Prairie Silence Quotes

“Dad never missed a day of work, regardless of how late he had been out the night before. The intensity of Dad’s dependability, I have always thought, has something to do with an almost genetically present sense of duty in people who work the land.”
― Melanie Hoffert, Prairie Silence: A Memoir

“This is a difficult question for me to answer. Somehow I want to explain to them that the land is beautiful, beyond their imagination. But I am stopped, like when I bring my city friends back to the farm. When the houses thin and we are eventually surrounded by nothingness I suddenly lose my vision. The world looks bleak, flat, unpromising, and colorless. I start apologizing as if I had dragged them to an empty art gallery. “The view is kind of ugly this time of year,” I’ll say.”
― Melanie Hoffert, Prairie Silence: A Memoir

“As a child when I visited my grandparents near the Bighorn Mountains in Wyoming I felt claustrophobic. The mountains seemed to block the sky and my eyes were forced to stop, when they were used to looking for miles across flat fields that didn’t end, but simply rolled up into the sky.”
― Melanie Hoffert, Prairie Silence: A Memoir

“This history argument holds absolutely no weight with my dad. He’s not sentimental in this way, does not linger on the past. Old stuff, in Dad’s mind, means less efficiency, more work, more to repair. But for me the barn is what makes the farm so—“farm-y.”
― Melanie Hoffert, Prairie Silence: A Memoir