Rinker Buck Quotes

#1. Riding across Nebraska in a covered wagon was a monthlong immersion therapy in kindness, a reminder of the essential decency of my country.

Rinker Buck

#2. And why did I think that the notorious and often fatal obstacles that the pioneers faced - mountain passes strewn with lava rock, hellacious winds and dust storms, rattlesnakes, and descents so steep that the wagons could only be lowered by ropes - would miraculously vanish from the trail for me?

Rinker Buck

#3. Even more beautiful than the land that we passed, or the months spent camping on the plains, was learning to live with uncertainty.

Rinker Buck

#4. Crazyass passion is the staple of life and persistence its nourishing force. Without them, you cannot cross the trail.

Rinker Buck

#5. It was an epochal moment for western migration, and few Americans who read about the women summiting South Pass failed to grasp the symbolism of their timing. It was July 4, 1836. The first white women had crossed the Rockies on Independence Day.

Rinker Buck

#6. All the heroes had crew cuts, platinum-blond wives and drove Corvettes. The media was devoted to this cult of innocence.

Rinker Buck

#7. Fear was just a deceptive veil obscuring the unknown.

Rinker Buck

#8. families, revealing insights that cannot be found in published histories. Brown doggedly cross-checks information about each grave in emigrant journals, land records, and nineteenth-century newspapers. A lifetime of searching for graves along the Oregon and California trails has also allowed him

Rinker Buck

#9. History almost everywhere is tragic and ironic, but in America the contrasts are more stark because we set such high ideals.

Rinker Buck

#10. Frequently, to be an American then was to be periodically unmoored, transient, so bereft of options that moving on was the only choice.

Rinker Buck

#11. I was having a great time, enjoying the best summer of my life, fucked up. Fucked up is good.

Rinker Buck

#12. I do not believe in organized religion, herbal remedies, yoga, Reiki, kabbalah, deep massage, slow food, or chicken soup for the soul. The nostrums of Deepak Chopra and Barbara De Angelis cannot rescue people like me. I believe in crazyass passion.

Rinker Buck

#13. Americans were folks who loved to profess peace-loving values, but who fought about everything.

Rinker Buck

#14. Seeing America slowly was, in a way, like eating slow food-I wasn't covering much ground in a single day, but I was digesting a lot more.

Rinker Buck

#15. All I am saying is that sometimes you're doing quite a lot by not doing anything. You're not quitting. You just keep going. That's the pioneer spirit.

Rinker Buck

#16. Few academics and high school history teachers want to risk their careers by suggesting to their students that the father of their country worked the same day job as Donald Trump. Washington was a land developer, often described as the richest of his generation.

Rinker Buck