Dakotah Quotes

“We think velocity is new, change is new, and this vast tumult and wave of fear is new. And we are wrong. There has never been firm ground for our lives and our only balm has been a forgetfulness of the changes we have endured.”
― Charles Bowden, Dakotah: The Return of the Future

“My father believed in evolution but held no brief for progress. He decided after close readings that the ancient Greeks had pretty much figured everything out and since then it had just been a cascade of better data, the benefits of tinkering in the mills and ever finer machines. But no one had gotten any closer to the meaning of life, and no one was likely to get any closer because life exists and the meaning is not part of that existence.”
― Charles Bowden, Dakotah: The Return of the Future

“I drive but I am never on the road, only the machine touches asphalt. I am not seeking to discover America. Sometimes I’ll drive five thousand miles to a destination and want to leave as soon as I arrive. I have no purpose on the road, but I have an appetite. Part of it is night, headlights barely sketching out the ground flying past. Also, the tired faces in truck stops at midnight where I sip bad coffee for five minutes. I study the lines at the restroom when a bus stops and the homeless line up for relief. The stale pizza under heat lamps gives off a soft glow of rot.”
― Charles Bowden, Dakotah: The Return of the Future

“I am out there as a child and no one remembers the killing, the plowing, the swing of the ax toppling the trees. It is a picture by Grant Wood of perfect fields and fine farmhouses with lush kitchen gardens near at hand. It is a thing called the heartland without a wild heart. Wood’s work is an artful deception and his canvases —“American Gothic,” “Stone City, Iowa”—capture wounds on the land. When I was a boy his prints hung in farmhouses all over the state and no one ever mentioned that though there is black earth and fine corn in his paintings the people portrayed never seem happy, as if the last train to paradise has already left.”
― Charles Bowden, Dakotah: The Return of the Future

“The winters came early, the rains not often enough, the locusts rose in biblical scale, the land broke hard to the plow, the price for the crops hardly ever enough, the isolation beyond imagination, the long nights forever, and summer sun exploding in their faces and searing their dreams with flames.”
― Charles Bowden, Dakotah: The Return of the Future