Goodbye to a River Quotes

“Neither a land nor a people ever starts over clean. Country is compact of all its past disasters and strokes of luck–of flood and drouth, of the caprices of glaciers and sea winds, of misuse and disuse and greed and ignorance and wisdom–and though you may doze away the cedar and coax back the bluestem and mesquite grass and side-oats grama, you're not going to manhandle it into anything entirely new. It's limited by what it has been, by what's happened to it. And a people, until that time when it's uprooted and scattered and so mixed with other peoples that it has in fact perished, is much the same in this as land. It inherits.”
― John Graves, Goodbye to a River: A Narrative

“If a man couldn't escape what he came from, we would most of us still be peasants in Old World hovels. But, if, having escaped or not, he wants in some way to know himself, define himself, and tries to do it without taking into account the thing he came from, he is writing without any ink in his pen. The provincial who cultivates only his roots is in peril, potato-like, of becoming more root than plant. The man who cuts his roots away and denies that they were ever connected with him withers into half a man.”
― John Graves, Goodbye to a River: A Narrative

“Sunshine and warm water seem to me to have full meaning only when they come after winter's bite; green is not so green if it doesn't follow the months of brown and gray. And the scheduled inevitable death of green carries its own exhilaration; in that change is the promise of all the rebirths to come, and the deaths, too. ... Without the year's changes, for me, there is little morality.”
― John Graves, Goodbye to a River: A Narrative

“Most autumns, the water is low from the long dry summer, and you have to get out from time to time and wade, leading or dragging your boat through trickling shallows from one pool to the long channel-twisted pool below, hanging up occasionally on shuddering bars of quicksand, making six or eight miles in a day's lazy work, but if you go to the river at all, you tend not to mind. You are not in a hurry there; you learned long since not to be.”
― John Graves, Goodbye to a River: A Narrative

“I would be annoyed if I were any more in tune with modern sensibilities. I was shaped differently. The world in which I grew up was Texan and Southern, and it had many, many failings. I think I've gotten rid of most of the bad things in myself from that earlier age, but I don't adjust to the way things are progressing now.”
― John Graves, Goodbye to a River: A Narrative

“In terms of the outdoors, I and the others like me weren't badly cheated as such cheatings go nowadays, but we were cheated nevertheless. We learned quite a lot, but not enough. Instead of learning to move into country, as I think underneath we wanted, we learned mostly how to move onto it in the old crass Anglo-Saxon way, in search of edible or sometimes just mortal quarry.”
― John Graves, Goodbye to a River: A Narrative

“Some days load themselves with questions whose answers have died, and maybe never mattered hugely”
― John Graves, Goodbye to a River: A Narrative

“One waxes pessimistic? Not so much … There is a pessimism about land which, after it has been with you a long time, becomes merely factual. Men increase; country suffers. Though I sign up with organizations that oppose the process, I sign without great hope.… Islands of wildlife and native flora may be saved, as they should be, but the big, sloppy, rich, teeming spraddle will go. It always has.”
― John Graves, Goodbye to a River: A Narrative

“People make trouble, trouble makes history”
― John Graves, Goodbye to a River: A Narrative

“Mankind is one thing; a man’s self is another. What that self is tangles itself knottily with what his people were, and what they came out of. Mine came out of Texas, as did I. If those were louts, they were my own louts.”
― John Graves, Goodbye to a River: A Narrative

“As you either care about what the land is or not, so do you like or dislike quiet things—sailboats, or rainy green mornings in foreign places, or a grazing herd, or the ruins of old monasteries in mountains.…”
― John Graves, Goodbye to a River: A Narrative

“If it hadn’t been for Mexicans, the South Texas Anglos would never have learned how to cope right with longhorn cattle. If it hadn’t been for Texans, nobody else on the Great Plains would have learned how, either.”
― John Graves, Goodbye to a River: A Narrative

“There is nothing like having a few Mexican Catholics around to dull the spines of the Baptist prickly pear,”
― John Graves, Goodbye to a River: A Narrative

“Where, tell me, is the terror and wonder of an elephant, now that they can be studied placid in every zoo, and any office-dwelling sport with a recent lucky break on the market can buy himself one to shoot through telescopic sights with a cartridge whose ballistics hold a good fileful of recorded science’s findings? With a box gushing refrigerated air (or warmed, seasonally depending) into a sealed house and another box flashing loud bright images into jaded heads, who gives a rat’s damn for things that go bump in the night? With possible death by blast or radiation staring at us like a buzzard, why should we sweat ourselves over where the Eskimo curlew went?”
― John Graves, Goodbye to a River: A Narrative

“Humanism has to speak in the terms of extant human beings. The terms of today’s human beings are air conditioners and suburbs and water impoundments overlaying whole country-sides, and the hell with nature except maybe in a cross-sectional park here and there. In our time quietness and sun and leaves and bird song and all the multitudinous lore of the natural world have to come second or third, because whether we wanted to be born there or not, we were all born into the prickly machine-humming place that man has hung for himself above that natural world.”
― John Graves, Goodbye to a River: A Narrative

“If a man couldn’t escape what he came from, we would most of us still be peasants in Old World hovels. But if, having escaped or not, he wants in some way to know himself, define himself, and tries to do it without taking into account the thing he came from, he is writing without any ink in his pen.”
― John Graves, Goodbye to a River: A Narrative

“The rain thickened; then slacked, then came down again in floods; the night crackled and roared with change and iron cold. Drunk with coziness, the pup wallowed beside me and groaned, and I remember wondering, before I slept, a little more about the relationship of storms to man … If, being animal, we ring like guitar strings to nature’s furies, what hope can there be for our ultimate, planned peacefulness?”
― John Graves, Goodbye to a River: A Narrative

“You could drink the truth in its purity if you went to the source”
― John Graves, Goodbye to a River: A Narrative

“It takes time for the habit of people to wear off of you”
― John Graves, Goodbye to a River: A Narrative

“He was also a good friend and an old one and the best kind of company.”
― John Graves, Goodbye to a River: A Narrative