American Landscape Quotes

“Ahead and to the west was our ranger station - and the mountains of Idaho, poems of geology stretching beyond any boundaries and seemingly even beyond the world.”
― Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It and Other Stories

“For ten to twelve hours, he smoked cigs across the bleached-out American landscape, up through the deltas of Mississippi and stars falling on Alabama, he watched the sky shift in burning purple and orange wars. Armies cascaded across the plains and planes died in beautiful violent violet clashes. Dust thick enough to taste billowing off the fields serving up their corn and soy.”
― Stephen Markley, Ohio

“That's when Pilotis began talking. I couldn't get all of it down, but this is the gist of much of it: 'I didn't know when I left home that I wanted something bigger that people and their little gods and small catechisms, their damned certainties, and covered-over confusions. The Missouri is bigger. It's like a Roman deity--powerful, playful, cantankerous, lusty, profligate, changeable, dangerous, yet still interested in the humanity that approaches it. I'm not deifying it, just comparing it, but anyone who doesn't believe it's a living force--something far more actual than any divinity in any religion--is innocent.”
― William Least Heat-Moon, River-Horse