Quotes from Paulette Jiles

She let them go all night and in the mornings would find them coming toward her where she slept, with that alert and nervous air unridden horses always have at dawn. They are remembering some far time when predators came for them at first light. So they came toward her with the strange and painful air of fallen angels, treading carefully and slowly as if the earth were foreign soil.

knowing in his fragile bones that it was the duty of men who aspired to the condition of humanity to protect children and kill for them if necessary. It comes to a person most clearly when he has daughters.

He saw her bright, fierce little face break into laughter when the crowd laughed. It was good. Laughter is good for the soul and all your interior works.

And the newspapers, they say nothing about this at all or about the poor at all, Doris said. There are great holes in your newspapers. Nobody sees them. God sees them. The

A Kiowa's first and last resort was courage. A Kiowa did not beg or plead or appease. She knew at the bitter end she could starve away the despair, deny any sustenance to surrender. She wiped her face again and climbed up into the wagon. Ausay gya kii, gyao boi tol. Prepare for a hard winter, prepare for hard times. She braided her hair as if for battle. And so she became quiet and stilled.

If people had true knowledge of the world perhaps they would not take up arms and so perhaps he could be an aggregator of information from distant places and then the world would be a more peaceful place. He had been perfectly serious. That illusion had lasted from age forty-nine to age sixty-five. And

It was a puzzling thing as to why they packed up in towns in the way they did.

THIS IS A PRINTING OFFICE CROSSROADS OF CIVILIZATION Refuge of all the arts against the ravages of time ARMOURY OF FEARLESS TRUTH AGAINST WHISPERING RUMOR INCESSANT TRUMPET OF TRADE From this place words may fly abroad NOT TO PERISH ON WAVES OF SOUND NOT TO VARY WITH THE WRITER'S HAND BUT FIXED IN TIME HAVING BEEN VERIFIED IN PROOF Friend you stand on sacred ground

The Indians are what we have made them," said Dr. Reed. "Every war between us and the red man has been precipitated by broken treaties. If they have attacked the settlers, it is because we have made them what they are.

she is like an elf. She is like a fairy person from the glamorie. They are not one thing or another.

At the age he had attained with his life span short before him he had begun to look upon the human world with the indifference of a condemned man.

You never knew. Cultures were mine fields.

Time seems to have been sweeping ahead very fast these last years. How many years I worried about you and also delighted in your company. And now it is time for me to give you away.

To go through our first creation is a turning of the soul we hope toward the light, out of the animal world. God be with us. To go through another tears all the making of the first creation and sometimes it falls to bits. We fall into pieces. She is asking, Where is that rock of my creation?

The road ran along the north side of the river, a shy and obsequious road that dodged every bank and lift and wound through the pecan trees and never insisted on its own way.

More than ever knowing in his fragile bones that it was the duty of men who aspired to the condition of humanity to protect children and kill for them if necessary. It comes to a person most clearly when he has daughters.

He knew that he did not play music so much as walk into it, as if into a palace of great riches, with rooms opening into other rooms, which opened into still other rooms, and in these rooms were courtyards and fountains with passageways to yet more mysterious spaces of melody

Young people could get away with rough clothing but unless the elderly dressed with care they looked like homeless vagabonds

In the famine children saw their parents die and then went to live with the people on the other side. In their minds they went. When they came back they were unfinished. They are forever falling.

No, seventy-two. He had just turned seventy-two on March 15, yesterday, as he had turned sixteen just before Horseshoe Bend and at that time it would have been beyond belief that he would even live to see this age, much less be traveling along a distant road far to the west, still in one piece, alive and unaccountably happy.

What held the civilized world together was the thinnest tissue of nothing but human will.

The fashion has been in literary fiction for the depressing ending, and for more or less passive characters who have terrible things happen to them . . . So why not have a happy ending? Is there a law?

Haain-a? No. Absolutely not. No. No scalping. He lifted her up and swung her up over the ledges of stone and then followed. He said, It is considered very impolite.

Loss of reputation and the regard of our fellow persons is in any society, from Iceland to Malaysia, a terrible blow to the spirit. It is worse than being penniless and more cutting than the blades of enemies. The