Quotes from Timothy Egan

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

You need messiness and magic, serendipity and insanity. Creativity comes from time off, and time out.

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.

Chief Sealth, appalled at how his emerald garden had been trashed so quickly, wrote a letter in 1854 to President Franklin Pierce. "The whites, too, shall pass, perhaps sooner than the other tribes," he wrote with the help of a translator. "Continue to contaminate your bed and you will one night suffocate in waste.

They didn't hide by day and only come out at night. They were people who held their communities together, bankers and merchants, lawyers and doctors, coaches and teachers, servants of God and shapers of opinion.

Within sight of Seattle and Vancouver are flanks of the earth that have yet to feel a human footprint.

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

What should have been shattering news—a Klansman dictating orders to elected officials and leaders of the dominant political party—barely caused a stir.

With the abolition of slavery, Black people were no longer counted as three-fifths but as a full person in the census. Ultimately, that gave twenty-five additional congressional seats to a one-party South that violently suppressed the vote of those newly recognized people. In 1880, 50 percent of Black men in the former Confederacy voted. By 1920, less than 1 percent exercised this fundamental right.

shout takes several seconds to land, and then bounces away.

At the wedding, women served a dish of cabbage that had been shredded by wooden kraut cutters, mixed with ground pork and onion, wrapped in bread dough, and baked.

Napoleon rarely marched off to battle without hundreds of cases of Moët & Chandon in tow. "I drink champagne when I win," he said, "and I drink champagne when I lose.

Men talk of the Negro problem," said Frederick Douglass in one of his last public speeches, in 1893. "There is no Negro problem. The problem is whether the American people have loyalty enough, honor enough, patriotism enough to live up to their own Constitution.

Indiana was the most Southern of Northern states—North Dixie

the Klan birthed in Indiana—a state that had lost 25,000 men fighting the Confederacy just a half century earlier—would soon have more Klansmen than any other state.

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.

The Klan wanted to make an example of anyone who threatened the 'sanctity of the home.

Men go abroad to admire the heights of mountains, the mighty waves of the sea, the broad tide of rivers, the vast compass of the ocean, the circular motion of the stars, and yet they pass over the mystery of themselves without a thought." We are spiritual beings. But for many of us, malnutrition of the soul is a plague of modern life.

In his preaching, Christ condemned adulterous behavior, but otherwise said nothing in any of the four Gospels about whom you could love, or how you could love. He said nothing about sex between people of the same gender. He said nothing about the superiority of abstinence over experience, nothing about the who and how of coupling, the timing of when to have children and when to practice birth control, all the forbidden sex later codified in exhaustive detail by celibate men.

photography was "a circus kind of business, and unfit for a gentleman to engage in.

As to Baker, that name should be forgotten," Winthrop wrote in The Canoe and the Saddle. "Mountains should not be insulted by being named after undistinguished bipeds.…

Steve and Barr also launched poison squads, as they were known on the inside. This was a disinformation brigade—clucks and gossips, but the best-known clucks and gossips in every community, so that false stories could be plausibly true.

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.

Two of the biggest volcanoes in the Northwest, Hood and Rainier, are named for wartime enemies of America.