Ted Conover > Quotes

“...what I'm getting at is like the distinction between tourist and a traveler. The tourist experience is superficial and glancing. The traveler develops a deeper connection with her surroundings. She is more invested in them -- the traveler stays longer, makes her own plans, chooses her own destination, and usually travels alone: solo travel and solo participation, although the most difficult emotionally, seem the most likely to produce a good story.”
― Ted Conover

“...required for good fiction: character, conflict, change through time. And if you're really blessed, you get resolution. But life doesn't usually work out that way.”
― Ted Conover

“Roads remain the essential network of the non-virtual world. They are the infrastructure upon which almost all other infrastructure depends. They are the paths of human endeavor.”
― Ted Conover

“Another change in our lifetime is a reassessment of humankind's relationship with nature. Ideas of dominating the natural world, of taming and subjecting it to the human will, are in retreat as Americans, with some foot-dragging, join other countries in responding to climate change, a crisis that our country, in producing so much carbon dioxide, has had such a big hand in creating.”
― Ted Conover, Cheap Land Colorado: Off-Gridders at America's Edge

“Among the tramps were some real bruisers, that was certain, but there were also men who had been badly bruised.”
― Ted Conover, Rolling Nowhere: Riding the Rails with America's Hoboes

“The scientist (Arvind Panjabi) concluded by sharing some steps ordinary people could take to help birds, such as keeping cats indoors, marking windows so birds won't crash into them, reducing the size of lawns and growing native plants, and watching birds and sharing what you see.”
― Ted Conover, Cheap Land Colorado: Off-Gridders at America's Edge

“All strength is born of association,” wrote Beaumont, “and 30 individuals united through perpetual communication, by ideas, by plans in common, by concerted schemes, have more real power than 900 whose isolation makes them weak.”
― Ted Conover, Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing

“One metric of a good life, in my book, is the number of interesting situations one can engage in, learn from, hang out with.”
― Ted Conover, Cheap Land Colorado: Off-Gridders at America's Edge

“Often they are mentioned in the same breath as drugs that are smuggled across, or terrorists that might try to be. What crosses the border is dangerous; the Southwest is our 'exposed flank.' There is a nagging fear that we've gone to sleep with the back door unlocked.

"In Mexico the migration is less imagined and more concrete. It's something people from the poorest and most remote corners of the republic have participated in for years -- at least as far back as 1848, when the United States, through the Mexican War and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, acquired nearly half of their country, stranding many Mexican nationals in a foreign land. Then, as now, migration has been recognized to be a two-way street, of people leaving home for a while, working, and then mainly returning home. The relatively fast pace of American industrialization, coupled with Mexico's economic and demographic crises, has accelerated the movement north. Today, if you are among the majority of Mexicans -- those with very little money -- working in the United States is not merely something you hear about, but something you might consider. It is one of life's few options.”
― Ted Conover, Coyotes: A Journey Across Borders With America's Mexican Migrants

“Instead of an American suburb circa the 1970's, I was headed in winter, to the far margins to live among the self-sufficient, the alienated, the smokers, the wounded, the dreamers and the hermits.”
― Ted Conover, Cheap Land Colorado: Off-Gridders at America's Edge

“We all screw up, we just have to strive for better. I owe a lot of my success in life to being able to forgive...myself." - person living in San Luis Valley”
― Ted Conover, Cheap Land Colorado: Off-Gridders at America's Edge

“When the conversation next turned to a custody issue she was having, it carried me away from feelings of prairie freedom to a sadder, more universal world of poor people’s pain.”
― Ted Conover, Cheap Land Colorado: Off-Gridders at America's Edge