Prairie Quotes
More Prairie Quotes
The flower-fed buffalos of the spring In the days of long ago, Ranged where the locomotives sing And the prairie flowers lie low.
(Nicholas) Vachel Lindsay— 1926 Going to the Stars,'The Flower-Fed Buffaloes'.
It is a revolution; a revolution of the most intense character; in which belief in the justice, prudence, and wisdom of secession is blended with the keenest sense of wrong and outrage, and it can no more be checked by human effort for the time than a prairie fire by a gardener’s watering pot.
judah p. benjamin— On the secession movement in the South (1860). Reported in Allan Nevins, The Emergence of Lincoln (1950), p. 387.
The junior Senator from Wisconsin, by his reckless charges, has so preyed upon the fears and hatred of uninformed and credulous people that he has started a prairie fire, which neither he nor anyone else may be able to control.
j. william fulbright— On Joseph McCarthy (November 30, 1954), in Fulbright of Arkansas: The Public Positions of a Private Thinker (1963)
He liked the vast openness of sky and prairie, and found loneliness a pleasure with so immense a domain to be alone in.
ursula k. le guin— Chapter 3 (City of Illusions (1967))
Any prairie farm can have a library of prairie plants, for they are drouth-proof and fire-proof, and are content with any roadside, rocky knoll, or sandy hillside not needed for cow or plow. Unlike books, which divulge their meaning only when you dig for it, the prairie plants yearly repeat their story, in technicolor, from the first pale blooms of pasque in April to the wine-red plumes of bluestem in the fall. All but the blind may read, and gather from the reading new lessons in the meaning of America.
aldo leopold— "Roadside Prairies" [1941]; Published in For the Health of the Land, J. Baird Callicott and Eric T. Freyfogle (eds.), 1999, p. 138
Engineers did not discover insulation: they copied it from these old soldiers of the prairie war.
aldo leopold— “April: Bur Oak”, p. 27
He who owns a veteran bur oak owns more than a tree. He owns a historical library, and a reserved seat in the theater of evolution. To the discerning eye, his farm is labeled with the badge and symbol of the prairie war.
aldo leopold— “April: Bur Oak”, p. 30
Then the slow lip of fire moves across the prairie with precision While, somewhere, with your pliers and glue, you make your first incision And, in a moment of almost-unbearable vision, doubled over with the hunger of lions 'Hold me close', cooed the dove, who was stuffed now with sawdust and diamonds.
joanna newsom— Sawdust & Diamonds
It is a revolution; a revolution of the most intense character; in which belief in the justice, prudence, and wisdom of secession is blended with the keenest sense of wrong and outrage, and it can no more be checked by human effort for the time than a prairie fire by a gardener’s watering pot.
— Judah P. Benjamin, Senator from Louisiana, on the secession movement in the South (1860). Reported in Allan Nevins, The Emergence of Lincoln (1950), p. 387.
I will remain what I am until I die, a hunter, and when there are no buffalo or other game I will send my children to hunt and live on prairie mice, for where an Indian is shut up in one place his body becomes weak.
sitting bull— Recorded by James M. Walsh, inspector in the Northwest Territory of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, at a conference with Sitting Bull on March 23, 1879. Published in Utley, Robert M. The Lance and the Shield. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1993. p. 206.
