Time Quote by John Graves

““Neither a land nor a people ever starts over clean. Country is compact of all its past disasters and strokes of luck–of flood and drouth, of the caprices of glaciers and sea winds, of misuse and disuse and greed and ignorance and wisdom–and though you may doze away the cedar and coax back the bluestem and mesquite grass and side-oats grama, you're not going to manhandle it into anything entirely new. It's limited by what it has been, by what's happened to it. And a people, until that time when it's uprooted and scattered and so mixed with other peoples that it has in fact perished, is much the same in this as land. It inherits.””

John Graves

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More by John Graves

“If a man couldn't escape what he came from, we would most of us still be peasants in Old World hovels. But, if, having…

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You notice. And noticing, you live.

John Graves

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Most autumns, the water is low from the long dry summer, and you have to get out from time to time and wade, leading or dragging your boat through trickling shallows from one pool to the long channel-twisted pool below, hanging up occasionally on shuddering bars of quicksand, making six or eight miles in a day's lazy work, but if…

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If you are lucky and reverent, and hush for a moment the doubts in your head, sometimes God will whisper in your ear.

John Graves

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“Some days load themselves with questions whose answers have died, and maybe never mattered hugely”

John Graves

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“Of all the passers-through, the species that means most to me, even more than geese and cranes, is the upland plover, the drab plump grassland bird that used to remind my gentle hunting uncle of the way things once had been, as it still reminds me. It flies from the far Northern prairies to the pampas of Argentina and then…

John Graves

Canoes, too, are unobtrusive; they don't storm the natural world or ride over it, but drift in upon it as a part of its own silence. As you either care about what the land is or not, so do you like or dislike quiet things--sailboats, or rainy green mornings in foreign places, or a grazing herd, or the ruins of…

John Graves

“Ritual isn't a New World strong point.”

John Graves

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I would be annoyed if I were any more in tune with modern sensibilities. I was shaped differently. The world in which I grew…

John Graves

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“In terms of the outdoors, I and the others like me weren't badly cheated as such cheatings go nowadays, but we were cheated nevertheless.…

John Graves

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Explore all 11 John Graves quotes

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