“We joined long wagon trains moving south; we met hundreds of wagons going north; the roads east and west were crawling lines of families traveling under canvas, looking for work, for another foothold somewhere on the land…. The country was ruined, the whole world was ruined; nothing like this had ever happened before. There was no hope, but everyone felt the courage of despair.”

— Rose Wilder Lane

Written in 1935, recalling her family’s migration from drought-stricken South Dakota to the Missouri Ozarks in 1894; the 650-mile trip had taken them six weeks.
As quoted in The Ghost in the Little House, ch. 1, by William V. Holtz (1993).

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

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Rose Wilder Lane 43

American journalist 1886–1968

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“The north and the west and the south are good hunting ground, but it is forbidden to go east.”

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Context: The north and the west and the south are good hunting ground, but it is forbidden to go east. It is forbidden to go to any of the Dead Places except to search for metal and then he who touches the metal must be a priest or the son of a priest. Afterwards, both the man and the metal must be purified. These are the rules and the laws; they are well made. It is forbidden to cross the great river and look upon the place that was the Place of the Gods — this is most strictly forbidden. We do not even say its name though we know its name. It is there that spirits live, and demons — it is there that there are the ashes of the Great Burning. These things are forbidden — they have been forbidden since the beginning of time.

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“From north to south, from east to west.”

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“We weren't where we were in those times because we had been thrown or moved there. We didn't think so. We felt we had impelled ourselves, like the faring pioneers and immigrants driving their wagons or pushing their barrows who somewhere somehow along the way stopped and settled. […] True, in some places we stayed on where our fathers and mothers and grandfathers had first settled, but even so we were caught up in that motion if our parents and grandparents had happened to settle in places that those on the move were now headed for or drawn to—seemingly blown to, you might think seeing them, as by those cosmic tornadoes that lift a boy on a bicycle or a chicken coop full of chickens or a ford car with Gramps and Gram inside and set it down unharmed somewhere else.”

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“We know where they [Iraq's WMD] are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south, and north somewhat….”

Donald Rumsfeld (1932) U.S. Secretary of Defense

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Context: We know where they [Iraq's WMD] are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south, and north somewhat.... I would also add, we saw from the air that there were dozens of trucks that went into that facility after the existence of it became public in the press and they moved things out. They dispersed them and took them away. So there may be nothing left. I don't know that. But it's way too soon to know. The exploitation is just starting.

“He was my North, my South, my East and West, My working week and my Sunday rest.”

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Source: Stop All The Clocks

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“The frontiers are not east or west, north or south, but wherever a man fronts a fact”

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A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext03/7cncd10.txt (1849), Thursday
Context: The frontiers are not east or west, north or south, but wherever a man fronts a fact, though that fact be his neighbor, there is an unsettled wilderness between him and Canada, between him and the setting sun, or, farther still, between him and it.

“Nothing Ireland—north, south, east, and west—has suffered so much in its history as the broken pledges of British statesmen.”

Edward Carson, Baron Carson (1854–1935) Irish politician, barrister and judge

Speech https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1918/apr/16/clause-2-power-by-order-in-council-to#column_320 in the House of Commons (16 April 1918). The Irish Nationalist MP John Dillon interrupted: "We are agreed at last on one thing."

“One of my greatest fears was the Witches, for while I had no magical powers at all I soon found out that the Witches were really able to do wonderful things. There were four of them in this country, and they ruled the people who live in the North and South and East and West. Fortunately, the Witches of the North and South were good, and I knew they would do me no harm; but the Witches of the East and West were terribly wicked, and had they not thought I was more powerful than they themselves, they would surely have destroyed me.”

L. Frank Baum book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

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