Keillor's Quotables

Texas: ...to base one's faith on beautiful scenery is to leave oneself open to grave doubt if you should see Texas. Texas would make any man an atheist, unless he understood that God means to challenge us.

Alaskan Cruises (For Dr. Wu): A cruise ship is the lazy man's way to see the wilderness. We are in the waters of the humpback and orca whales, in the habitat of brown bears and harbor seals, eagles soaring overhead, but we have hot showers and room service. I can stand on deck and breathe the chill salt air and gaze at a river of descending ice, and I can also send e-mail and get the New York Times crossword fresh daily. And — just to illustrate the level of degradation — one can lie abed and watch the glaciers on TV. One could watch them and pick up the phone and order eggs Benedict. I don't do this myself, but one could. A cruise ship is a floating town of lazing people. And luxury feels so luxurious in the wilderness. What is obscene to the hairy-legged hiker on the mountain path — the sight of a luxury liner in the bay below — is perversely pleasant to the folks aboard.

Children: Any parent knows about humbling. Children grow up, and your influence over them declines precipitously. You begat them because you pictured yourself as a wise and beloved patriarch, but instead you become the warden of San Question. Your offspring yell at you and bang their tin cups as you walk through the cellblock. You try to enforce a few rules, and they ignore you. They become painted women in tiny shorts and tank tops and lascivious boys dancing in dim basements to bands with names like Stark Raving Idiots and Degenerate Thrombosis. Either they will slide into a life of crime and addiction, or awaken in time to get into medical school and become pediatricians. One or the other. Either they'll wind up in the Big House, sullen, chain-smoking, heavily tattooed, or they'll be making the rounds in a starched white smock, placing a stethoscope against the chests of tiny infants. And you, Mom and Pop, will have had mighty little influence on the outcome.

Marriage: Every marriage has its ups and downs. There are the days when you look at your spouse and hear choirs humming Alleluias and there are the days when you wonder, "Who are you and what is your stuff doing in my house?" Those are the days when you play golf. Fishing works, too, or writing sonnets or digging post holes. It keeps the two of you apart for a few hours and usually that's all you need.

Politics and the Military: Whenever I meet military men and women, I'm struck by their bearing and temperament. I sit down to dinner with a Marine captain just back from Iraq and immediately feel a little childish in his presence, though he's 30 years younger. He is friendly, polite and tremendously focused. What might appear at a distance to be rigidity is really heightened attentiveness. Everything he says is appropriate and precise. When you ask about his experience in Iraq, he tells you, without spinning the story. He is no tin soldier, no flag-waver. There's no bombast in him. Like dancers, or pilots, or violinists, or lion-tamers, he is a man trained to operate consistently at a high level of attention. As you see the price to be paid for flabbiness and immaturity and narcissism and bad manners and lousy grammar, you appreciate the military more and you ponder the consequences of its isolation in American life. Fewer and fewer of our leaders have military service in their resumes. They prefer to sweep blithely along from one comfy perch to the next, cushioned in self-regard, promoting, puffing, spinning, hitting their talking points, building their skill sets. They slip into public office without ever having been yelled at by a bullet-headed black man with sergeant's stripes and made to stand up straight in 95-degree weather and march back and forth across a dusty field and not ask why. This is a shame. The way to put military service back in the picture is to pass a constitutional amendment requiring that a candidate for president have at least two years of full-time military service. It would be a boon to the country, to the military and to the young. It would confirm the importance of service. The 42-year-old governor who discovers that he wants to be president would need to go down to the recruiting office and enlist. It'd be a big moment, like when Elvis went off to basic training. Think of Newt Gingrich climbing on a bus and going off to have his head shaved and his individuality taken away and rebuilt.

Writing: The truth, young people, is that writing is no more difficult than building a house, and the only good reason to complain is to discourage younger and more talented writers from climbing on the gravy train and pushing you off. Young people are pessimistic enough these days without their elders complaining about things. Shut up. Life is pretty good when you grow up. You own your own car, you go where you like, and you sing along with the radio or talk to yourself or chat on your cell phone. You pull into the drive-up window and order the Oreo Blizzard. What's not to like?

English Majors: When I was in college, the smart people were going into engineering, which had solid long-term prospects, and only we dweezils majored in English, and look what happened: Engineers are being laid off, America is losing its capacity to manufacture things (my phone was made in China, of course), but every day we turn out trillions of words about ourselves, bloggers blogging, floods of memoir, day-dreaming, carpet-chewing, and when eventually the Chinese repo men come to collect on our debt, they will find a nation of highly articulate self-aware people who can't change an oil filter but maintain wonderful Web sites. A nation of English majors.