Prairie Quotes

“To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover, and a bee,
And revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few.”
― Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson

“We had no choice. Sadness was a dangerous as panthers and bears. the wilderness needs your whole attention.”
― Laura Ingalls Wilder

“Trees were so rare in that country, and they had to make such a hard fight to grow, that we used to feel anxious about them, and visit them as if they were persons.”
― Willa Cather, My Ántonia

“The land belongs to the future, Carl; that's the way it seems to me. How many of the names on the county clerk's plat will be there in fifty years? I might as well try to will the sunset over there to my brother's children. We come and go, but the land is always here. And the people who love it and understand it are the people who own it--for a little while.”
― Willa Cather, O Pioneers!

“While the train flashed through never-ending miles of ripe wheat, by country towns and bright-flowered pastures and oak groves wilting in the sun, we sat in the observation car, where the woodwork was hot to the touch and red dust lay deep over everything. The dust and heat, the burning wind, reminded us of many things. We were talking about what it is like to spend one’s childhood in little towns like these, buried in wheat and corn, under stimulating extremes of climate: burning summers when the world lies green and billowy beneath a brilliant sky, when one is fairly stifled in vegetation, in the color and smell of strong weeds and heavy harvests; blustery winters with little snow, when the whole country is stripped bare and gray as sheet-iron. We agreed that no one who had not grown up in a little prairie town could know anything about it. It was a kind of freemasonry, we said.”
― Willa Cather, My Ántonia

“After that hard winter, one could not get enough of the nimble air. Every morning I wakened with a fresh consciousness that winter was over. There were none of the signs of spring for which I used to watch in Virginia, no budding woods or blooming gardens. There was only—spring itself; the throb of it, the light restlessness, the vital essence of it everywhere: in the sky, in the swift clouds, in the pale sunshine, and in the warm, high wind—rising suddenly, sinking suddenly, impulsive and playful like a big puppy that pawed you and then lay down to be petted. If I had been tossed down blindfold on that red prairie, I should have known that it was spring.”
― Willa Cather, My Ántonia

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

“There was only the enormous, empty prairie, with grasses blowing in waves of light and shadow across it, and the great blue sky above it, and birds flying up from it and singing with joy because the sun was rising. And on the whole enormous prairie there was no sign that any other human being had ever been there.”
― Laura Ingalls Wilder, Little House on the Prairie

“What a thousand acres of Silphiums looked like when they tickled the bellies of the buffalo is a question never again to be answered, and perhaps not even asked.”
― Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There

“And by experiencing prairie---over the four seasons, and at various times of day, in all weathers---you develop a heightened sense of awe and wonder that will spill over into every other area of your life.”
― Cindy Crosby, The Tallgrass Prairie: An Introduction

“Once, in another lifetime, there was an ocean here, and if you plant your feet in the soil you can almost feel the ancients rising and falling like the tides of old as the storm gathers strength.”
― Heidi Barr, Woodland Manitou: To Be on Earth

“The prairie is one of those plainly visible things that you can’t photograph. No camera lens can take in a big enough piece of it. The prairie landscape embraces the whole of the sky. Any undistorted image is too flat to represent the impression of immersion that is central to being on the prairie. The experience is a kind of baptism.”
― Paul Gruchow, Journal of a Prairie Year

“Prairies are like people. Each one has similar characteristics, but each one is also as unique as a snowflake. When we spend time on different prairies, we discover they all have their own quirks, individuality, and charm.”
― Cindy Crosby, The Tallgrass Prairie: An Introduction

“ALMOST all of the original tallgrass prairie has vanished. Lost to the plow, to development, and to---perhaps---a lack of imagination.”
― Cindy Crosby, Tallgrass Conversations: In Search of the Prairie Spirit

“Although we think of restoration as a science, it's also about creativity. Prairie restoration begins with a vision. The dream of how the land might be healed, imagined in the mind of a steward or site manager.”
― Cindy Crosby, Tallgrass Conversations: In Search of the Prairie Spirit

“The city loomed out of the landscape like a fortress. I saw what walls we build against the prairie, how timidly we huddle together, how effectively we close off its vastness of space and make for ourselves another space of more human proportions.

Nearly every inch of land [along my 600 mile drive] had been painstakingly turn over, furrow by furrow. It seemed some unknowable comment on the human spirit that we should, despite our walls, have turned ourselves into an army of Lady Macbeths, rubbing out so relentlessly such a terrible space.”
― Paul Gruchow, Journal of a Prairie Year

“You see more people walking now. With children, dogs. We always wave from our front porch and think if they just keep on walking that direction, pretty soon they’ll find themselves out on the prairie. Think of that. An aerial view of all these kind, goodhearted, small-town people, kids in tow and dogs on leashes, walking across the prairie in a kind of trance, a kind of resignation.”
― David Searcy

“When we commit to the easy way --- planting one kind of anything --- we gamble. It is simpler, isn't it, to know and promote only a few flowers or trees or grasses for our landscape? We know what they will look like, their requirements and habits. It's more comfortable. A no-brainer. But when we do, we lose the benefits of a vibrant, healthy landscape teeming with different trees, plants and their associated animals, birds, and insects. We lose diversity.”
― Cindy Crosby, Tallgrass Conversations: In Search of the Prairie Spirit

“By sharing it with others, you help ensure that the tallgrass prairie continues to delight future generations.”
― Cindy Crosby, The Tallgrass Prairie: An Introduction

“Prairies take an investment of time.”
― Cindy Crosby, Tallgrass Conversations: In Search of the Prairie Spirit

“By sharing it with others, you help ensure that the tallgrass prairie continues to delight future generations. By growing in your knowledge of prairie, you develop a better understanding of the natural world. And by experiencing prairie---over the four seasons, and at various times of day, in all weathers---you develop a heightened sense of awe and wonder that will spill over into every other area of your life. Your adventure is only beginning.”
― Cindy Crosby, The Tallgrass Prairie: An Introduction

“Face-to-face, the vast prairie sweeps belie your
instincts about such country. Their sublimity, I think, arises from their unfathomable boundaries and their self-confident grandness of scale, combined with an echoless, calm monotony of sensory affect.”
― Dan Flores, Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History

“A prickly pear cactus had grown around the base of a rusted water pump next to a dry stock tank. Brilliant yellow flowers smiled at him from atop each teardrop-shaped pad.

“Even in ruin, there is beauty,” Lincoln observed aloud.”
― Kimber Silver, Bullets in the Briar

“Did you know,” she said, “that the first explorers who came to Kansas thought it was a big wasteland? They actually called it a desert, The Great American Desert, you know why?” “No.” “It was the lack of trees. They thought if trees couldn't live here, nothing could, so they misunderstood the whole place—which is basically what mom does. […] Those explorers,” Evelyn said, “were looking for the one thing that didn't grow, and so they didn't notice all the things that did grow. It's an important lesson: if you cling too hard to what you want to see, you miss what's really there.”
― Nathan Hill, Wellness

“It was almost nightfall when Lou reached the outskirts of Lethbridge. Dark blue skies backdropped golden coulees and shadows of buildings stretched across roads in long, undulating bands.”
― Danika Stone, The Dark Divide

“Outside the closed windshield, birds hovered mid-air, held aloft by the relentless breeze. Lethbridge was a prairie city, dusty and slow-moving, but it had one constant that separated it from other places on the flatland: Wind. Bracing for it, Lou swung the door open and caught the handle before the gusts could tear it from her hand. Black hair whipped around her face. Scents rose and swirled past, carried by the breeze. Lou breathed in sunbaked soil and sparse golden grasses, motor oil and fast food.”
― Danika Stone, The Dark Divide

“The prairie I grew up on teaches you to notice, to pay attention. The yolk of the sun as it slides across the dome of the sky streaking the world orange and indigo. The swish of grass in afternoon breeze. The screech of a grackle. During the Golden hour on the prairie, the North Dakota palette reveals the subtle differences between ochre, umber, and sienna.”
― Taylor Brorby, Boys and Oil: Growing Up Gay in a Fractured Land

“I mentioned how I had lived in the oil boom. I described the buttes of the badlands. The smell of the sage. The yolk-yellow breasts of the sage grass. How if you sat long enough, waited for the golden hour, then the entire sweep of the badlands surged into a riot of reds and purples and golds. I told him how there were ponderosa pines tucked into the southwestern pocket of North Dakota, but that they looked shrimpy compared to the ones here, in the rain-forest of the Olympics.”
― Taylor Brorby, Boys and Oil: Growing Up Gay in a Fractured Land

“Bring me the sunrise of a faraway land where the soul sings of the memories of night and the sleeping dark leaps into light.....Tell me the story of torment and delight how distant moors turn into meadows of blooms and my sobbing deeps become the prairie soul.”
― Jayita Bhattacharjee

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