Henry Beston

"Every year at the farm I watch the insect kingdom come into its northern being, flourish in what we have of heat and sun, live out its myriad life, and disappear almost as if it had never been."

"On his own land or on others, he sought the company of rural people. In their husbandry he found the "poignant and poetic recognition of the long continuity of man" that was his own real calling."

"The house was full of the sound of the gale. It was a winter northeaster, furious with wind and snow, and driving down against us from the dark and desolate North Atlantic and a thousand miles of whitecaps and slavering foam."

"The three great elemental sounds in nature are the sound of rain, the sound of wind in a primeval wood, and the sound of outer ocean on a beach. I have heard them all, and of the three elemental voices, that of ocean is the most awesome, beautiful and varied.”"

"His Maine books, like Northern Farm, sing of harmonious, self-reliant country living: uncramped, governed by seasonal rhythms, connected to all the generations who’d farmed the land before them."