PrairyErth Quotes

“Suddenly, over the slope, as if tethered to a cord of air drawing quickly upward, came a Northern Harrier, motionless but for its rising. So still was the bird - wings, tail, head - it might have been a museum specimen. Then, as if atop the wind, it slid down the ridge, tilted a few times, veered, tacked up the hill, its wings hardly shifting. I though, if I could be that hawk for one hour I'd never again be just a man.”
― William Least Heat Moon, PrairyErth

“When the Populist congressman "Sockless" Simpson of Medicine Lodge, Kansas, misspelled his hometown while running for office, he said, "I wouldn't give a tinker's durn for a man who can't spell a word more than one way.”
― William Least Heat Moon, PrairyErth

“whether lack of privacy isn’t the worst thing about a small town, and she says, And also the best. I love going to the post office in the morning and knowing everybody. The only time we honk a car horn is with a wave. It’s touching when somebody asks about my son or my dad’s health. We can’t afford not to care about other people in a place this small. Our survival, in a way, depends on minimizing privacy because the lack of it draws us into each other’s lives, and that’s a major resource in a little town where there aren’t a thousand entertainments. There’s an elderly man who lost his little granddaughter to a drunk, a hit-and-run driver, a few months ago. Every time the old gentleman comes into the Emma Chase, he retells the story, and every time people listen. What’s that worth to a person? Or to a community? A café like this serves to bond us.”
― William Least Heat-Moon, PrairyErth: A Deep Map

“On the prairie, upright sturdy things, like fenceposts, acquire an importance they rarely have in wooded country. Out here they become reminders that you are, despite having seen no other person for a couple of hours, not entirely alone: a fencepost implies a landowner, someone somewhere nearby to look after it and whatever it protects. Barbed”
― William Least Heat-Moon, PrairyErth: A Deep Map