Great Plains Quotes

“The prairie skies can always make you see more
than what you believe.”
― Jackson Burnett, The Past Never Ends

“It seems to me nothing man has done or built on this land is an improvement over what was here before.”
― Kent Haruf, West of Last Chance

“It is a country to breed mystical people, egocentric people, perhaps poetic people. But not humble ones…Puny you may feel there, and vulnerable, but not unnoticed. This is a land to mark the sparrow’s fall”
― Wallace Stegner, Wolf Willow

“We stood by and allowed what happened to the Great Plains a century ago, the destruction of one of the ecological wonders of the world. In modern America, we need to see this with clear eyes, and soberly, so that we understand well that the flyover country of our own time derives much of its forgettability from being a slate wiped almost clean of its original figures.”
― Dan Flores, American Serengeti: The Last Big Animals of the Great Plains

“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

“It's hard to think of the divide where I grew up as a watershed. The creeks are dry most of the year, rainfall is undependable at best, and folks in one river system are always trying to steal water from another.”
― Faith A. Colburn, Threshold

“It still scares people driving cars named Expedition and Outlander... Throughout the Great Plains, a visitor passes more nothing than something. Or so it seems.”
― Timothy Egan, The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl

“They came to a living prairie that was a marvelous and alien place, disorienting to newcomers in its vastness.”
― Richard Edwards, Great Plains Homesteaders