Siatta Dunbar Quotes

I was a demon. I could find a romantic opportunity in an insect-infested swamp. ~ Debra Dunbar

. . . [H]ad North America been a wilderness, undeveloped, without roads, and uncultivated, it might still be so, for the European colonists could not have survived. They appropriated what had already been created by Indigenous civilizations. They stole already cultivated farmland and the corn, vegetables, tobacco, and other crops domesticated over centuries, took control of the deer parks that had been cleared and maintained by Indigenous communities, used existing roads and water routes in order to move armies to conquer, and relied on captured Indigenous people to identify the locations of water, oyster beds, and medicinal herbs. ~ Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

If you want to be in this business [acting], do it for the right reasons. Don't be in it because you want to be a celebrity. Be in it because you really love the work, and the work keeps you up at night, and it keeps you motivated, and it wakes you up early in the morning because you have ideas. ~ Rockmond Dunbar

Noble men in the quiet of morning hear Indians singing the continent's violent requiem. ~ William Dunbar

She twisted her body to the curtained windows, listening to the night. "Where are you, poor dead thing? Are you right outside?" The voice of the sea drifted on a low wind, like the noise a wolf might make in its sleep. ~ Robert Dunbar

…a bar he sometimes sneaked into called The Slab. (They served bloody marys and zombies – stiff drinks they called them – and the jukebox only played dirges. A spotlight pinned dead go-go boys in cages, and though he'd never ventured to the refrigerated back room, he'd heard stories.) ~ Robert Dunbar

All training is negotiation, whether you're training dogs or spouses. ~ Ian Dunbar

The round, unformed script on the fly-leaf said, Francis Crawford of Lymond. She stared at it; then put it down and picked up another. The writing in this one was older; the neat level hand she had seen once before, in Stamboul. This time it said only, The Master of Culter.

That dated it after the death of his father, when until the birth of Richard's son Kevin, the heir's rank and title were Lymond's. And all the books were his, too. She scanned them: some works in English; others in Latin and Greek, French, Italian and Spanish.… Prose and verse. The classics, pressed together with folios on the sciences, theology, history; bawdy epistles and dramas; books on war and philosophy; the great legends. Sheets and volumes and manuscripts of unprinted music. Erasmus and St Augustine, Cicero, Terence and Ptolemy, Froissart and Barbour and Dunbar; Machiavelli and Rabelais, Bude and Bellenden, Aristotle and Copernicus, Duns Scotus and Seneca.

Gathered over the years; added to on infrequent visits; the evidence of one man's eclectic taste. And if one studied it, the private labyrinth, book upon book, from which the child Francis Crawford had emerged, contained, formidable, decorative as his deliberate writing, as the Master of Culter. ~ Dorothy Dunnett

They imbibed. It never went far, not among so many, but their naturally frantic edge amplified it, whatever the euphoric, pushed it until giddiness mutated into a sort of epiphany – a pack ritual. And rituals have power. ~ Robert Dunbar

I know what the caged bird feels, alas! ~ Paul Laurence Dunbar

Hope is tenacious. It goes on living and working when science has dealt it what should be its deathblow. ~ Paul Laurence Dunbar

Every hunchback has his gypsy, each phantom his diva, and flames of passion consume witches and martyrs alike. For any lonely monster, tradition demands that one sacrificial soul seek immolation.
Ashe to ashes.
It remains the ultimate, transformative act of love. ~ Robert Dunbar

What about you, Snipes?" Dunbar asked. "You think there to be mountain lions up here or is it just folks' imaginings?"

Snipes pondered the question a few moments before speaking.

They's many a man of science would claim there aint because you got no irredeemable evidence like panther scat or fur or tooth or tail. In other words, some part of the animal in questions. Or better yet having the actual critter itself, the whole think kit and caboodle head to tail, which all your men of science argue is the best proof of all a thing exists, whether it be a panther, or a bird, or even a dinosaur."

To put it another way, if you was to stub your toe and tell the man of science what happened he'd not believe a word of it less he could see how it'd stoved up or was bleeding. But your philosophers and theologians and such say there's things in the world that's every bit as real even though you can't see them."

Like what?" Dunbar asked.

Well," Snipes said. "They's love, that's one. And courage. You can't see neither of them, but they're real. And air, of course. That's one of your most important examples. You wouldn't be alive a minute if there wasn't air, but nobody's ever seen a single speck of it."

… "All I'm saying is there is a lot more to this old world than meets the eye."

… "And darkness. You can't see it no more than you can see air, but when its all around you sure enough know it." (Serena, 65-66) ~ Ron Rash

Long before haunted houses existed, haunted woods circled the globe. Homer knew it. The Brothers Grimm knew it. In legend, all the great mythic quests of self-discovery begin with the hero entering a dark wood. Some journeys also end there. ~ Robert Dunbar

Willow trees are kind, Dear God. They will not bear a body on their limbs. ~ Alice Dunbar Nelson

To-day my skies are bare and ashen,
And bend on me without a beam.
Since love is held the master-passion,
Its loss must be the pain supreme ~ Paul Laurence Dunbar

We reduce the deity to vulgar fractions. We place our own little ambitions and label them ?divine messages?. With our short sight we affect to take a comprehensive view of eternity. ~ Paul Laurence Dunbar

A crust of bread and a corner to sleep in. A minute to smile and an hour to weep in. A pint of joy to a peck of trouble, And never a laugh but the moans come double. And that is life. A crust and a corner that makes love precious, With a smile to warm and tears to refresh us, And joy seems sweeter when cares come after, And a moan is the finest of foils for laughter. And that is life. ~ Paul Laurence Dunbar

Especially on rainy nights like this, they would congregate under the bridge, all the boys from nowhere, the boys who lived nowhere, who had nowhere else to go. ~ Robert Dunbar

So many things were testing his faith. There was the Bible, of course, but the Bible was a book, and so were Bleak House, Treasure Island, Ethan Frome and The Last of the Mohicans. Did it then seem probable, as he had once overheard Dunbar ask, that the answers to riddles of creation would be supplied by people too ignorant to understand the mechanics of rainfall? Had Almighty God, in all His infinite wisdom, really been afraid that men six thousand years ago would succeed in building a tower to heaven? ~ Joseph Heller

Jodi Byrd writes: "The story of the new world is horror, the story of America a crime." It is necessary, she argues, to start with the origin of the United States as a settler-state and its explicit intention to occupy the continent. These origins contain the historical seeds of genocide. Any true history of the United States must focus on what has happened to (and with) Indigenous peoples - and what still happens. ~ Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

After all, the male ego was a horrible thing. ~ Robert Dunbar

When I'm training a dog, I develop a relationship with that dog. He's my buddy, and I want to make training fun. ~ Ian Dunbar

Training a puppy is like raising a child. Every single interaction is a training opportunity. ~ Ian Dunbar

European institutions and the worldview of conquest and colonialism had formed several centuries before that. From the eleventh through the thirteenth centuries, Europeans conducted the Crusades to conquer North Africa and the Middle East, leading to unprecedented wealth in the hands of a few. ~ Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

A Georgia volunteer, afterward a colonel in the Confederate service, said: "I fought through the civil war and have seen men shot to pieces and slaughtered by thousands, but the Cherokee removal was the cruelest work I ever knew."34 ~ Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

I'm assuming the widened eyes and squished up mouth are your way of entreating me to take you to the train station and help you question the humans. Either that or you're constipated." "I'm not constipated." I resumed The Look. ~ Debra Dunbar

Irix, my beloved klepto. ~ Debra Dunbar

Nowadays I get complaints about long drum solos, but in those days they wanted me to keep on going so they could go over to the bar and have a drink. ~ Aynsley Dunbar

But a prayer that he sends from his heart's deep core. ~ Paul Laurence Dunbar

Even for an inbred clan deep in the swamp, she thought they might well be considered a peculiar bunch, but then the family always had run to eccentricity. ~ Robert Dunbar

Cinema – all art really – has great power. Power to illuminate. Power to transform. For those of us who experience film as literature, classic movies comprised an introductory education in the genre. As kids, many of us went searching through library shelves for obscure source novels after seeing some old movie or other. It was the start of many an adventure. ~ Robert Dunbar

Here, rancid air hangs heavily in a void, its texture thick, liquid, clinging, in a night full of the hot smells of decay. ~ Robert Dunbar

Even in the wood, there was a right road and a wrong one. All the most terrifying fairy tales inevitably began with some foolish innocent (or two) straying from the path. Then anything might happen. ~ Robert Dunbar

Can you move on?" I ask…
"Everyone tells me it's time," she whispers.
"Time for what, Mati?"
"You to kiss me. ~ L.B. Dunbar

Pride has a terrible price," I told her. "People with pride are so easy to defeat. They never see it coming. A little cockroach takes down the mighty giant. Of course, it's best to make it look like a fluke, an accident, and run and hide as quickly as you can." Kelly looked doubtful. "But then no one knows you've done it. They still won't respect you. How can you advance, live up to your potential, and take your rightful place in the world if you hide in the woodwork like a cockroach?" I was feeling really uncomfortable with her logic. All this talk of respect was bullshit. She wasn't getting my point here. "There's a reason pride is a sin," I told her. "The inner strength you feel is deceptive. It actually creates enormous vulnerability, sets you up for a fall of your own making. ~ Debra Dunbar

I could speak to you and say, 'Laytay-chai, paisey, paisey.' ... Why aren't you responding? Oh, you don't speak Swahili. Well, I've got news for you. The dog doesn't speak English, or American, or Spanish, or French. ~ Ian Dunbar

The Texan wanted everybody in the ward to be happy but Yossarian and Dunbar. He was really very sick. ~ Joseph Heller

Maybe a person had to lose everything to find purpose. ~ Robert Dunbar

A lawyer who does not know men is handicapped. ~ William Dunbar

What Joe Hamilton lacked more than anything else in the world was some one to kick him. Many a man who might have lived decently and become a fairly respectable citizen has gone to the dogs for the want of some one to administer a good resounding kick at the right time. It is corrective and clarifying. ~ Paul Laurence Dunbar

Hanging a banner from the front of the Bureau of Indian Affairs building that proclaimed it to be the "Native American Embassy," hundreds of protesters hailing from seventy-five Indigenous nations entered the building to sit in. BIA personnel, at the time largely non-Indigenous, fled, and the capitol police chain-locked the doors announcing that the Indigenous protesters were illegally occupying the building. The protesters stayed for six days, enough time for them to read damning federal documents that revealed gross mismanagement of the federal trust responsibility, which they boxed up and took with them. The Trail of Broken Treaties solidified Indigenous alliances, and the "20-Point Position Paper,"14 the work mainly of Hank Adams, provided a template for the affinity of hundreds of Native organizations. Five years later, in 1977, the document would be presented to the United Nations, forming the basis for the 2007 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. ~ Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

It's punishment to be compelled to do what one doesn't wish. ~ Alice Dunbar Nelson

He'd risk everything for you, Sam," Wyatt said. "He'd trade heaven for an eternity in the depths of hell to possess you. ~ Debra Dunbar