Timothy Egan · 312 pages
Rating: (37.4K votes)
“Of all the countries in the world, we Americans have been the greatest destroyers of land of any race of people barbaric or civilized," Bennett said in a speech at the start of the dust storms. What was happening, he said, was "sinister", a symptom of "our stupendous ignorance.”
“Much of Texas took its prohibition seriously. Not Dalhart. It took its whiskey seriously, in part because some of the finest corn liquor in America was coming out of the High Plains.”
“So cotton growers, siphoning from the Ogallala, get three billion dollars a year in taxpayer money for fiber that is shipped to China, where it is used to make cheap clothing sold back to American chain retail stores like Wal-Mart.”
“Rioting over food: how could this be? Here was all this grain, food enough to feed half the world, sitting in piles at the train station, going to waste. Something was out of balance.”
“At the wedding, women served a dish of cabbage that had been shredded by wooden kraut cutters, mixed with ground pork and onion, wrapped in bread dough, and baked.”
“Of all the countries in the world, we Americans have been the greatest destroyers of land of any race of people barbaric or civilized,” Bennett said in a speech at the start of the dust storms. What was happening, he said, was “sinister,” a symptom of “our stupendous ignorance.”
“Of all the countries in the world, we Americans have been the greatest destroyers of land of any race of people barbaric or civilized,”
“The villainous sun and the starved bank did not seem related—yet.”
“The name Oklahoma is a combination of two Choctaw words— okla, which means "people,”
“Going to the outhouse was an ordeal, a wade through shoulder-high drifts, forced to dig to make forward progress.”
“Of all the countries in the world, we Americans have been the greatest destroyers of land of any race of people barbaric or civilized," Bennett said in a speech at the start of the dust storms. What was happening, he said, was "sinister," a symptom of "our stupendous ignorance.”
“It struck me that there would always be a part of him that didn’t (and shouldn’t) belong to me. It’s all too easy to think that the people you care about go into some kind of suspended animation when you’re not around. That they only truly come to life when they’re with you, and don’t really exist without you. I mean, you know that’s not true (you’re not stupid, after all), but that other part of their life is kind of irrelevant – to you at least.”
“The only good thing was that by midnight, even most of the bums had gone home to sleep it off. That was lucky for them, because Ray was the worst damn driver I’d ever seen. And that was after I jerked his head out of the duffel and parked it on the dashboard.
“Gah! That makes it worse!” he told me, as I tried to get the eyes facing forward.
“How can it possibly be worse?”
“Because I got double vision now! Get it off! Get it off!”
He batted at his own head and succeeded in sending it tumbling into Christine’s lap. She immediately went into hysterics and slapped it away. The head fell out of the car; Ray hit the brakes and we came to a screeching halt.
“What are you doing?” I screeched, as he hopped out. “There are people firing at us!”
“Tough!” came from somewhere under the car.”
“If an object - a star, for instance, like our own sun - is eight hundred light years away from the Earth, it would take light leaving that object eight hundred years until it reached our eyes. So when you look at that object, you are seeing it as it appeared eight hundred light years ago, not as it looks today. It might not even exist anymore. Every time you look up at the stars, you are looking into the past.”
“I'm coming to believe that there are two kinds of people... those who choose to be masters of their own fate and those who wait in chairs while other dance. I would rather be one of the former than the latter.”
“If you ignore little things, they become big problems.”
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