Ian Frazier Quotes

“Every once in a while, people need to be in the presence of things that are really far away.”

— Ian Frazier

Sometimes travel is merely an opportunity taken when you can.

— Ian Frazier

“Siberia is so big, it's almost more an idea than a place”

— Ian Frazier

“Scientists estimate that the Siberian permafrost holds the remains of 150 million mammoths-or about 8 million more than the 142 million Russians aboveground in Russia today.”

— Ian Frazier

“She said being inside a language was like being in a person's house - after a while you came to see why the teapot was where it was.”

— Ian Frazier

“It reflects like an optical instrument and responds to changes in the weather so sensitively that it seems like a part of the sky rather than of the land. And along with all that, Baikal is distinctly Asiatic: if a camel caravan could somehow transport Baikal across Siberia to Europe, and curious buyers unwrapped it in a marketplace, none would mistake it for a lake from around there.”

— Ian Frazier

“Would Crazy Horse have spent this much to remodel a kitchen?”

— Ian Frazier

“Some settlers began with no implements but an ax. In conversation, the subject of axes
their ideal weight, their proper helves
was more popular than politics or religion. A man who made good axes, who knew the secrets of tempering the steel and getting the center of gravity right, received the celebrity of an artist and might act accordingly. The best ax maker in southern Indiana was "a dissolute, drunken genius, named Richardson." Men who really knew how to chop became famous, too. An ax blow requires the same timing of weight shift and wrist action as a golf swing, and as in golf those who where good at it taught others; sometimes all the men in one district learned their stroke from the same axman extraordinaire. A good stroke had a "sweetness" similar to the sound of a well-struck golf or tennis ball, and gave a satisfaction which moved the work along.”

— Ian Frazier

“One very important key to maintaining our daily sanity is a simple scheduling tactic I call Putting Things the Hell Off.”

— Ian Frazier

“Katya talked about how the Russian language is being destroyed by poor education and by the sloppiness of nonnative speakers who ignore case endings and have no conception of verb aspects and don't care. You find the worst speech in the street markets, she said. She called the new, bad Russian that's spreading everywhere "market language" (bazarnii yazyk).”

— Ian Frazier

In Russia, meanwhile, dedicated young people kept trying to kill the tsar.

— Ian Frazier

“And soon all the people who had accompanied me through life would be gone, too, and then even the people who had known us, and no one would remain on earth who had ever seen us, and those descended from us perhaps would know stories about us, perhaps once in a while they would pass by buildings where where we had lived and they would mention that we had lived there. And then the stories would fade, and our graves would go untended, and no one would guess what it had been like to wake before dawn in our breath-warmed bedrooms as the radiators clanked and our wives and husbands and children slept. And we would move from the nearer regions of the dead who are remembered into the farther regions of he forgotten, an on past those, into a space as while and big as the sky replicated forever.”

— Ian Frazier

“When I go to Indian reservations in the West, and especially to the Pine Ridge Reservation, I sometimes feel unsure where to put my foot when I open the car door. The very ground is different from where I usually stand. There are fewer curbs, fewer sidewalks, and almost no street signs, mailboxes, or leashed dogs.”

— Ian Frazier

Russian humor is to adapt or make some sense or nonsense out of the insanity of their lives.

— Ian Frazier

“Words are charms. It's like a song you didn't even know you knew.”

— Ian Frazier

“I suppose anybody just losing it and sputtering curses is pretty funny. But I think it would be more of a challenge, much more of a challenge, to make a cursing dad funny.”

— Ian Frazier

“I think Indians dress better than anyone, but I don't want to imitate more than a detail or two; I prefer my clothes humdrum and inconspicuous, and a cowboy hat just doesn't work for me.”

— Ian Frazier

“I don't want to collect Indian art, though pots and beadwork and blankets made by Indians remain the most beautiful art objects in the American West, in my opinion.”

— Ian Frazier

“Russia has always had a global history. Global history is a bummer. You suffer invasions of all different kinds. And Russia was not defended against them.”

— Ian Frazier

When the days start to get shorter, I want to be in some nice brick building on the East Coast with the lights glowing in the windows. When the daylight starts changing, I want to be out West.

— Ian Frazier

“You can find dozens of books about people taking the Trans-Siberian Railroad. I knew I had to do something different to cross Siberia. To drive and to talk with people along the way, that was how I wrote my book 'Great Plains'. I drove and camped in Siberia, but did not have a real program.”

— Ian Frazier

“A book tour is not a good opportunity to let your mind wander. You have to pay attention, remember salespeople's and interviewers' names, succinctly summarize your book in a 'selling' way, and so on.”

— Ian Frazier

Everything in Russia is made of cement - phone booths, fence posts and light bulbs.

— Ian Frazier

“I don't have a disregard for my reader in humor pieces.”

— Ian Frazier

“I think what is important for things to be funny is if you the listener, or the reader, get a chance to supply the humor of it yourself.”

— Ian Frazier

“I don't want to participate in traditional Indian religious ceremonies - dance in a sun dance or pray in a sweat lodge or go on a vision quest with the help of a medicine man. The power of these ceremonies has an appeal, but I'm content with what little religion I already have.”

— Ian Frazier

With reporting, if you work hard, you can usually pull something out. But writing humor doesn't respond to working hard, necessarily. I mean, you could just sit there and look at the page all day and maybe something will come.

— Ian Frazier

“America can enjoy a vital, fully functioning government, with all the benefits provided by Texas, while reducing Texas at the same time.”

— Ian Frazier

“Despite the obvious benefits, many Americans do not like Texas. Some even say they despise Texas, and make no secret of their feelings.”

— Ian Frazier

“I believe that when Crazy Horse was killed, something more than a man's life was snuffed out.”

— Ian Frazier

I only saw one English-speaking person all the way across Siberia.

— Ian Frazier

“I would hate to see the idea of freedom disappear, and I wonder if maybe it will.”

— Ian Frazier

Leading economists have shown that by shrinking Texas, we can actually create more income for Texas in the long run.

— Ian Frazier

“People in Russia adapt to misery by a deep, deep humor.”

— Ian Frazier

“There's an idea of the Plains as the middle of nowhere, something to be contemptuous of. But it's really a heroic place.”

— Ian Frazier

“When I needed to think or was really upset, generally I climbed a tree.”

— Ian Frazier

“On two or three book tours, I have visited bookstores in the Mall of America and signed copies of my books and introduced myself to store employees who I hope will sell them.”

— Ian Frazier

America to me is so varied and exciting. I always feel nostalgia for the place I'm not in, and then I get there and find myself in a traffic jam going into the Lincoln Tunnel, and I think, 'God, why was I romanticizing this part of the country?' I think it has to do with the romantic, unrealistic temperament.

— Ian Frazier

“Human connection is the way things work. It's like a patronage system. You know somebody, and he knows somebody, and he knows somebody, and he knows the district governor, and it's okay.”

— Ian Frazier

“I am an author, and like many in my profession, I am also a traveling salesman, going all over in an attempt to persuade people to spend twenty-five dollars on a hardcover book by me.”

— Ian Frazier

“I'd read books in Russian, and they would take me forever. I wanted to write a book that would last and would not be superficial. Siberian-travel writing is its own genre.”

— Ian Frazier

“I'm one of those people who happen to like trees. I don't know why - I just do. As a kid, I loved to climb them. The distant, upper branches, especially, were celestial and alluring.”

— Ian Frazier

“Once, America's size in the imagination was limitless. After Europeans settled and changed it, working from the coasts inland, its size in the imagination shrank.”

— Ian Frazier

“To me, a bag in a tree is like a flag of chaos, and when I remove it, I'm capturing the flag of the other side. In the end, it doesn't matter how ironic or serious or even effective on a larger scale bag snagging may be.”

— Ian Frazier

“Writing humor for me is more like a watchful-ness. You have to watch. When you say something funny, or someone else does, it's more like you wait for the piece.”

— Ian Frazier

“I was friends with Russians who said I should see Russia. I went there in '93 and it was so exciting, and I went to Siberia and had a great time.”

— Ian Frazier

“Russians don't complain, usually.”

— Ian Frazier

“Siberia is a state of mind.”

— Ian Frazier

“Roy Blount is so funny, and he sounds like he's just talking, and the next thing you know he has tossed off
an essay as elegant and intricately structured as a birdsong. His ear for American speech is better than anybody's.”

— Ian Frazier