The Children's Blizzard Quotes

“But hell is this life we lead now, not later.”
― Melanie benjamin, The Children's Blizzard

“People get tired of constant bad news, they shut it out after a while, become immune to it.”
― Melanie Benjamin, The Children's Blizzard

“For the first time, she understood that conversations didn't always bring about resolution. That people - all people - carried around inside them notions and thoughts and sadness that could not be alleviated simply by talking about them.”
― Melanie Benjamin, The Children's Blizzard

“The Great Plains were immense enough to inspire the grandest, most foolish of dreams - but they were also vast enough that no one could ever explore every corner.”
― Melanie Benjamin, The Children's Blizzard

“Oh, don’t blame your wife! You’re a man, you could have come. But she was right, you should have thought of your family in the first place. I should have, too. I won’t be so silly—so selfish—again. I don’t need you to rescue me anymore, Gunner, and I don’t think I ever really did.”
― Melanie Benjamin, The Children's Blizzard

“A small smudge over there—the bird cruised down to see, hopeful, hungry. But he was disappointed; the smudge did not move. For it was an arm, sticking out of the snow, attached to a body buried beneath. Another odd blot of lifelessness, another, another—the bird took it all in from his aerial vantage point. A yellow hat atop a grey head, eyes frozen shut. A hand, poking out of a drift; a child’s hand, so small, so white, a deathly white, paler than the snow. A wagon wheel, a pale blue dress fluttering out of its spokes, and inside that dress, a lifeless female body. Clothing fluttered, moving, tricking the hawk time and again into thinking it had found its breakfast. Clothing blown off bodies that were now naked to the elements, like the one over there, only a few heartbreaking steps away from a barn. And more small hands, feet, faces upturned, eyes shut tight. That deathly pallor, blue grey against the dazzling white snow. The hawk turned northward, hoping for better hunting grounds. But he was doomed to be disappointed on this cold, sunny morning.”
― Melanie Benjamin, The Children's Blizzard

“But the hawk knew the landscape; there were vast areas of it he avoided due to a scarcity of prey. Land that was overhunted—that land was the Great Sioux Reservation, bordered by the rugged Black Hills on the west, the Missouri River on the east. There, even scrawny squirrels and half-dead rabbits were precious. The smudges there were tepees, made out of fading buffalo hide, clustered together in groups, the groups too close to those from other tribes, but forced, due to the government, to live together. Misery hung over this landscape like a cloud, even on the sunniest day. So he kept to the south, swooping closer to the ground, and finally the peaceful-seeming landscape gave up some secrets. A fence post here, a clump of bushes there, an upturned wagon, haystacks. As his eyes adjusted, however, other secrets were discovered. What seemed like a line of small haystacks were, upon closer inspection as the hawk zeroed in, cows. Unmoving cows, statues; some on their sides, others standing, all frozen where they were. The hawk turned, uninterested, to investigate more dark shapes emerging from the blinding white; horses, their legs collapsed under them, eyes closed forever.”
― Melanie Benjamin, The Children's Blizzard

“Because to him, she was just a silly girl to whom he could do whatever he wanted. Because to him, she was a plaything. There was nothing noble in his devotion. It was vanity—she was a mirror, reassuring him that he was a man who could make a young girl lose her head. A reminder that as a man, he could take whatever he wanted.”
― Melanie Benjamin, The Children's Blizzard

“But as soon as he felt the first blast of ice slap his unprotected face, Gavin thought, once more, of that girl. How many ways could he come up with to describe what happened when young, hopeful—yearning—women were frozen to death out on the prairie? Gavin looked up at the sky, hoping, to his own surprise, to see a break in the clouds, a glimpse of a fading sun. But no such break occurred.”
― Melanie Benjamin, The Children's Blizzard

“The two prepared to head out into the storm that was not letting up, thank God; maybe this thing was going to turn out to be a tragedy, after all!”
― Melanie Benjamin, The Children's Blizzard

“The blizzard, created when an enormous trough of cold air rushing in from the Arctic had met up with an equally enormous influx of warm, wet air from the gulf, gobbled up everything in its path. The collision generated a force of energy no one could remember seeing in their lifetimes, but that all would talk about with wonder until the day they died.”
― Melanie Benjamin, The Children's Blizzard

“Other eyes watched them get off the trains, darker eyes set in darker skin. The tragic eyes of the people whose land this had been.”
― Melanie Benjamin, The Children's Blizzard

“Slowing down enough so that someone could have caught him. And the horse wondered why his owner had not; why the exhausted cries of his name had stopped at some point, so many painful steps back.”
― Melanie Benjamin, The Children's Blizzard