Sam Anderson > Quotes

“The Land Run should be called something like “Chaos Explosion Apocalypse Town” or “Reckoning of the DoomSettlers: Clusterfuck on the Prairie.”
― Sam Anderson, Boom Town: The Fantastical Saga of Oklahoma City, Its Chaotic Founding, Its Apocalyptic Weather, Its Purloined Basketball Team, and the Dream of Becoming a World-class Metropolis

“Imperial is like Robert Caro’s The Power Broker with the attitude of Mike Davis’s City of Quartz, if Robert Caro had been raised in an abandoned grain silo by a band of feral raccoons, and if Mike Davis were the communications director of a heavily armed libertarian survivalist cult, and if the two of them had somehow managed to stitch John McPhee’s cortex onto the brain of a Gila monster, which they then sent to the Mexican border to conduct ten years of immersive research, and also if they wrote the entire manuscript on dried banana leaves with a toucan beak dipped in hobo blood, and then the book was line-edited during a 36-hour peyote séance by the ghosts of John Steinbeck, Jack London, and Sinclair Lewis, with 200 pages of endnotes faxed over by Henry David Thoreau’s great-great-great-great grandson from a concrete bunker under a toxic pond behind a maquiladora, and if at the last minute Herman Melville threw up all over the manuscript, rendering it illegible, so it had to be re-created from memory by a community-theater actor doing his best impression of Jack Kerouac. With photographs by Dorothea Lange. (Viking has my full blessing to use that as a blurb.)”
― Sam Anderson - NY Magazine

“Cities are not microwave popcorn. Unless you are talking, as we are, about Oklahoma City. Oklahoma City is microwave popcorn.”
― Sam Anderson, Boom Town: The Fantastical Saga of Oklahoma City, Its Chaotic Founding, Its Apocalyptic Weather, Its Purloined Basketball Team, and the Dream of Becoming a World-class Metropolis

“Oklahoma City has chaos in its DNA.”
― Sam Anderson, Boom Town: The Fantastical Saga of Oklahoma City, Its Chaotic Founding, Its Apocalyptic Weather, Its Purloined Basketball Team, and the Dream of Becoming a World-class Metropolis

“Oklahoma’s ultra Conservative government after years of aggressive tax cuts even during the boom years had been corrupted the state. Social services, mental health programs, public transportation and infrastructure were all in various stages of collapse. The public education budget was stripped so bear that teachers had started flooding out to neighbouring states in search of living wages, forcing Oklahoma to patch the gaps by issuing hundreds of emergency teaching licenses and even cutting some of the school back to 4 days a week. It was a radical experiment in ante government governance and it was failing miserably. In 2014, Oklahoma botched an execution so badly that it horrified the entire world. The state was becoming what it used to be: a nowhere place that occasionally erupted with very bad reviews, a kind of grim American joke.”
― Sam Anderson, Boom Town: The Fantastical Saga of Oklahoma City, Its Chaotic Founding, Its Apocalyptic Weather, Its Purloined Basketball Team, and the Dream of Becoming a World-class Metropolis

“The most interesting answer is not just that we can’t stop tornadoes but that we shouldn’t. This was the answer I got from Greg Carbin, one of the wind geniuses at the Storm Prediction Center in Norman. “Why can’t we stop tornadoes?” I asked. “Well, what is the purpose of a tornado?” he responded. It had never occurred to me that a storm had anything as grand as a purpose. Consider a hurricane, Carbin said. It acts as a kind of air conditioner for the planet, pushing excess heat from the equator off toward the poles. Similarly, he said, a tornado releases pent-up instability. “In the process of that turning,” Carbin told me, “there’s something that the atmosphere is releasing, or relaxing. So if you could eliminate tornadoes, what does that mean? How does the atmosphere react to the fact that you’ve now suppressed this natural phenomenon? It’s going to manifest itself in some other way.”
― Sam Anderson, Boom Town: The Fantastical Saga of Oklahoma City, Its Chaotic Founding, Its Apocalyptic Weather, Its Purloined Basketball Team, and the Dream of Becoming a World-class Metropolis

“A French hot air balloonist planned to hover just over Oklahoma until noon, then descend onto his favorite spot before anyone else had a chance.”
― Sam Anderson, Boom Town: The Fantastical Saga of Oklahoma City, Its Chaotic Founding, Its Apocalyptic Weather, Its Purloined Basketball Team, and the Dream of Becoming a World-class Metropolis

“Most places have one sky. Oklahoma city has about 12.”
― Sam Anderson, Boom Town: The Fantastical Saga of Oklahoma City, Its Chaotic Founding, Its Apocalyptic Weather, Its Purloined Basketball Team, and the Dream of Becoming a World-class Metropolis

“The engineers are in charge,” he told me. “They’re not broad-thinking people. In their mind, their job is only to move traffic. They’ll have cars running from one end of the country to the other, and they’ll just drop them off in the Atlantic or the Pacific Ocean.”
― Sam Anderson, Boom Town: The Fantastical Saga of Oklahoma City, Its Chaotic Founding, Its Apocalyptic Weather, Its Purloined Basketball Team, and the Dream of Becoming a World-class Metropolis

“the ultimate proof that Kevin Durant was nice, the strongest case for his sainthood, was his ability to tolerate Russell Westbrook.”
― Sam Anderson, Boom Town: The Fantastical Saga of Oklahoma City, Its Chaotic Founding, Its Apocalyptic Weather, Its Purloined Basketball Team, and the Dream of Becoming a World-class Metropolis

“This was a place whose newspaper published not only a daily prayer on its front page but near-constant caricatures of an idiotic Barack Obama on its editorial page, and where a six-foot-tall granite monument of the Ten Commandments would soon be erected next to the state capitol.”
― Sam Anderson, Boom Town: The Fantastical Saga of Oklahoma City, Its Chaotic Founding, Its Apocalyptic Weather, Its Purloined Basketball Team, and the Dream of Becoming a World-class Metropolis

“The connection between basketball and the bombing may seem like a stretch.”
― Sam Anderson, Boom Town: The Fantastical Saga of Oklahoma City, Its Chaotic Founding, Its Apocalyptic Weather, Its Purloined Basketball Team, and the Dream of Becoming a World-class Metropolis

“It’s unclear, in fact, what part of the country Oklahoma actually belongs to. It is spoken of, variously, as part of the Southwest, Midwest, Bible Belt, and Heartland. It’s easier to say what it is not: it’s not the arid West or the frigid North or the humid South or the old-world East. Instead, it is precisely where all of those things meet.”
― Sam Anderson, Boom Town: The Fantastical Saga of Oklahoma City, Its Chaotic Founding, Its Apocalyptic Weather, Its Purloined Basketball Team, and the Dream of Becoming a World-class Metropolis

“the ruined building would pop into his”
― Sam Anderson, Boom Town: The Fantastical Saga of Oklahoma City, Its Chaotic Founding, Its Apocalyptic Weather, Its Purloined Basketball Team, and the Dream of Becoming a World-class Metropolis

“His personal motto, which he was glad to repeat at any time, for any reason, was a bit of Yoda-like egalitarianism: “Hard work beats talent when talent fails to work hard.”
― Sam Anderson, Boom Town: The Fantastical Saga of Oklahoma City, Its Chaotic Founding, Its Apocalyptic Weather, Its Purloined Basketball Team, and the Dream of Becoming a World-class Metropolis

“If a Starbucks drink could be a church, it would be LifeChurch.TV”
― Sam Anderson, Boom Town: The Fantastical Saga of Oklahoma City, Its Chaotic Founding, Its Apocalyptic Weather, Its Purloined Basketball Team, and the Dream of Becoming a World-class Metropolis

“Destiny, sometimes, will agree to look the other way until the details match up with its grand plan.”
― Sam Anderson, Boom Town: The Fantastical Saga of Oklahoma City, Its Chaotic Founding, Its Apocalyptic Weather, Its Purloined Basketball Team, and the Dream of Becoming a World-class Metropolis

“You don't get to bargain with me, motherfucker.”
― Sam Anderson, Boom Town: The Fantastical Saga of Oklahoma City, Its Chaotic Founding, Its Apocalyptic Weather, Its Purloined Basketball Team, and the Dream of Becoming a World-class Metropolis

“Oklahoma's state government was, by this point, unbelievably dysfunctional, and the state's infrastructure was the worst in the nation, and the roads and bridges were crumbling everywhere.”
― Sam Anderson, Boom Town: The Fantastical Saga of Oklahoma City, Its Chaotic Founding, Its Apocalyptic Weather, Its Purloined Basketball Team, and the Dream of Becoming a World-class Metropolis

“Harden “won Sixth Man of the Year the way Freddie Mercury would’ve won a small town dive bar’s Wednesday night karaoke contest.”
― Sam Anderson, Boom Town: The Fantastical Saga of Oklahoma City, Its Chaotic Founding, Its Apocalyptic Weather, Its Purloined Basketball Team, and the Dream of Becoming a World-class Metropolis

“You knew a storm was going to be bad, Oklahomans would say, when Gary England took off his jacket.”
― Sam Anderson, Boom Town: The Fantastical Saga of Oklahoma City, Its Chaotic Founding, Its Apocalyptic Weather, Its Purloined Basketball Team, and the Dream of Becoming a World-class Metropolis

“It is a place where a golden geodesic dome sits down the street from a tiny building with a giant milk bottle on its roof, where a thin-shell concrete retro-futuristic church is known affectionately, to certain locals, as the City Titty.”
― Sam Anderson, Boom Town: The Fantastical Saga of Oklahoma City, Its Chaotic Founding, Its Apocalyptic Weather, Its Purloined Basketball Team, and the Dream of Becoming a World-class Metropolis

“For the purposes of this book, and with apologies to Charleston, Austin, the Portlands, Fort Worth, Indianapolis, Chattanooga, Charlotte, Memphis, San Antonio, and of course Seattle (always special apologies to Seattle), Oklahoma City is the great minor city of America.”
― Sam Anderson, Boom Town: The Fantastical Saga of Oklahoma City, Its Chaotic Founding, Its Apocalyptic Weather, Its Purloined Basketball Team, and the Dream of Becoming a World-class Metropolis

“Oklahoma City is tiny and huge at the same time.”
― Sam Anderson, Boom Town: The Fantastical Saga of Oklahoma City, Its Chaotic Founding, Its Apocalyptic Weather, Its Purloined Basketball Team, and the Dream of Becoming a World-class Metropolis

“It was a war zone, the very definition of a triage situation, and some victims were so badly hurt they had to be allowed to die.”
― Sam Anderson, Boom Town: The Fantastical Saga of Oklahoma City, Its Chaotic Founding, Its Apocalyptic Weather, Its Purloined Basketball Team, and the Dream of Becoming a World-class Metropolis

“Oklahoma was overrun, at various times, by dinosaurs, mammoths, rhinos, horses, and camels, all running wild, eating and mating, owning the land outright. Again, to someone who knows only modern Oklahoma City, to someone who has watched a tennis shoe float down the Bricktown Canal past Toby Keith’s I This Bar & Grill, none of this will seem possible.”
― Sam Anderson, Boom Town: The Fantastical Saga of Oklahoma City, Its Chaotic Founding, Its Apocalyptic Weather, Its Purloined Basketball Team, and the Dream of Becoming a World-class Metropolis