Rose Wilder Lane

"Life is a thin narrowness of taken-for-granted, a plank over a canyon in a fog. There is something under our feet, the taken-for-granted. A table is a table, food is food, we are we—because we don’t q…"

"Writing fiction is … an endless and always defeated effort to capture some quality of life without killing it."

"I am too sick to work and haven't money enough to last 2 months and pay income tax. I want to keep going but do not see quite how, and there is no alternative - rather than justify my mother's 25-year…"

"The county was listed as a rural slum, the land as eroded. When I asked to be shown erosion, the answer was, it is ’sheet erosion’ That is, the constant effect of rainfall on all earth. There was not …"

"That way of life against which my generation rebelled had given us grim courage, fortitude, self-discipline, a sense of individual responsibility, and a capacity for relentless hard work."

"The first twenty years of my life were wasted...I didn't fit my environment, and I didn't know any other."

"I somehow always have this idea that as soon as I can get through this work that’s piled up ahead of me, I’ll really write a beautiful thing. But I never do. I always have the idea that someday, someh…"

"My attachment to these United States is wholly, entirely, absolutely The Revolution, the real world Revolution, which men began here and which has—so to speak—a foothold on earth here. If reactionarie…"