The process of manually gathering residual crops from the field after formal harvesting is finished. The Old Testament establishes gleaning as a right of the poor, and it was widely practiced in agrarian communities in most European countries.
Gleaning Quotes in Harvest
The Harvest quotes below are all either spoken by Gleaning or refer to Gleaning. For each quote, you can also see the other terms and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 3
Quotes
We know we ought to make amends for shearing her. That’s why she’s standing there, awaiting us. She’s asking us to witness what we’ve done […] For a moment, the temper of the barn is not that she has shamed our evening but that we’ve found our Gleaning Queen.
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Chapter 4
Quotes
The moment is always a rousing one. Our labors are condensed to this: a dozen tokens of our bread and drink, each tucked and swaddled in the oval of a grain, and sitting on a child’s undamaged skin. What should we do but toss our hats and cheer?
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Chapter 13
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I’ll not forget her blowing on the grains to winnow off the flake and how the barley pearls were weighty on her palm. But now she is like chaff herself. A sneeze could lift her up and take her off. She’s hollowed out and terrified.
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