Rural America Quotes

“Don’t bother to have your thugs break into my house when you give me an out-of-town assignment, Ms. Jones,” James Ed said. “They won’t find anything. My tape will be in safekeeping at Farmer’s Bank.”
― Shafter Bailey, James Ed Hoskins and the One-Room Schoolhouse: The Unprosecuted Crime Against Children

“The stars sparkled in an inky sky as they drove through the hot summer night—rhinestones scattered across midnight silk. Out here, a person could almost see forever across the flat expanse of farmland. Wide-open spaces revealed little towns miles away, their lights glinting like rubies and pearls. Kansas held a subtle beauty that only a quiet eye could see.”
― Kimber Silver, Broken Rhodes

“Inevitable pickup trucks complete with full gun racks,
chainsaws,
fishing poles,
and big, sneering dogs in the back,
line the streets and parking lots.
Meek murmur of autumn skies,
Ford and Chevy outfits to roll through town,
as people get ready for a long, gray, foggy winter,
big, four-wheel-drive pickups with snow blades attached,
the box loaded down,
with a high stack of cordwood topped by a huge elk carcass,
to go disheartened in the midst of wretched weather,
cold, raw, continually snowing.”
― Brian D'Ambrosio

“Why hell, look at us. Old men alone. Decrepit old bachelors out here in the country seventeen miles from the closest town which don't amount to much of a good goddamn even when you get there. Think of us. Crotchety and ignorant. Lonesome. Independent. Set in all our ways. How you going to change now at this age of life?

I can't say, Raymond said. But I'm going to. That's what I know.”
― Kent Haruf, Plainsong

“This town was caught in a perpetual state of stagnation. The same three thousand or so people were still living the same small-town life. They thought they ruled the universe from the confines of this one-mile square, yet their world ended at the city limits.”
― Kimber Silver, Broken Rhodes

“Through the stillness they heard the church clock striking five.
"Oh, Ethan, it's time!" she cried.
He drew her back to him. "Time for what? You don't suppose I'm going to leave you now?"
"If I missed my train where'd I go?"
"Where are you going if you catch it?"
She stood silent, her hands lying cold and relaxed in his.
"What's the good of either of us going anywheres without the other one now?" he said.”
― Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome

“It is an unimaginatively standardized background, a sluggishness of speech and manners, a rigid ruling of the spirit by the desire to appear respectable. It is contentment . . . the contentment of quiet dead, who are scornful of the living for their restless walking. It is negation canonized as the one positive virtue. It is the prohibition of happiness. It is dullness made God.”
― Sinclair Lewis, Main Street

“At last, we arrived home. Indian Vale. The house my father had built that had become mine and that one day would be my daughter’s, if she chose to stay in the area. She wouldn’t, though. Why should she? The young people here moved somewhere else as fast as they could, and the old folks withered away and died. The factories vanished and the mines and mills sank into the ground, and in their places were erected fast food joints and furniture rental places and pawnshops. Sometimes I hear places like where I live called “Real America,” and I know it rankles some folks—city folks, mostly—something awful, and I wish I could tell them it’s only done out of politeness. That it’s only people saying nice things about the dying.”
― Jason Miller, Red Dog

“In addition, when they talked as if city people lived by different values, they were not emphasizing abortion, or gay marriage, or the things that are typically pointed to as the cultural issues that divide lower-income whites from the Democratic Party. Instead, the values they talked about were intertwined with economic concerns.”
― Katherine J. Cramer, The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker

“America is like an isolated information island. A lot of what happens in the rest of the world, a lot of the cultural exchange, never makes it to rural Alabama.”
― Oliver Markus Malloy, Bad Choices Make Good Stories - Finding Happiness in Los Angeles

“They were shelters for sparrows, not homes for warm laughing people.”
― Sinclair Lewis, Main Street

“They had something to do. They could escape from themselves.”
― Sinclair Lewis, Main Street

“I know, but the poor souls – Well, I’m sure you will agree with me in one thing: The chief task of a librarian is to get people to read.”
“You feel so? My feeling, Mrs. Kennicott, and I am merely quoting the librarian of a very large college, is that he first duty of the conscientious librarian is to preserve the books.”
― Sinclair Lewis, Main Street

“.. And you want to ‘reform’ people like that when dynamite is so cheap?”
― Sinclair Lewis, Main Street

“I wonder if the small town isn’t, with some lovely exceptions, a social appendix?”
― Sinclair Lewis, Main Street

“I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him - but he was a good and faithful horse.
-Frank

From "Eulogy for a Percheron" in "The Horse Lawyer and Other Poems”
― Greg Seeley, The Horse Lawyer and Other Poems

“Law is the historical antithesis of order.”
― J.P. Redding, OFF GRID: How Long Can They Hide From The Surveillance State?

“The people I’ve met on this trip through rural America are so different from those you meet traveling through more densely-populated areas. A genuine warmth and concern for others exists.”
― Michael ONeill, Road Work: Images And Insights Of A Modern Day Explorer

“I doubt if in the landscape there can be anything finer than a distant mountain-range. They are a constant elevating influence.

Henry David Thoreau”
― Gayla McBride Edwards, Frankie, Nancy and Rose on the Mountain

“Goddamnit, I hate murder more than just about anything,” said Sheriff Red Jetty. “It can just ruin a day.”
― Percival Everett, The Trees

“Food was the most valuable thing you could give someone."...The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek”
― Kim Michele Richardson