Thomas Isern > Thomas's Quotes

“In Conclusion, let us inquire what has been and what is to be the Meaning of the Great Plains in American Life”
― Walter P. Webb

“We agreed that no one who had not grown up in a little prairie town could know anything about it. It was a kind of freemasonry, we said.”
― Willa Cather

“Once in his life a man ought to concentrate his mind upon the remembered earth. He ought to give himself up to a particular landscape in his experience; to look at it from as many angles as he can, to wonder about it, to dwell upon it. He ought to imagine that he touches it with his hands at every season and listens to the sounds that are made upon it. He ought to imagine the creatures there and all the faintest motions of the wind. He ought to recollect the glare of the moon and the colors of the dawn and dusk.”
― N. Scott Momaday

“For history is a pontoon bridge. Every man walks and works at its building end, and has come as far as he has over the pontoons laid by others he may never have heard of.”
― Wallace Stegner

“Why not a new village of farmers, citizens of the world through schools and radio and space-consuming transportation, grouped together in friendly sociability, building directly upon the soil?”
― Angie Debo

“So far as the great Northwest is concerned there is no more "Great American Desert." The phrase has given place in modern geography to "The Bread Basket of the World." . . . These lands are capable of sustaining a great population. A great population will occupy them.”
― Daniel W. Willard

“Mountains are all right, I guess, because you can get on top of them and get a good view of the plains.”
― Thomas D. Isern

“There was nothing but land; not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made.”
― Willa Cather, My Ántonia

“In general the assumption of all of us, child or adult, was that this was a new country and that a new country had no history. History was something that applied to other places.”
― Wallace Stegner, Wolf Willow

“I may not know who I am, but I know where I am from.”
― Wallace Stegner, Wolf Willow