Time & Perspective Quote by Garrison Keillor

Keillor’s sentence does its work by refusing to let cynicism have the last word. The opening clause drops you into a deliberately cartoonish age: “elephantine vanity and greed” is not just criticism, it’s satire-by-zoom-lens. “Elephantine” makes selfishness feel oversized, loud, impossible to ignore; it’s the kind of phrasing that signals a storyteller who’s watched American appetites swell into spectacle. Keillor’s Midwestern moral sensibility is right there: he’ll name the rot, but he won’t perform despair.

Then he pivots with a quiet dare: “one never has to look far.” The subtext isn’t that goodness is rare; it’s that our attention has been trained to miss it. Keillor implies the problem is partly perceptual, even elective. If you’re only seeing vanity, you’re staring at the parade route, not the sidewalks.

The closing image, “campfires of gentle people,” is Keillor at full prairie-mythopoet. Campfires suggest warmth, light, and small circles of trust; they also suggest impermanence, something you keep alive by tending. “Gentle” is a pointed adjective here: not heroic, not viral, not brandable. The intent is corrective, almost pastoral, offering a counter-narrative to an era that rewards bigness and brazenness.

Context matters: Keillor’s public voice, shaped by the communal rhythms of A Prairie Home Companion, has long romanticized neighborliness as a civic technology. The line argues that decency persists not as an abstract virtue, but as scattered, local heat - visible if you choose to step closer.