Quotes from Hamlin Garland

There is no gilding of setting sun or glamor of poetry to light up the ferocious and endless toil of the farmers' wives.

My recollection of a hundred lovely lakes has given me blessed release from care and worry and the troubled thinking of our modern day. It has been a return to the primitive and the peaceful.

Whenever the pressure of our complex city life thins my blood and numbs my brain, I seek relief in the trail; and when I hear the coyote wailing to the yellow dawn, my cares fall from me - I am happy.

I remember a hundred lovely lakes, and recall the fragrant breath of pine and fir and cedar and poplar trees. The trail has strung upon it, as upon a thread of silk, opalescent dawns and saffron sunsets.

There is no gilding of setting sun or glamor of poetry to light up the ferocious and endless toil of the farmers' wives.

Whenever the pressure of our complex city life thins my blood and numbs my brain, I seek relief in the trail and when I hear the coyote wailing to the yellow dawn, my cares fall from me - I am happy.

My recollection of a hundred lovely lakes has given me blessed release from care and worry and the troubled thinking of our modern day. It has been a return to the primitive and the peaceful.

Do you fear the force of the wind, The slash of the rain? Go face them and fight them, Be savage again. Go hungry and cold like the wolf, Go wade like the crane: The palms of your hands will thicken, The skin of your cheek will tan, You'll grow ragged and weary and swarthy, But you'll walk like a man!

He bantered us, challenged us, electrified us . . . At times his eloquence held us silent as images and some witty turn, some humorous phrase brought roars of applause. At times we cheered almost every sentence, like delegates at a political convention, At other moments we rose in our seats and yelled. There was something hypnotic in his rhythm and phrasing. His power over his auditors was absolute. {Garland's thoughts on the great Robert Ingersoll }

Each of our lives was knit into these hedges and rooted in these fields and yet, notwithstanding all this, in response to some powerful yearning, my father was about to set out for the fifth time into the still more remote and untrodden west.

There were moments of a morning or at sunset when the plain was splendid as a tranquil sea, and in such moments I bowed down to its mysterious beauty--but for the most part it seemed an empty, desolate, mocking world.

All my own making," Estelle said. "Oh, of course, sister held the nails and bossed, but I did it. I like it, too. It's more fun than working red poppies on tidies—that's about all they'll let you do back East." "It doesn't matter much what you do out here," said Rivers, meaningly. "Oh yes, it does. Some things are wrong anywhere; but there are other things which people think are wrong that are only unusual," she answered, and he knew she knew what he meant.