Quotes from Paulette Jiles

For a moment he asked himself where it would be better. Cities of the North, with their sections for blacks only. The South in ruins and seething with bitter ex-Confederates and confused and rootless freedmen. Unknown places with unknown rules, and all in a perilous state of flux.

Lascaux was in my time-stream, my ancestry, and Lascaux was the joy and the transport of stories. That's what lasts. It has lasted thirty thousand years.

would have liked to kiss her on the cheek but he had no idea if the Kiowas kissed one another or if so, did grandfathers kiss granddaughters. You never knew. Cultures were mine fields. He patted the air with a gentle motion. Sit. Stay.

My name is John Calley, the man said. He poured coins back into the can out of his large, callused hand. He said, We should not have taken your money this morning on the road. I am regretting it.

Maybe life is just carrying news. Surviving to carry the news. Maybe we have just one message, and it is delivered to us when we are born and we are never sure what it says; it may have nothing to do with us personally but it must be carried by hand through a life, all the way, and at the end handed over, sealed. He was not really rested but well enough. They went on.

He broke down the .38, cleaned it, reassembled it. He made a list: feed, flour, ammunition, soap, beef, candles, faith, hope, charity.

Perhaps it was something like this that changed the captive children forever; the violence they had endured when they were captured, their parents killed. Perhaps it sank down in their young minds and stayed there, invisible and unacknowledged but very powerful. He

The Captain stepped into the stirrup and was proud of the fact that at age seventy-one he could step up from the ground onto a sixteen-hand horse. With some pain but no flinching he swung into the saddle.

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, peculiar intervals, unheard notes.

The Captain stuffed tobacco into his kaolin pipe. And here he was in his mild and mindless way still roaming, still reading out the news of the world in the hope that it would do some good, but in the end he must carry a weapon in his belt and he had a child to protect and no printed story or tale would alter that. He considered the men who must be following them and also that the smell of tobacco smoke carried far and wide, far more than meat smoke, so on second thought he laid down the pipe.

Oh, I think we want to try some unusual methods in dealing with the Indian people. Honesty. Honoring our treaties with them. We will not use the military. Not on my agency.

Yes, novel and untried," said Deaver. He took up his knife and fork. "So they have given the most warlike tribes on the plains into the hands of Quakers. The most warlike and the least known. How interesting life is. How strange." He ate a large bite of his steak. "How peculiar are the ways of government.

all those captured as children and returned were restless and hungry for some spiritual solace, abandoned by two cultures, dark shooting stars lost in the outer heavens.

Britt was restless when they had to stay in town for any length of time. He was wary of the white men. It was better on the road, traveling free of any rules and away from ex-Confederates and strange men come into the country from distant places. It was better to travel and sleep under the wagons with no company but their own. The road was like a very long and thin nation to itself, a country whose citizens were isolate and untrammeled, whose passports were all carte blanche.

It was now the second week in March and the time of tender growth, when it slowly dawned on people that the world would not always be cold and brown. This high-level country was like something unexpectedly and suddenly loved and responding to the bounty of young rain and long hours of sunlight. Awake, awake, ye drowsy sleeper.

An Gorta Mor, she said. 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. She shook out her wet, pinned-up skirt and watched as Johanna carefully ate pieces of bacon with her hands.

Kiowa was to do without, to make use of anything at hand; they were almost vain of their ability to go without water, food, and shelter. Life was not safe and nothing could make it so, neither fashionable dresses nor bank accounts. The baseline of human life was courage.

But still he objected. He was an old man. A cranky old man. I raised two of them already. A celestial voice said, Well then, do it again.

I consider how we have crowded them and dispossessed them from the Atlantic on westward. They have been driven and harried and cheated. Perhaps they feel that by taking captives they will convince us to stop.

We are in the middle of many changes, and this endless changing is become disorder and people cannot long endure disorder. They'll do anything rather than put up with it. Desperate things. Things that they don't want to remember later.

Music is clean, clear, its rules are forever, another country for the mind to go to, and so this search for employment among the drinking places of Galveston did not bother him. To Simon, the world of musical structures was far more real than the shoddy saloons in which he had to play. Nothing could match it, nothing in this day-to-day world could ever come up to it. It existed outside him. It was better than he was. He was always on foot in that world, an explorer in busted shoes.

Who cares for your fashions and your wars and your causes? I will shortly be gone and I have seen many fashions come and go and many causes so passionately defended only to be forgotten. But now it was different and he was drawn back into the stream of being because there was once again a life in his hands. Things mattered. The

May a cat eat him and may the devil eat the cat

I told you but you didn't hear me. You hear what you want.