The Trackers Quotes

“And also, I said, the weirdest thing about the Constitution was that apparently the founding fathers had wanted a third of the government to be unelected and lifelong and therefore uncorrectably corrupt.”
― Charles Frazier, The Trackers

“The mood I was in, I saw the large sweep of America's history as Florida's assault on civilization.”
― Charles Frazier, The Trackers

“After Florida—a state equivalent to a hot towel from somebody else’s bath flung sopping across your face—Wyoming felt clean and brittle,”
― Charles Frazier, The Trackers

“The weather didn’t feel different, but the light did. It fell at an angle that carried a thin and brittle sadness, the sense of an ending.”
― Charles Frazier, The Trackers

“She’d said one night, I don’t think about the past much. I try to take each day as it presents itself and let sleep put it away before the next sunrise.”
― Charles Frazier, The Trackers

“THE WATER MRS. ORSON BROUGHT was a shade off clear. It tasted like sulfur and rust, a little like sucking a cut finger.”
― Charles Frazier, The Trackers

“Looking now, I realized the missing element—and it was down in a deep crater—was the violence of the West. Not so much the physical geography, but the violence inherent in the concept of the West,”
― Charles Frazier, The Trackers

“grasshopper sparrow.”
― Charles Frazier, The Trackers

“The Making of a Fresco. Rivera”
― Charles Frazier, The Trackers

“Rivera’s paintings, and Benton’s, are about something solid. The struggle and strength of the underclass, the power and bulk of their muscles on the wall representing the power of their spirit, of their souls, to endure and survive.”
― Charles Frazier, The Trackers

“draft a plan to move the capital. My first choice would be Lander. Hell, even Casper would be better than Cheyenne. But Casper would open its own can of worms, if you know what I mean. Or maybe I’d have some fun and piss almost everybody off and propose moving it to Jackson.”
― Charles Frazier, The Trackers

“sitting in front of the Golden Gate made me think that if we, meaning our culture, could make this bridge-sculpture right now, bad off and broke as we were, then surely we could do almost anything, and we could do it gracefully, powerfully, beautifully, and functionally.”
― Charles Frazier, The Trackers

“Wiltson, every time you open your mouth, it's like you're competing against yourself to say something stupider than yesterday. And you always win.”
― Charles Frazier, The Trackers

“Nearly four in the morning, sitting there with a handful of other sleepy drunk folks, Eve singing lullabies in a pool of light in a dark room, I felt myself doing exactly what many had done before me. Falling.”
― Charles Frazier, The Trackers

“Girls so young living on the road looked either forlorn, like prey for the nearest predator, or so hard and self-contained they could put a knapped flint blade through the rib cage of a wolf.”
― Charles Frazier, The Trackers

“KOMO and KJR are so strong and close you could probably pick them up by sticking a nail in your mouth and clamping it between your teeth.”
― Charles Frazier, The Trackers

“Life’s like a movie, one direction. Forward.”
― Charles Frazier, The Trackers

“THAT FIRST WEEK IN SEPTEMBER had been unquestionably summer. Then a front pushed in over the mountains from the northwest, but not nearly as dramatic as Faro’s story. A couple of gray windy days with falling temperatures, and then the sky cleared to a hard brilliant blue, and it was immediately autumn, as if the aspens on the lower slopes of the mountains began turning yellow at one precise moment.”
― Charles Frazier, The Trackers

“prompted by the time of year and the place. September high plains along the edge of the Rockies, specifically the Wind River Range and the Absarokas.”
― Charles Frazier, The Trackers

“J. L. Howard’s California Industrial Scenes.”
― Charles Frazier, The Trackers

“a trio of trackers—two Crow guides and John Colter. In planning I had wanted those three figures to give the mural its title”
― Charles Frazier, The Trackers

“Raw eggs are for the paint. You separate the whites from the yolks and discard the whites and pat the yolks dry with a cloth and then mix the yolks with dry pigment to make the paint. Tempera can last thousands of years.”
― Charles Frazier, The Trackers

“The mood I was in, I saw the large sweep of American history as Florida's assault on civilization.”
― Charles Frazier, The Trackers

“After all, the ultimate expression of capitalism is not Democracy. It’s a dictatorship not of individual men but of corporations with interchangeable leaders. I wasn’t sure if the Depression was straining the structural limits of our Constitution or simply revealing that its fundamental ideas were faulty. Those revolutionaries of old had left so much space in their documents, so much fog and vagueness. Like scribing a draft and getting a laugh imagining people in the future trying to figure out what in hell they meant.”
― Charles Frazier, The Trackers

“I walked along the sand road thinking about fields of magnetism or gravity dragging at us and shoving at us, blind forces we like to believe have meaning and sometimes call fate or destiny”
― Charles Frazier, The Trackers

“giornata—finally read, Ten-thousand-foot blue.”
― Charles Frazier, The Trackers

“Looking now, I realized the missing element—and it was down in a deep crater—was the violence of the West. Not so much the physical geography, but the violence inherent in the concept of the West, the politically and culturally and religiously ordained rapacity smearing blood over all the fresh beauty. Hutch had made the limits”
― Charles Frazier, The Trackers

“Thinking back on the past three months—tracking Eve, and then Jake and Faro tracking us, and then the day Long might have done his own tracking”
― Charles Frazier, The Trackers

“Her voice had the flutter of a dirty carburetor struggling for air.”
― Charles Frazier, The Trackers