Sand Creek Massacre Quotes

Thomas slammed his fist on the table, sending eating utensils flying. "Shameful! It is downright shameful that so-called men of God would use religion to manipulate people."
--from Prairie Grace when Thomas learns how the Indian agents and others are stealing from Native Americans ~ Marilyn Bay Wentz

Never be an artist that starts worshiping yourself or believe your little group is better than anyone outside of it. For, you are nothing more than a grain of sand on a hillside in this world of ours. Even Da Vinci's work is only glanced at then scrolled past on a phone or computer these days. Climb down off your throne and become humble once more. ~ Jason E. Hodges

There is no hope the future will but turn the old sand in the falling glass of time. ~ Richard Henry Stoddard

It is essential to persuade the soldier that those he is being urged to massacre are bandits who do not deserve to live; before killing other good, decent fellows like himself, his gun would fall from his hands. ~ Andre Gide

The Line makes itself felt,
thro' some Energy unknown, ever are we haunted by that Edge so precise, so near. In the Dark, one never knows. Of course I am seeking the Warrior Path, imagining myself as heroick Scout. We all feel it Looming, even when we're awake, out there ahead someplace, the way you come to feel a River or Creek ahead, before anything else,
sound, sky, vegetation,
may have announced it. Perhaps 'tis the very deep sub-audible Hum of its Traffic that we feel with an equally undiscover'd part of the Sensorium,
does it lie but over the next Ridge? the one after that? We have mileage Estimates from Rangers and Runners, yet for as long as its Distance from the Post Mark'd West remains unmeasur'd, nor is yet recorded as Fact, may it remain, a-shimmer, among the few final Pages of its Life as Fiction. ~ Thomas Pynchon

The past was like a handful of sand you thought you were squeezing tightly, but which had already run out through the cracks between your fingers. Memory was a river that had run dry long ago, leaving only scattered gravel in a lifeless riverbed. He had lived life always looking out for the next thing, and whenever he had gained, he had also lost, leaving him with little in the end. ~ Liu Cixin

Distances"

Swifts turn in the heights of the air;
higher still turn the invisible stars.
When day withdraws to the ends of the earth
their fires shine on a dark expanse of sand.

We live in a world of motion and distance.
The heart flies from tree to bird,
from bird to distant star,
from star to love; and love grows
in the quiet house, turning and working,
servant of thought, a lamp held in one hand. ~ Philippe Jaccottet

Death is just the moment that your hourglass runs out of sand. That's it. It happens to everyone eventually. All any of us gets to decide is where the sand falls. ~ Ryan Winfield

No one makes a revolution by himself; and there are some revolutions which humanity accomplishes without quite knowing how, because it is everybody who takes them in hand. ~ George Sand

Whoever deemed the ocean an invigorating place needed to reconsider the reality of crashing waves, sunburn, and sand wedged up into places no one should have it. ~ Natalia Jaster

A pencil is an extension of a finger writing in the sand. But our electronic media are extensions of our brains. ~ Susan Maushart

It was only outside in the sun and heat that she began to feel the weight of what she had done. Her feet were terribly hot and slipping in her shoes, and the sand worked its way in. With each step she fell more into herself, and her stomach roiled with the curdled truth of her betrayal. I can see you, she imagined God saying. The basket of eggs hit her hip and one shell cracked, freeing yolk and white into a slippery mess, which dripped through the wicker and landed in thick shiny drops on her skirt. * ~ Rae Meadows

To build your house on the rock is to hear what Jesus says and obey. To be foolish and build your house on the sand is to hear and ignore. ~ Kevin DeYoung

Think about the holes children make when they dig in the sand on the seashore. When the waves come in, the holes are swallowed up by the ocean. Similarly, when we know Christ, our physical death is overwhelmed by the love and grace of God. Death is swallowed up in the victory of Christ. ~ Billy Graham

Vivian Bloodmark, a philosophical friend of mine, in later years, used to say that while the scientist sees everything that happens in one point in space, the poet sees everything that happens in one point in time. Lost in thought, he taps his knee with his wandlike pencil, and at the same instant a car (New York license plate) passes along the road, a child bangs the screen door of a neighbouring porch, an old man yawns in a misty Turkestan orchard, a granule of cinder-grey sand is rolled by the wind on Venus, a Docteur Jacques Hirsch in Grenoble puts on his reading glasses, and trillions of other such trifles occur - all forming an instantaneous and transparent organism of events, of which the poet (sitting in a lawn chair in Ithaca, N.Y.) is the nucleus. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

Now I saw his lifeless state. And that there was no longer any difference between what once had been my father and the table he was lying on, or the floor on which the table stood, or the wall socket beneath the window, or the cable running to the lamp beside him. For humans are merely one form among many, which the world produces over and over again, not only in everything that lives but also in everything that does not live, drawn in sand, stone, and water. And death, which I have always regarded as the greatest dimension of life, dark, compelling, was no more than a pipe that springs a leak, a branch that cracks in the wind, a jacket that slips off a clothes hanger and falls to the floor. ~ Karl Ove Knausgaard

Even the unhappiest life has its sunny moments and its little flowers of happiness between sand and stone. ~ Hermann Hesse

Christianity, just as much as Islam, teaches children that unquestioned faith is a virtue. You don't have to make the case for what you believe. If somebody announces that it is part of his faith, the rest of society, whether of the same faith, or another, or of none, is obliged, by ingrained custom, to "respect" it without question; respect it until the day it manifests itself in a horrible massacre like the destruction of the World Trade Center, or the London or Madrid bombings. ~ Richard Dawkins

And everything soon must change. Men would set their watches by other suns than this. Or time would vanish. We would need no personal names of the old sort in the sidereal future, nothing being fixed. We would be designated by other nouns. Days and nights would belong to the museums. The earth a memorial park, a merry-go-round cemetery. The seas powdering our bones like quartz, making sand, grinding our peace for us by the aeon. Well, that would be good - a melancholy good. ~ Saul Bellow

He behaved like an ostrich and put his head in the sand, thereby exposing his thinking parts. ~ George Carman

As you wake up to sort of Morocco coming to life, and you drive a two hour journey through the desert as the sun is rising over the sand dunes ... I saw landscapes and visual stuff that I'll never forget. It was special. ~ Jim Sturgess

Would you like a paddle to help you up Shit Creek in your douchecanoe? Catcher ~ Katie Ashley

The progress of the language has caused us to lose many old treasures. It is thus with all progress, and one must make the best of it. ~ George Sand

I imagine a line, a white line, painted on the sand and on the ocean, from me to you. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

Why did you throw sand when I just told you not to?"

What child says, "Hmm, why did I? I guess there's no good reason. Thanks for pointing that out. It won't happen again. ~ Joanna Faber

Secretly he was pleased to own a horse with the sand to eat a raw cowboy. ~ Annie Proulx

Time is always wanting to me, and I cannot meet with a single day when I am nut hurried along, driven to by wits'-end by urgent work, business to attent do or some service to render. ~ George Sand

Watch the road! Don't look at me, look at the road. Except it's not really a road. It's a track. What are these damn bushes, and why are they here?"
"It's fuchsia. Lovely, aren't they?"
They made her think of blood spatter, possibly resulting from a massacre by a battalion of farm animals. ~ J.D. Robb

If we sit by and become complacent and put our heads in the sand, we're complicit. ~ Shelley Morrison

Little drops of water, little grains of sand,
Make the mighty ocean, and the pleasant land.
So the little minutes, humble though they be,
Make the mighty ages of eternity. ~ Julia Abigail Fletcher Carney

I've had a reoccurring dream about hanging out with Britney Spears, so maybe it would be fun to chill with her for a bit? Like, see what makes her tick. I had this dream once about Britney, that we were going to get married or something, and so I had to meet her parents but we were stuck on a beach in these sand dunes - and at this point between the dreams and self-portrait, you know way too much about me. ~ Gabriel Mann

JANE: What to do when it is that time in your girl child's life:

1. Sit down calmly and explain sex to her?

2. Buy her a book, video, or CD that gives her the details?

3. Buy her condoms and put her on the pill?

Or do as many mothers before you did - just stick your head in the sand and hope she joins a convent.

Of course these days your child may know more about sex than you did at her age, what with in-school health lessons, and out-of-school R-rated movies easily accessed on the TV, not to mention the Starr Report!

In the days of fairy tales, sex was dangerous because so many women died in childbirth. Today sex is again dangerous because of diseases like AIDS. So what do we say? ~ Jane Yolen

If you would like to leave footprints in the sands of time, you had better wear work shoes. ~ Herbert V. Prochnow

May your character not be a writing upon the sand, but an inscription upon the rock! ~ Charles Haddon Spurgeon

How do I know that there is a God? In the same way that I know, on looking at the sand, when a man or beast has crossed the desert - by His footprints in the world around me. ~ Henry Parry Liddon

Does one grow wise in increments? By fractioning a life and then summing it? By stacking sand? An infant, in his first sleepiness, must let go of the world; a man must learn to die. What comes between are the grains of sand. Ambition. Loss. Envy. Desire. Hatred. Love. Tenderness. Joy. Shame. Loneliness. Ecstasy. Ache. Surrender. Live long enough and you will solve them all. ~ Ethan Canin

This case was too full of skewed, slippery parallels, and I couldn't shake the uneasy sense that they were somehow deliberate. Every coincidence felt like a sea-worn bottle slammed down on the sand at my feet, with my name engraved neatly on the glass and inside a message in some mockingly indecipherable code. ~ Tana French

I decide that if I ever get to come back here under different, nonstressful circumstances, I will stay at this hotel and drink fruity drinks and lay in the sand until my skin looks like it had a makeout session with the sun. But today, I'm looking for an inconspicuous way into the water.
We head out of the lobby and get waylaid by hula dancers in grass skirts handing out necklaces of flowers. Apparently Toraf doesn't like necklaces of flowers; as one of the women raises it above his head, he slaps her hand away. I show him, as I accept the gift around my neck, that the woman with the coconut boobs was just trying to be his friend. Just like all the women he's come across so far.
"Humans are too weird," he whispers, unconvinced. I wonder what Toraf would think of Disney World.
Our hotel is right on the water, so we pass through the lobby to the back. The beach is lined with lounge chairs and umbrellas and people scantily clad and people who shouldn't be scantily clad. ~ Anna Banks

Seeing the world with all the unspoiled simplicity of a young child, you are free from concepts of beauty and ugliness, good and evil, and no longer fall prey to conflicting tendencies driven by desire or repulsion. Why trouble yourself about all the ups and downs of daily life, like a child who delights in building a sand castle but cries when it collapses? To get what they want and be rid of what they dislike, look how people throw themselves into torments, like moths plunging into the flame of a lamp! Would it not be better to put down your heavy burden of dreamlike obsessions once and for all? ~ Dilgo Khyentse

I see no reason for denying so fundamental an urge, ruin or no. It is more important to live the life one wishes to live, and to go down with it if necessary, quite contentedly, than to live more profitably but less happily. Yet to achieve content under sometimes adverse circumstances, requires first an adjustment within oneself, and this I had already made, and after that, a recognition that one is not unique in being obliged to toil and struggle and suffer. This is the simplest of all facts and the most difficult for the individual ego to accept. As I look back on those first difficult times at the Creek, when it seemed as though the actual labor was more than I could bear, and the making of a living on the grove impossible, it was old black Martha who drew aside a curtain and led me in to the company of all those who had loved the Creek and been tormented by it. ~ Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

The truth sometimes reminds me of a city buried in sand. As time passes, the sand piles up even thicker, and occasionally it's blown away and what's below is revealed. ~ Haruki Murakami

There's something, though, about the sounds that other people make. Not talking, necessarily. Just the sounds of living - creaking upstairs, humming a tune, watching TV, clanging the dishes - that blot away your loneliness. You miss them when they're gone. Their absence - the total silence - becomes palpable. ~ Angie Kim

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred? ~ Richard Dawkins

It was a little like Into the Sands, with Claude Barron, which she'd seen a couple of weeks ago. In that picture Claude Barron enlists in the Foreign Legion because Rita Carrol marries another guy. The other guy turns out to be a cheater and drinker, and so Rita Carrol leaves him and travels out to the desert where Claude Barron if fighting the Arabs. By the time Rita Carrol gets there he's in the hospital, wounded, or not a hospital really but just a tent and she tells him she loves him and Claude Barron says, "I went into the desert to forget about you. But the sand was the color of your hair. The desert sky was the color of your eyes. There was nowhere I could go that wouldn't be you." And then he dies. Tessie cried buckets. Her mascara ran, staining the collar of her blouse something awful. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides

I got a nice nine-month vacation living on the beach collecting sand dollars, and I really got to reflect and realize that in entertainment, you can definitely go too far. ~ Spencer Pratt

What was the constant?
Movement. Yes. With time there was always movement. The setting sun. The dripping water. The
pendulums. The spilling sand. To realize his destiny, such movement had to cease. He had to stop the flow
of time completely ... ~ Mitch Albom

Wake me for the massacre, okay? Don't want to miss it. ~ Rachel Caine

The Colt rested in her lap. "You better wake up in the morning, Mr. Latimer because I don't want to have to explain a dead man in my cabin to the sheriff."
- Emma in "Emma of Crooked Creek ~ MK McClintock