Top 50 Timothy Egan Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Timothy Egan

2. “A survey of Canadian media consumption by Microsoft concluded that the average attention span had fallen to eight seconds, down from 12 in the year 2000.”

— Timothy Egan

3. “He discovered that if he said something often enough, no matter how untrue, people would believe it. Small lies were for the timid. The key to telling a big lie was to do it with conviction. He.”

— Timothy Egan

4. “I’ll take the advice of Labre, the patron saint of wandering souls, who grew up not far from here: ‘There is no way. The way is made by walking.”

— Timothy Egan

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

— Timothy Egan

6. “Better for a man to fail, he said, even “to fail greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.”

— Timothy Egan

7. “The Columbia River Bar has swallowed more ships, about 2,100 at last count, than any other location on the Pacific north of Mexico.”

— Timothy Egan

8. “Here in the corner attic of America, two hours’ drive from a rain forest, a desert, a foreign country, an empty island, a hidden fjord, a raging river, a glacier, and a volcano is a place where the inhabitants sense they can do no better, nor do they want to.”

— Timothy Egan

9. “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.”

— Timothy Egan

10. “Rioting over food: how could this be? Here was all this grain, food enough to feed half the world, sitting in piles at the train station, going to waste. Something was out of balance.”

— Timothy Egan

11. “The villainous sun and the starved bank did not seem related – yet.”

— Timothy Egan

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

— Timothy Egan

13. “The problem with history was that it was written by the survivors, and they usually wrote in the sunshine on harvest day, from victory stands.”

— Timothy Egan

14. “Much of Texas took its prohibition seriously. Not Dalhart. It took its whiskey seriously, in part because some of the finest corn liquor in America was coming out of the High Plains.”

— Timothy Egan

15. “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.”

— Timothy Egan

16. “Upshaw – Apsaroke, 1905. Curtis’s friend and interpreter Alexander Upshaw, “perfectly educated and absolutely uncivilized,” as Curtis said of him, had trouble shuttling between two worlds. He chose to pose in the clothes of his ancestors.”

— Timothy Egan

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

— Timothy Egan

18. “Far ahead of his time, and to the criticism of isolationists in his own party, Roosevelt tried to get the major nations of the world to come together and take stock of the globe they shared.”

— Timothy Egan

19. “We are spiritual beings. But for many of us, malnutrition of the soul is a plague of modern life.”

— Timothy Egan

20. “It scares them because of the forced intimacy with a place that gives nothing back to a stranger, a place where the land and its weather – probably the most violent and extreme on earth – demand only one thing: humility.”

— Timothy Egan

21. “The tribes may have been numerous, but the overall population was plummeting. When the results of the 1900 census were published, the government counted only 237,000 Indians in a country of 76 million people. This was the lowest number ever, scholars and Indian authorities said, down from perhaps as many as 10 million at the time of white contact in 1492.”

— Timothy Egan

22. “The larger question for the Northwest, where the cities are barely a hundred years old but contain three-fourths of the population, is whether the wild land can provide work for those who need it as their source of income without being ruined for those who need it as their source of sanity.”

— Timothy Egan

23. “Every bit of water falling on all of France, channeled into one drainpipe – that’s similar to what goes into the Columbia, or at least a shallow part of it. The river’s source is a glacial drip 2,619 feet above sea level in the foothills of the Canadian Purcells; by its midway point in a high desert, the Columbia has a depth several hundred feet below the ocean plane.”

— Timothy Egan

24. “Their humanity has been forgotten,” Grinnell said of the predominant way most outsiders looked at Indians – as either savages or victims.”

— Timothy Egan

25. “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.”

— Timothy Egan

26. “Sometimes the wind along the Pacific shore blows so hard it steals your breath before you can inhale it.”

— Timothy Egan

27. “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.”

— Timothy Egan

28. “In Pinchot, he saw someone “who could relish, not run from a rainstorm,” as he wrote. Just like himself.”

— Timothy Egan

29. “Sealth died in 1866, one year after the city which bore his name passed an ordinance to ban Indians from town.”

— Timothy Egan

30. “Seattle gets less rain than New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington and Miami.”

— Timothy Egan

31. “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.”

— Timothy Egan

32. “Madge Oberholtzer deserves a plaque of her own.”

— Timothy Egan

33. “In the fall of 1887, Ed Curtis and his father arrived in the Puget Sound area, which was opening up to land opportunists after treaties had removed most of the Indian, and all of the British, claims to the region.”

— Timothy Egan

34. “Though a degree from Yale was not required, Pinchot wanted his foresters to be able to write well, for the numerous reports that their enemies in Congress would be second-guessing.”

— Timothy Egan

35. “In court, pricey lawyers from the city try to answer the question: whose life is more endangered, the spotted owl’s or the logger’s? Victims of mutual incompatibility, both owl and logger are disappearing in Oregon, a state that once had enough standing timber to rebuild every house in America.”

— Timothy Egan

36. “Naturalist Roger Tory Peterson has calculated that the Olympic Rain Forest is weighted down with more living matter than any other place on earth.”

— Timothy Egan

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

— Timothy Egan

38. “Good pictures, Curtis explained, are not products of chance, but come from long hours of study.”

— Timothy Egan

39. “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.”

— Timothy Egan

40. “The preacher said Madge’s spirit belonged to Irvington, and Irvington must be there for her memory: “Let us not forget that in coming here today we have not fulfilled our obligations of friendship,” he said. In the days, weeks, and years ahead, the family “will need us as never before.”

— Timothy Egan

41. “The Klan wanted to make an example of anyone who threatened the ’sanctity of the home.”

— Timothy Egan

42. “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.”

— Timothy Egan

43. “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.”

— Timothy Egan

44. “Beckey’s fame spread through word of mouth. There were stories about his wolf howl, a blood-chilling sound, which Beckey would use to scare tourists away from his favorite campsites.”

— Timothy Egan

45. “Isn’t it strange that with all our educational advantages,” noted the Hoosier writer Meredith Nicholson, so many “Indiana citizens could be induced to pay $10 for the privilege of hating their neighbors and wearing a sheet?”

— Timothy Egan

46. “The moisture is predatory in this part of the world, and no element, be it stone or wood or tin or steel, lasts very long without losing some part of its composition to the nag of precipitation.”

— Timothy Egan

47. “He discovered that if he said something often enough, no matter how untrue, people would believe it.”

— Timothy Egan

48. “The governor of Georgia, Clifford Walker, told a Klan rally in 1924 that the United States should “build a wall of steel, a wall as high as heaven” against immigrants.”

— Timothy Egan

49. “The Klan prided itself on how quickly it could spread a lie: from a kitchen table to the whole state in six hours or less.”

— Timothy Egan

50. “What many Americans heard about Jews they got from Henry Ford, operating out of a Michigan base less than three hundred miles from Indianapolis. His newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, was a fire hose of anti-Semitism and reached a peak circulation of nearly one million readers.”

— Timothy Egan