Quotes About Barley

“Nelson, do you remember the spring day when we climbed the barn gable so we could see the seagulls that mysteriously blew into our clay hills
swept from an ocean neither of us had ever seen though it was scarcely a hundred miles away, each bird a genuine miracle high above the green barley? The time we saw that panther in the sycamore tree and Maw said it was the sign of war? Nelson, I am sixty-three years old, the same age that both Maw and Daddy were when they died. I have written this in testimony. With this book, I presume to be done now with such remembrance. But somehow I suspect it will go on, this peering down old wells, this excavation of memory and its shades.”

— Joe Bageant

“Are you free to be anything more than a friend to me? If," and she stressed the if heavily, "I ever decided to live in Avalon and wanted to be with you, would you be free enough to do that?"
He looked away, and Laurel could tell he'd been avoiding a conversation like this.
"Well?" she insisted.
"If you wanted it," he finally said.
"If I wanted it?"
He nodded. "I'm not allowed to ask. You would have to ask me."
Her breath caught in her chest, and Tamani looked at her.
"Why do you think David bothers me so much?"
Laurel looked down at her lap.
"I can't just storm in and proclaim my intentions. I can't 'steal' you away. I just have to wait and hope that, someday, you'll ask."
"And if I don't?" Laurel said, her voice barley above a whisper.
"Then I guess I'll wait forever.”

— Aprilynne Pike

“Today the Somme is a peaceful but sullen place, unforgetting and unforgiving ... To wander now over the fields destined to extrude their rusty metal fragments for centuries is to appreciate in the most intimate way the permanent reverberations of July, 1916. When the air is damp you can smell rusted iron everywhere, even though you see only wheat and barley.”

— Paul Fussell

“The whiter the bread, the quicker you're dead. Stick with barley and spelt.”

— Ken O'Neill

“The carved images on the early Minoan sealstones are tantalising, inscrutable. The Nature Goddess is yanked from the soil like a snake or a sheaf of barley; the Mistress of the Animals suckles goats and gazelles. There are male Adorants certainly - up on tiptoe, their outstretched arms hoisted in a kind of heil, their bodies arched suggestively, pelvis forward, before the Goddess - but there are no masculine deities, not a single one in sight. No woman worth her salt, one might think, could fail to be intrigued.”

— Alison Fell

“And God accepted Abel and rejected Cain. I never thought that was a just thing. I never understood it. Do you?" "Maybe we think out of a different background," said Lee. "I remember that this story was written by and for a shepherd people. They were not farmers. Wouldn't the god of shepherds find a fat lamb more valuable than a sheaf of barley? A sacrifice must be the best and most”

— John Steinbeck

“His sister Kat, her husband, Morgan Williams, have been plucked from this life as fast as his daughters were taken, one day walking and talking and next day cold as stones, tumbled into their Thames-side graves and dug in beyond reach of the tide, beyond sight and smell of the river; deaf now to the sound of Putney's cracked church bell, to the smell of wet ink, of hops, of malted barley, and the scent, still animal, of woolen bales; dead to the autumn aroma of pine resin and apple candles, of soul cakes baking.”

— Hilary Mantel

“For years now I've kind of operated under an informal shopping cycle. A bit like a farmer's crop rotation system. Except, instead of wheat, maize, barley, and fallow, mine pretty much goes clothes, makeup shoes, and clothes (I don't bother with fallow). Shopping is actually very similar to farming a field. You can't keep buying the same thing, you have to have a bit of variety. Otherwise you get bored and stop enjoying yourself.”

— Sophie Kinsella

“I have come to learn about things that intrigue people through their strangeness. But barley did I find myself in you presence than I understood that life is none other than the different manifestations of the universal spirit.”

— Kahlil Gibran

“Integrate at least three of these items into your daily diet to be sure you are eating plenty of whole food. 1. Beans-all kinds: black beans, pinto beans, garbanzo beans, black-eyed peas, lentils 2. Greens-spinach, kale, chards, beet tops, fennel tops 3. Sweet potatoes-don't confuse with yams. 4. Nuts-all kinds: almonds, peanuts, walnuts, sunflower seeds, Brazil nuts, cashews 5. Olive oil-green, extra-virgin is usually the best. Note that olive oil decomposes quickly, so buy no more than a month's supply at a time. 6. Oats-slow-cook or Irish steel-cut are best. 7. Barley-either in soups, as a hot cereal, or”

— Dan Buettner

“He that lives in sin, and looks for happiness hereafter, is like him that soweth cockle and thinks to fill his barn with wheat or barley.”

— John Bunyan

“For the LORD your God is bringing you into a good land- a land with streams and pools of water, with springs flowing in the valleys and hills; a land with wheat and barley, vines and fig trees, pomegranates, olive oil and honey; a land where bread will not be scarce and you will lack nothing; a land where the rocks are iron and you can dig copper out of the hills.”

— Beth Moore

“Tell me about the farm," she pleaded as drops of blood began to appear on her hand.
"The farm?"
"The farm that Finnikin the peasant would have lived on with his bride."
"Evanjalin. That was her name. Did I mention that?"
She laughed through a sob. "No, you didn't."
"They would plant rows upon rows of wheat and barley, and each night they would sit under the stars to admire what they owned. Oh, and they would argue. She believes the money made would be better spent on a horse, and he believes they need a new barn. But then later they would forget all their anger and he would hold her fiercely and never let her go."
"And he'd place marigolds in her hair?" she asked.
He clasped her hands against his and watched her blood seep through the lines of his skin. "And he would love her until the day he died," he said.”

— Melina Marchetta

“Always skip to the pub to enjoy your barley and hops”

— Benny Bellamacina

“Out of the thirty thousand types of edible plants thought to exist on Earth, just eleven-corn, rice, wheat, potatoes, cassava, sorghum, millet, beans, barley, rye, and oats-account for 93 percent of all that humans eat, and every one of them was first cultivated by our Neolithic ancestors.”

— Bill Bryson

“The American woods have been unnerving people for 300 years. The inestimably priggish and tiresome Henry David Thoreau thought nature was splendid, splendid indeed, so long as he could stroll to town for cakes and barley wine, but when he experienced real wilderness, on a vist to Katahdin in 1846, he was unnerved to the cored. This wasn't the tame world of overgrown orchards and sun-dappled paths that passed for wilderness in suburban Concord, Massachusetts, but a forbiggind, oppressive, primeval country that was "grim and wild ... savage and dreary," fit only for "men nearer of kin to the rocks and wild animals than we." The experience left him, in the words of one biographer, "near hysterical.”

— Bill Bryson

“It's odd to see how no one is really human to us until we talk to them and realize there's barley any separation between who we are and who they are.”

— Penelope Douglas

“Saracen had finished his barley and was happily chewing at the corner of a sheet that had been spread across a hedge to dry. He had once discovered a tablecloth, and ever since had been optimistic about the effects of dragging cloths off the top of things.”

— Frances Hardinge

“Egypt is the largest wheat importer in the world. In some part, this is due to irrigation issues and inhospitable climes. Egypt's dependence on wheat is also partially because for decades it has been cheaper to import wheat, corn, soy and barley from the U.S. than to grow it locally.”

— Marcus Samuelsson

“It would not be a good place for the heroine of a modern novel to stay at.  The heroine of a modern novel is always "divinely tall," and she is ever "drawing herself up to her full height."  At the "Barley Mow" she would bump her head against the ceiling each time she did this.”

— Jerome K. Jerome

“Most of what presents itself to us in the marketplace as a product is in truth a web of relationships, between people, yes, but also between ourselves and all the other species on which we still depend. Eating and drinking especially implicate us in the natural world in ways that the industrial economy, with its long and illegible supply chains, would have us forget. The beer in that bottle, I'm reminded as soon as I brew it myself, ultimately comes not from a factory but from nature - from a field of barley snapping in the wind, from a hops vine clambering over a trellis, from a host of invisible microbes feasting on sugars. It took the carefully orchestrated collaboration of three far-flung taxonomic kingdoms - plants, animals, and fungi - to produce that ale. To make it yourself once in a while, to handle the barley and inhale the aroma of hops and yeast, becomes, among other things, a form of observance, a weekend ritual of remembrance.”

— Michael Pollan

“There's plenty of food here," Erik said dismissively. "We have fish traps and eel traps, we net wildfowl and eat well. And the prospect of silver and gold buys a lot of wheat, barley, oats, meat, fish, and ale.”

— Bernard Cornwell

“Derek said Andrew never went to bed before midnight. If we wanted to get him after he was sound asleep, that meant waiting until two.
To my surprise, I fell asleep, so soundly that i didn't hear the alarm on the watch Derek had given me earlier. I woke to Tori shaking me with one hand, while trying to shut off the alarm with the other.
I yawned and blinked hard.
"Running away after you've barley slept in a week isn't a great idea," she said. "Luckily, I anticipated this."
She popped open a can of coke and handed it to me.
"Not as good as coffee," she said. "But I bet you don't drink coffee do you?"
I shook my head as I gulped.
"Kids," she said, rolling her eyes.”

— Kelley Armstrong

“Barley malt has a really deep, rich taste. A lot of manufacturers have switched over to corn syrup over the years because it's a cheaper sweetener, but it doesn't have the flavor.”

— Nell Newman

“The ease with which barley may be substituted directly for wheat in human food and its usefulness to replace wheat milling by-products as feed in the production of the milk supply render its abundant production important.”

— David F. Houston

“Barley, where it succeeds, yields a larger weight of feed per acre than any other small grain crop.”

— David F. Houston

“For drink, there was beer which was very strong when not mingled with water, but was agreeable to those who were used to it. They drank this with a reed, out of the vessel that held the beer, upon which they saw the barley swim.”

— Xenophon

“All I could remember was her smile. Unable to picture the loved face, however strenuously I tried to make myself remember it, I was for ever irritated to find that my memory had retained exact replicas of the striking and futile faces of the roundabout man and the barley-sugar woman, just as the bereaved, who each night search their dreams in vain for the lost beloved, will find their sleep is peopled by all manner of exasperating and unbearable intruders, whom they have always found, even in the waking world, more than dislikable. Faced with the impossibility of seeing clearly the object of their grief, they come close to accusing themselves of not grieving, just as I was tempted to believe that my inability to remember the features of Gilberte's face meant that I had forgotten her and had stopped loving her.”

— Marcel Proust

“The cow, basically, eats three basic things in their feed: corn, beets, and barley, and so what I do is I actually challenge my staff with these crazy, wild ideas. Can we take what the cow eats, remove the cow, and then make some hamburgers out of that?”

— Homaro Cantu

“Bummer," Glo said. "Do you want me to say some words? I'm an ordained minister. I even have a certificate." "What church?" I asked her. "The Church of the Barley Goddess." "I don't think that's a real church." "They have a website," Glo said. "The World Wide Web wouldn't allow them on there if they weren't real.”

— Janet Evanovich

“Old Barley might be as old as thee hills, and might swear like a whole field of troopers, but there were redeeming youth and trust and hope enough in Chinks's Basin to fill it to overflowing.”

— Charles Dickens

“I was raised on T.V. dinners because in those days, they were considered a well-balanced meal. And when I was sick, my mother fed me beef-barley soup and peanut butter sandwiches. That's about it for childhood food memories.”

— Lindsay Wagner

“Katz had read extensively in popular sociobiology, and his understanding of the depressive personality type and its seemingly perverse persistence in the human gene pool was that depression was successful adaptation to ceaseless pain and hardship. Pessimism, feelings of worthlessness and lack of entitlement, inability to derive satisfaction from pleasure, a tormenting awareness of the world's general crappiness: for Katz Jewish paternal forebears, who'd been driven from shtetl to shtetl by implacable anti-Semites, as for the old Angles and Saxons on his mother's side, who'd labored to grow rye and barley in the poor soils and short summers of northern Europe, feeling bad all the time and expecting the worse had been natural ways of equilibriating themselves with the lousiness of their circumstances. Few things gratified depressives, after all, more than really bad news. This obviously wasn't an optimal way to live, but it had its evolutionary advantages.”

— Jonathan Franzen

“For a long moment, while Brock stood off observing them, Ned and Barley appraised one another as only Englishmen can who are of the same height and class and shape of head.”

— John Le Carré

“CIA Interrogator:
Have you ever met any jazz musicians you would describe, or who would describe themselves, as anarchists?
Bartholomew 'Barley' Scott Blair:
Hmmm ... ah, there was a trombone player, Wilfred Baker.
Bartholomew 'Barley' Scott Blair:
He's the only jazz musician I can think of who is completely devoid of anarchist tendencies.”

— John Le Carré

“If there's no sea-gull there's no meeting, Wicklow had said. No sea-gull means abort. That's my epitaph, thought Barley. 'There was no sea-gull, so he aborted.”

— John Le Carré

“The crops, however, I examine closely, to see what each bird has been feeding upon. Clover. Kinnickkinnick. Snowberries. Wheat. Barley. Crickets. Grasshoppers. Fir needles. Huckleberries. Rose hips. The crops filled with snowberries are breathtaking, looking like a clump of pearls, and nearly as rare; it's always a thrill to open a crop and see nothing but beautiful white berries. Usually in these woods, though, in the autumn, the crops are bulging with bright red kinnickkinnick berries, and the bright green leaves from the same bush. Tom and Nancy save the crop from each bird they kill and set it on the windowsill to dry translucent in the sunlight-a globe, a ball, filled with Christmas colors, perfect red and green; and then in December they hang these as ornaments on their tree. For”

— Rick Bass

“Barley and mushroom is a soothing combination. It's mainly a textural thing, with the barley both gently breaking and enhancing the mushroomy gloopiness.”

— Yotam Ottolenghi

“I rarely cook traditional risotto, but I love other grains cooked similarly - barley, spelt or split wheat. I find they have more character than rice and absorb other flavours more wholeheartedly.”

— Yotam Ottolenghi

“Pot barley takes longer to cook than pearl, but an overnight soak in water will speed things along. It's a robust grain that, if overcooked, won't collapse but will become more tender.”

— Yotam Ottolenghi

“Out of 30,000 edible plants thought to exist on earth, just eleven account for 93% of all that humans eat: oats, corn, rice, wheat, potatoes, yucca (also called tapioca or cassava), sorghum, millet, beans, barley, and rye.”

— Daniel Levitin

“The Egyptians became fond of wine and bibulous; and so a way was found among them to help those who could not afford wine, namely, to drink that made from barley; they who took it were so elated that they sang, danced, and acted in every way like persons filled with wine.”

— Athenaeus

“I was very healthy from a young age. I was always known as the healthy kid in my group of friends. My mom had us drink barley-grass powder, and I've taken vitamins and fish oil and multivitamins since I was a kid. My mom just had me doing that for a long, long time. And I enjoy eating healthy. It's not a chore to me to eat healthy food.”

— Blake Griffin

“A field is the most just possession for men. For what nature requires it carefully bears: barley, oil, wine, figs, honey. Silver-plate and purple will do for the tragedians, not for life.”

— Philemon

“One of the products I swear by is Sante Barley.”

— Piolo Pascual

“I was just an infant when [Fannie Lou] Hamer spoke - barley even awake in the world. But here she was, pressing the Democratic Party to refuse to recognize the all-white Mississippi delegation, because obviously there was no way Mississippi could have an all-white delegation. Black people had been kept from registering through violence and intimidation. She had experienced that violence herself and was there to speak about it and to insist the delegation of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party be recognized instead.”

— Leah D. Daughtry

“Only reapers, reaping early In among the bearded barley, Hear a song that echoes cheerly From the river winding clearly, Down to towered Camelot.”

— Alfred Lord Tennyson

“When I was a young man I heard Henry Barley say that the world has yet to see what God can do for a man fully yielded to Him, and I said I wanted to be that man. But I can say today the world has yet to see what God can do with a man fully yielded to Him.”

— Dwight L. Moody

“We've barley stepped into the bright glow of the realms when everything goes dark ...”

— Libba Bray

“Everything depends on the value we give to things. We are the ones who make morality and virtue. The cannibal who eats his neighbor is as innocent as the child who sucks his barley-sugar.”

— Gustave Flaubert