Kansas Prairie Quotes & Sayings

Kathy Kerouac knew the power of her voice. It was, she said, her 'golden thing,' an amulet protecting her against all disorders of the spirit. Her voice was a charm that could stop violence and transform crudeness into curtesy, foolishness into finesse. So Kathy Kerouac was under the impression that nothing was ever altogether dangerous, the feeling that no word spoken could soil her world. — Nicole Brossard

Compared with Iowa, Kansas City was a strange world. The Halls where she worked was in the most elegant place she'd ever been at that point, a made-up town for shopping, a Fifth Avenue on the prairie (when she got to the real Fifth Avenue, she wasn't very impressed, because the Country Club Plaza had spoiled her). — Jane Smiley

This guy, when I met him he was 47 years old, he'd just come out of a divorce and he was, you know, very desirable. He had every Cosmo cover girl and undercover girl. They were just coming out of his ears. Baking cakes on his doorstep, one in the back door, one on the roof, one waiting in the basement, another in the elevator. So I know I have to keep an eye on him. — Pia Zadora

Do not fear me because I am dark and shadowed — Deborah Harkness

You can never really escape. It goes with you, wherever you go. Somehow, the prairie dust gets in your blood, and it flows through your veins until it becomes a part of you. The vast stretches of empty fields, the flat horizons of treeless plains. The simplicity of the people - good, earnest people. The way they talk and the way they live. The lack of occurrence, lack of attention, lack of everything. All that - it's etched into your soul and it colors the way you see everything and it becomes a part of you. Eventually, Ms. Harper, when you leave, everything you experience outside of Kansas will be measured against all you know here. And none of it will make any sense. — P.S. Baber

To a dusty shelf we aspire. — A.S. Byatt

I think regular Iowans are cynical of this whole idea of corporate welfare, with the biggest awards going to the most profitable companies. It doesn't make sense. — David F. Swensen

Due to success I started losing friends. — Ace Hood

When we can see the non-rose elements when looking at a rose, it is safe for us to use the word "rose." When we look at A and see that A is not A, we know that A is truly A. Then A is no longer a dangerous obstacle for us. — Thich Nhat Hanh

First of all, I'm a Midwesterner, being from Kansas, and Chicago is basically a big Midwestern cow town. It was built from the stockyards, and everyone is very friendly, and it's at the edge of the tallgrass prairie. There's just a good feel to it. — Bill Kurtis

Angela Davis's legacy as a freedom fighter made her an enemy of the state under the increasingly neoliberal regimes of Nixon, Reagan and J. Edgar Hoover because she understood that the struggle for freedom was not only a struggle for political and individual rights but also for economic rights. — Henry Giroux

This morning a splendid dawn passed over our house on its way to Kansas. This morning Kansas rolled out of its sleep into a sunlight grandly announced, proclaimed throughout heaven - one more of the very finite number of days that this old prairie has been called Kansas, or Iowa. But it has all been one day, that first day. Light is constant, we just turn over in it. So every day is in fact the selfsame evening and morning. — Marilynne Robinson

Kansas afternoons in late summer are peculiar and wondrous things. Often they are pregnant, if not over-ripe, with a pensive and latent energy that is utterly incapable of ever finding an adequate release for itself. This results in a palpable, almost frenetic tension that hangs in the air just below the clouds. By dusk, spread thin across the quilt-work farmlands by disparate prairie winds, this formless energy creates an abscess in the fabric of space and time that most individuals rarely take notice of. But in the soulish chambers of particularly sensitive observers, it elicits a familiar recognition - a vague remembrance - of something both dark and beautiful. Some understand it simply as an undefined tranquility tinged with despair over the loss of something now forgotten. For others, it signifies something far more sinister, and is therefore something to be feared. — P.S. Baber

That sentence is: "Nothing is to be clung to as I, me, or mine." In other words, no attachments - especially to fixed ideas of yourself and who you are. — Jon Kabat-Zinn

As a young girl, I saw commitment in my grandmother, who helped Grandpa homestead our farm on the Kansas prairie. Somehow they outlasted the Dust Bowl, the Depression, and the tornadoes that terrorize the Great Plains. — Sheri L. Dew

324This morning a splendid dawn passed over our house on its way to Kansas. This morning Kansas rolled out its sleep into a sunlight grandly announced, proclaimed throughout heaven--one more of the very finite number of days that this old prairie has been called Kansas, or Iowa. But it has all been one day, that first day. Light is constant, we just turn over in it. So every day is in fact the selfsame evening and morning. My grandfather's grave turned into the light, and the dew on his weedy little mortality patch was glorious — Marilynne Robinson

For man, maximum excitement is the confrontation of death and the skillful defiance of it by watching others fed to it as he survives transfixed with rapture. — Ernest Becker

The Old Man's prayers was more sight than sound, really, more sense than sensibility. You had to be there: the aroma of burnt pheasant rolling through the air, the wide, Kansas prairie about, the smell of buffalo dung, the mosquitoes and wind eating at you one way, and him chawing at the wind the other. He was a plain terror in the praying department — James McBride