Hal Borland Quotes

The West - the very words go straight to that place of the heart where Americans feel the spirit of pride in their western heritage - the triumph of personal courage over any obstacle, whether nature or man.

The history of my state of Oklahoma offers a great example of pursuing the American Dream. It was built and settled by pioneers moving West to seek better lives.

The West is the most powerful reality in the history of this country. It's always had a power, a presence, an attraction that differentiated it from the rest of the United States.

I came west for opportunity. I made Lincoln my home.

I like to describe 'Yellowstone' is 'The Great Gatsby' on the largest ranch in Montana. Then it's really a study of the changing of the West.

In 1862, Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act, a bill opening one half million square miles of territory in the western United States for settlement.

When you go back and look at American history, it's not terribly different from Canadian history. If you weren't self-reliant on the prairie, you wouldn't survive.

The past is what the past is.

The only thing simple about the past is that it's not now.

I've always been interested in the history of the West, our country and particularly as it relates to the Native Americans - the original Americans.

We have always been dreamers in Montana.

I left Montana in Spring of 1866, for Utah, arriving at Salt Lake city during the summer.

I feel the other element of a western is the land, which is very important in this movie. I mean the land is another character in the piece, actually.

My people were homesteading in Colorado before Emancipation.

We are tomorrow's past.

The West is the most American part of America....

While the government underwrote the West more than any other region, the myth claimed that hardworking Western cowboys and settlers wanted nothing from the government but to be left alone to work out their own destiny.

You want to know why there's a Texas Rangers? Well, here's the answer. You know how the six-gun came around? Well, here's the answer. You want to know why Mexicans allowed Americans to settle Texas in the first place? It was fear of Comanches.

I grew up in that, when I was a kid. My friends and I used to play cowboys and Indians. We were cowboys killing the Indians, following the Wild West stories. All of this combined into a very strange culture, which is frightened.

Up to our own day American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West. The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development.

I sit beside the fire and think of all that I have seen, of meadow-flowers and butterflies in summers that have been; Of yellow leaves and gossamer in autumns that there were, with morning mist and silver sun and wind upon my hair.

Still photographs often differ from life more by their silence than by the immobility of their subjects. Landscape pictures tend to converge with life, however, on summer nights, when the sounds outside, after we call in children and close garage doors, are small - the whir of moths, the snap of a stick.

I love borders. August is the border between summer and autumn; it is the most beautiful month I know.

You must have something new in a landscape as well as something old, something that's dying and something that's being born.

And so there would always be more to remember that could no longer be seen...our history is always returning to a little patch of weeds and saplings with an old chimney sticking up by itself...and here I look ahead to the resting of my case: I love the house that belonged to the chimney, holding it bright in memory, and love the saplings and the weeds.