Timothy Egan Quotes

Their humanity has been forgotten, Grinnell said of the predominant way most outsiders looked at Indians - as either savages or victims.

In the fall of 1887, Ed Curtis and his father arrived in the Puget Sound area, which was opening up to land opportunists after treaties had removed most of the Indian, and all of the British, claims to the region.

In Pinchot, he saw someone "who could relish, not run from a rainstorm," as he wrote. Just like himself.

Upshaw - Apsaroke, 1905. Curtis's friend and interpreter Alexander Upshaw, "perfectly educated and absolutely uncivilized," as Curtis said of him, had trouble shuttling between two worlds. He chose to pose in the clothes of his ancestors.

We are spiritual beings. But for many of us, malnutrition of the soul is a plague of modern life.

The larger question for the Northwest, where the cities are barely a hundred years old but contain three-fourths of the population, is whether the wild land can provide work for those who need it as their source of income without being ruined for those who need it as their source of sanity.

As well, she [i.e., Joan of Arc] is the only person ever condemned to death for heresy by the same faith that made her a saint - evidence of the deep bewilderment about women in a church run by men.

Of all the countries in the world, we Americans have been the greatest destroyers of land of any race of people barbaric or civilized," Bennett said in a speech at the start of the dust storms. What was happening, he said, was "sinister", a symptom of "our stupendous ignorance.

So cotton growers, siphoning from the Ogallala, get three billion dollars a year in taxpayer money for fiber that is shipped to China, where it is used to make cheap clothing sold back to American chain retail stores like Wal-Mart.

He [i.e., Augustine] asked the right questions. But some of his answers do not fit in a world that is so much more than sorrow and penance, more than denial, more than predestined awfulness or salvation, a world capable of producing joy and wonder in its everyday details. And those joys and wonders are not forbidden fruits - otherwise why would they be so abundant? To reject the "pleasure, beauty, and truth" that can be found in creation, as Augustine said he had to do in order to understand the divine, is not an argument for God. It's an argument against God.

There is not in the world a more ignoble character than the mere money-getting American, insensitive to every duty, regardless of every principle, bent only on amassing a fortune, Roosevelt said just before he became president.

A decent man would stand out like a cactus on an ice floe.

Here in the Great Lakes region, a fourth year in a row of declining water levels has caused millions of dollars in losses for shipping companies, marinas and other businesses and prompted further restrictions on future water withdrawals for expanding suburbs. "A lot of people just can't believe that we may be running out of water, living this close to the Great Lakes," said Sarah Nerenberg, a water engineer with the Northeastern Illinois Planning Commission, which conducted the study on shortages.

the Forest Service has punched 343,000 miles of logging roads into the vast stands of public trees - more than seven times the 44,000 miles of road built by the national highway system.

Sealth died in 1866, one year after the city which bore his name passed an ordinance to ban Indians from town.

The [Apache] tribe was under siege by government agents, who had jailed some of the medicine men for practicing their rituals. Freedom of religion was cherished as a sacrosanct American right -- everywhere, that is, but on the archipelago of Indian life.

Sometimes the wind along the Pacific shore blows so hard it steals your breath before you can inhale it.

Polygamy was common [amongst the Navajo], but women had superior property rights, owning sheep and the houses. A man who deserted his family would be destitute -- a powerful incentive to stay married.

Rioting over food: how could this be? Here was all this grain, food enough to feed half the world, sitting in piles at the train station, going to waste. Something was out of balance.

This paradox - how a belief founded on a gospel of love could cause so much pain - is a big reason why people are leaving the church in droves. And it's no small part of my struggle as I step into the pilgrim realm.

In court, pricey lawyers from the city try to answer the question: whose life is more endangered, the spotted owl's or the logger's? Victims of mutual incompatibility, both owl and logger are disappearing in Oregon, a state that once had enough standing timber to rebuild every house in America.

Though a degree from Yale was not required, Pinchot wanted his foresters to be able to write well, for the numerous reports that their enemies in Congress would be second-guessing.

At low tide, much of the sea changes to land, and then more than seven hundred islands can be counted. People come here to hide, to find something they can't find on the mainland, to get religion through solitude. From June till September, nearly every day is perfect, with the 10,778-foot volcano of Mount Baker rising from the tumble of the Cascades to the west, blue herons and bald eagles crowding the skies, killer whales breaching offshore. The water is exceptionally clear, the result of a twice-daily shift-change in tide, when it sweeps north toward the Strait of Georgia, then back south toward the Strait of Juan de Fuca. In some places, the rip tides create white water like rapids on a foaming river. Being is bliss. But then the winters come and the tourists all go home and clouds hang on the horizon and unemployment doubles and the island dweller is left with whatever it is that led him to escape the rest of the world.

The Pacific Northwest is simply this: wherever the salmon can get to. Rivers without salmon have lost the life source of the area.

Naturalist Roger Tory Peterson has calculated that the Olympic Rain Forest is weighted down with more living matter than any other place on earth.

Most of the writers I know work every day, in obscurity and close to poverty, trying to say one thing well and true. Day in, day out, they labor to find their voice, to learn their trade, to understand nuance and pace. And then, facing a sea of rejections, they hear about something like Barbara Bush's dog getting a book deal.

Better for a man to fail, he said, even to fail greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.