Jim Fergus Quotes

I, personally, have resolved never to display weakness, to be always strong and firm and forthright, to show neither fear nor uncertainty
no matter how fearful and uncertain I may be inside; I see no other way to survive this ordeal.

Yet only the atrocities of the conquered are referred to as criminal acts; those of the conqueror are justified as necessary, heroic, and even worse, as the fulfillment of God's will.

can't help but think once again what a foolish, loutish creature is man. Is there another on earth that kills for the pure joy of it?

As I squat to pee I look upward at the billions of stars and planets in the heavens and somehow my own insignificance no longer terrifies me as it once did, but comforts me, makes me feel a part, however tiny, of the whole complete and perfect universe ... and when I die the wind will still blow and the stars still shine, for the place I occupy on earth is no more permanent than the water I now make, absorbed by the the sandy soil, dried instantly by the constant prairie wind ...

That's exactly the good thing about the Injun life
you don't have to stop and think about whether or not you're 'happy'
which in my opinionis a highly overrated human condition invented by white folks

But others of us believed that the only true happiness our Sara had ever known in her short life on this earth had been among these people. And we wished for her soul to go to the place the Cheyennes called Seano – the place of the dead – which is reached by following the Hanging Road in the Sky, the Milky Way. Here the Cheyennes believe that all the People who have ever died live with their Creator, He'amaveho'e. In Seano they live in villages just as they did on earth – hunting, working, eating, playing, loving, and making war. And all go to the place of the dead, regardless of whether they were good or bad on earth, virtuous or evil, brave or cowardly – everyone – and eventually in Seano all are reunited with the souls of their loved ones.

Now we move out again, the horses slipping down off the knoll, following the People, who follow the buffalo, who follow the grass, which springs from the earth.

Don't you know that I laugh because it is my last defense against tears?

I push him from my mind. This is no act of easy omission on my part; I do not consign him casually to a forgotten past. It is rather an act of will
a kind of self-performed surgery on my soul ... the bloodiest of mutilations.

For their part, the savage men appear to spend an inordinate amount of time lounging around their lodges, smoking and gossiping among themselves ... so that it occurs to me that perhaps our cultures are not so different after all: the women do all the work while the men do all the talking.

Your power as a woman, as a mother, is your medicine, and it saved you. Take your courage in that.

I knew then that when we had crested that final tortuos pass in the rocks and dropped down into this valley, we had crossed a threshold into another world, a world with its own sun and moon, and its own separate race of man.