from Terry Southern's The Sun and Still-Born Stars

Sid and Sarah were of a line of unimaginative, one-acre farmers who very often had not owned the land they worked, and whose life’s spring was less connected to the proverbial love of the land than twisted somehow around a vague acceptance of work, God’s will and the hopeless, unsurprising emptiness of life. The only book in their little house was the Bible, which they never read.