House of Rain Quotes

“I grew up in motion. I have never lived outside the Southwest, yet in my childhood I rarely had the same home or lived in the same state for more than a year or two at a time. Well before adulthood I believed that all was right with the world only when I was standing at the brink of every possibility, a voyage not yet taken unraveling before me.”
― Craig Childs, House of Rain: Tracking a Vanished Civilization Across the American Southwest

“One small cloud had passed while we were out walking earlier in the day. It had dragged a quarter acre of shade across the desert, and we had set off chasing it, sprinting to catch up so we could get under its shade. Before we got there, the cloud lifted its skirt and sailed off, evaporating into nothing. We were left empty-handed, my oiled hat brim wilted in the sun.”
― Craig Childs, House of Rain: Tracking a Vanished Civilization Across the American Southwest

“I turned off my light in the back of the cave. I closed my eyes. It felt as if all these centuries, these thousands of years, were contained here, their processions playing out again and again as drips strummed the pool beside me. The same routes are traveled repeatedly, the same meridians followed across horizons, over hundreds of years. Anasazi, I thought, was never a people. It was a rhythm, a form of motion stirred up from the land. People merely fell into step.”
― Craig Childs, House of Rain: Tracking a Vanished Civilization Across the American Southwest

“I turned off my light in the back of the cave. I closed my eyes. It felt as if all these centuries, these thousands of years, were contained here, their processions playing out again and again as drips strummed the pool beside me. The same routes are traveled repeatedly, the same meridians followed across horizons, over hundreds of years. Anasazi, I thought, was never a people. It was a rhythm, a form of motion stirred up from the land. People merely fell into”
― Craig Childs, House of Rain: Tracking a Vanished Civilization Across the American Southwest

“Two richly dressed skeletons were discovered lying on a bed of fifty-six thousand pieces of turquoise, surrounded by fine ceramic vessels, and covered by a sheet of ivory-colored shells imported from the ocean six hundred miles away.”
― Craig Childs, House of Rain: Tracking a Vanished Civilization Across the American Southwest