“Livy: Don’t you ever wonder what else is out there…beyond the farm?Ray: SometimesLivy: Aren’t you curious how other people lived?Ray: I enjoyed the drive, but i like coming back to my place. Sleeping on my land.Livy: Your land. Ha! Seems every war in human history is about owning a land. I liked the Indian view that we’re just temporary guardians of the land where we lived.Ray: It’s not temporary to me.Livy: But your family just owned this land for less than a hundred years. In a span of a history that’s nothing. Ray: In a span of a life…that’s near everything.”

“With tractors, you just don’t get the feel of tilling that land. So when planting season comes around, I use a hoe. To grow one useful whore, that’s the motto of my pimp farm.”

“Actually—and this was where I began to feel seriously uncomfortable—some such divine claim underlay not just 'the occupation' but the whole idea of a separate state for Jews in Palestine. Take away the divine warrant for the Holy Land and where were you, and what were you? Just another land-thief like the Turks or the British, except that in this case you wanted the land without the people. And the original Zionist slogan—'a land without a people for a people without a land'—disclosed its own negation when I saw the densely populated Arab towns dwelling sullenly under Jewish tutelage. You want irony? How about Jews becoming colonizers at just the moment when other Europeans had given up on the idea?”

“I consider whoever my words land on to be my target, that’s why I like flash fiction, it’s a lot like using a shotgun.”

“In the country, especially, there are such a lot of entertaining things. I can walk over everybody's land, and look at everybody's view, and dabble in everybody's brook; and enjoy it just as much as though I owned the land--and with no taxes to pay!”

“I see hundreds of men come by on the road an’ on the ranches with their bindles on their back an’ that same damn thing in their heads. Hundreds of them. They come, an’ they quit an’ go on; an’ every damn one of ‘em’s got a little piece of land in his head. An’ never a God damn one of ‘em ever gets it. Just like heaven. Ever’body wants a little piece of lan’. I read plenty of books out there. Nobody never gets to heaven, and nobody never gets no land. It’s just in their head.”