Madeline Maher

“Everything he had planted that spring was blooming like a garden. Why, he could just hear the potatoes grow!”
― O.E. Rølvaag, Giants in the Earth

“This place has been here from the beginning and it will be here in the end: Adams County, hacked from the wilderness by naming's brutal baptism long before Illinois was a state or a territory or even so much as a dream.”
― Jon Clinch, Finn

“But more to be dreaded than this tribulation was the strange spell of sadness which the unbroken solitude cast upon the minds of stone.”
― O.E. Rølvaag, Giants in the Earth

“Here was the endless prairie, so rich in its blessings of fertility, but also full of great loneliness--a form of freedom which curiously affected the minds of strangers, especially those to whom the Lord had given a sad heart.”
― O.E. Rølvaag, Giants in the Earth