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21 " It really set my nerves jangling,” Jenny Larsen confessed. “Wasn’t it strange, the way it kept up, day after day?” Alice Grebe, to whom this question was directed, said nothing, for "
― James A. Michener , Centennial
22 " I have no hope that the white man can ever say something and mean it, because we never deal with the same white man. One makes the treaty, and he goes. Another comes, but he never heard of the treaty. With us it is different. When the calumet passes, every Arapaho now and to be born is bound. "
23 " The curious thing about this little forerunner of greatness is that although we are sure that he existed and are intellectually convinced that he had to have certain characteristics, no man has ever seen a shred of physical evidence that he really did exist. "
24 " No fossil bone of this little creature has so far been found; we have tons of bones of diplodocus and her fellow reptiles, all of whom vanished, but of this small prototype of one of the great animal families, we have no memorials whatever. Indeed, he has not yet even been named, although we are quite familiar with his attributes; perhaps when his bones are ultimately found—and they will be—a proper name would be “paleohippus,” the hippus of the Paleocene epoch. "
25 " Panic of 1873 had already cast its shadow across the money markets of New York and Chicago; prudent men were beginning to draw in their investments, but the men and women involved in this outlandish affair were so wealthy and so protected that the panic could not touch them. "
26 " There it would reach the river. A wall of water would fan out across the plains, engulfing both the river and its tributaries. Churning, roaring, twisting, it would scour everything before it as it scratched and clawed its way eastward. In the space of an afternoon, such a flood might carve away deposits which had required ten million years to accumulate. "
27 " From that moment on I have never handled a gun. I have found even the shooting of a rattlesnake abhorrent, and I recommend to all my descendants that they keep away from firearms, for I have found that they do far more damage to good men than to evil. "
28 " Lincoln, whose nation was being torn apart, or Lost Eagle, whose people were being exterminated. "
29 " The earth is something you protect every day of the year. A river is something you defend every inch of its course. "
30 " In depicting the Indian background, do not commit these traditional errors: Do not show them on war parties in full regalia. I judge from what I have read that Indians in their everyday occupations looked pretty much like students at the Boulder campus of Colorado University today, except that the Indians may have been somewhat cleaner. "
31 " He takes what he wants and then gives us back what is already ours. "