a doctor or a worker or even a banker, and his daughter a teacher. The son of a worker will be an employer - or maybe president.
Growing up in Georgia, my dad was a farmer and we worked in agriculture, so we were always looking up at the sky, checking if rain was in the forecast. That always set the tone for the mood in my household, whether we had rain coming in or not - we knew the crops would be good and it was going to be a good week around the Bryan household.
In Vegas, you have an audience you can't find anywhere else. It's from all over the country. You play Seattle, everyone's from Seattle. But in Vegas, you have six from Seattle, a bunch from L.A., some local Las Vegans and maybe a farmer from Iowa. In Vegas, you learn the ins and outs of holding a room because of that great spectrum of folks.
