p. 10 That's why we stay in business – facts are important to us, but understandings are vital. We inject a high percentage of understandings in our rag and we're asking you to help us on our next big project.
p. 42 [The Pawnee Buttes] were extraordinary, these two sentinels of the plains. Visible for miles in each direction, they guarded a bleak and silent empire.
p. 70 Mammals, unlike reptiles, had some capacity for memory, and as the trek to the northwest continued, the chestnut felt sorrow and the loss if his mate and the colt, but the recollection did not last long, and he was soon preoccupied with the problems of the journey.
p. 103 The vast plains had a nobility that would never diminish, for they were a challenge, with their duststorms, their wild blizzards, their tornadoes and their endless promise, if men treated them with respect. They were a resource inexhaustible in their variety but demanding in their love. In they years ahead they would terrify easterners and Europeans afraid of loneliness, but they would be a haven for all who understood them, and they would be loved in contrary ways and with harsh curses. The great plains – illimitable in both challenge and fulfillment.
p. 160 There was the tamed elk, too, that stayed about the camp in the north and the sounds of coyotes along the Arkansas when [the Arapaho] were planning to fight the Comanche, and the sandy places where the children played. They had possessed a universe of endless horizons and sunsets blazing with golden fire.
p. 275 They spent a good deal of time dissecting what a girl like Elly, an orphan with no prospects and less than mediocre looks, would have to do to catch a man like one of the rich Zendts, and Laura Lou concluded, "I think men like to be loved. Just loved."
p. 303 ...and in that moment the Zendts knew what moving west meant – the awful loneliness, the burden of rifles, the strange rivers flowing swift with mud, the unknown Indians lurking, the long, long trails with no homes and no lights at dusk. They had barely started; over half the continent lay ahead...
p. 482 Nate asked, 'Are they givin' that [14-year-old] boy whiskey?' and Poteet said, 'Three things a man's got to learn to handle – a gun, a glass of whiskey, and a girl. He don't learn by readin'.'
p. 493 In these last days Jim had his first good chance to study the plains of Colorado, and everything he saw pleased him: the golden-brown color, the gently rising sweeps, the hidden swales, the rounded hills, the limitless horizon darkening at the edges, and day after day of cloudless sky, an arc of blue enclosing an untouched paradise.
p. 494 God, he wished he could ride forever with these men. Just keep riding toward some distant horizon behind which the Comanche and the Kansans and the unfordable rivers lay. But it could not be. Trails end, and companies of men fall apart.
p. 584 'Back east, wherever you look, you see something. The world crowds in on you. I can't tell you how homesick I got for the prairies, where a man can look for miles and not see anything ... not feel crowded. Out here the human being is important ... not a lot of trees and buildings.'
p. 619 She cut him off. 'Here in Chicago it doesn't matter if you're an Indian. Life is better when no one knows who you are.' The bleakness of such reasoning was so contrary to the warm love he had known on that Texas farm with his mother, and so alien to the friendships he had experienced on the trail north with Poteet that he could not accept it. 'You must come home. Where people love you,' he pleaded.
p. 622 Life in western America had a majesty, and the memory of it possessed her.
p. 733 ...and the character of a society depends more upon what men thing of themselves than upon what they really are.
p. 828 'The earth gives you nothing, Morgan. It simply sits there and waits. It neither loves you nor hates you, but it does cooperate with men who are not afraid.'
p. 853 Garrett had assembled various theories about this American preference for isolation. When a Pilgrim was thrown onto the shore at Plymouth he faced only wilderness, and from it each man had chopped out his own little kingdom. He had to wrestle with loneliness, learn to live with it and overcome it. If he could not do this, he could not survive. Traipsing off to the town meeting was not the basic characteristic of New England life; it was going back afterward to the loneliness of one's own cottage.
p. 864 Masterpieces are like that; they require an active participation and offer nothing to those who are unwilling to contribute.
p. 908 'I could live anywhere in America ... anywhere in the world, I suppose ... But I keep livin' in that old clapboard house my grandpappy built. You know why? A man needs roots. Specially a singin' man tryin' to catch at the heart of people. He needs to know where his pappy worked and which families his mom did washin' for. When he walks down the street it's got to be his street....'
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