Jim Fergus > Quotes

“Don't you know that I laugh because it is my last defense against tears?
”
― Jim Fergus, One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd

“...how odd to think of one's life not as chapters in a book but as complete volumes, separate and distinct.
”
― Jim Fergus, One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd

“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 opinion is a highly overrated human condition invented by white folks”
― Jim Fergus, One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd

“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.”
― Jim Fergus, One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd

“A peace is of the nature of a conquest;
For then both parties nobly are subdu’d,
And neither party loser.” (William Shakespeare,
Henry IV, Part Two, Act IV, Scene 2,
from the journals of May Dodd)”
― Jim Fergus, One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd

“even if it meant early release of a few low-level felons or minor mental defectives”
― Jim Fergus, One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd

“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?”
― Jim Fergus, One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd

“My definition of LUNATIC ASYLUM: A place where lunatics are created.”
― Jim Fergus, One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd

“The natives have a way of putting it themselves: “the real world behind this one,” they call it, suggesting that what we see and understand of the surface world is but a façade, which they are capable of navigating beyond. And so it is that in living among them, such things as shape-shifters, talking bears, men turning into birds and flying, all seem somehow plausible.”
― Jim Fergus, The Vengeance of Mothers: The Journals of Margaret Kelly & Molly McGill

“We curse the US government, we curse the Army, we curse the savagery of mankind, white and Indian alike. We curse God in his heaver. Do not underestimate the power of a mother's vengeance." (from the journals of Margaret Kelly)”
― Jim Fergus, One Thousand White Women The Journals of May Dodd

“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.”
― Jim Fergus, One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd

“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.”
― Jim Fergus

“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 . . .”
― Jim Fergus, One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd

“Good-bye, Harry, wherever you may be … never has it been more clear to me that the part of my life which you occupied is over forever … I could not be further away from you if I were on the moon … how odd to think of one’s life not as chapters in a book but as complete volumes, separate and distinct.”
― Jim Fergus, One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd

“capitaine,”
― Jim Fergus, The Vengeance of Mothers: The Journals of Margaret Kelly & Molly McGill

“Jim”
― Jim Fergus, One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd

“...the Sierra, a region so quiet and pristine that we have the sense of being the first human beings ever to set foot in it. We fall silent ourselves in its midst, as if conversation in a place of such primaevl solitude would be like talking in church.”
― Jim Fergus, The Wild Girl

“elicted”
― Jim Fergus, One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd

“Ah but Art never fails anyone, magic and medicine may certainly fail, but never Art.”
― Jim Fergus, One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd

“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.”
― Jim Fergus, The Wild Girl

“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.”
― Jim Fergus

“I watch as long as I can and only then do I finally gain the courage to change seats, to give up my dark and troubled past and turn around to face an uncertain and terrifying future. And when I do so the breath catches in my throat at the immensity of earth that lies before us, the prairie unspeakable in its vast, lonely reaches. Dizzy and faint at the sight of it, I feel as if the air has been sucked from my lungs, as if I have fallen off the edge of the world, and am hurtling headlong through empty space. And perhaps I have … perhaps I am …”
― Jim Fergus, One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd

“It was our understanding that we were to be instructing them in the ways of the civilized world, not being made beasts of burden, but, as Helen Flight has pointed out, of what use are table manners to those without tables.”
― Jim Fergus, One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd

“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.”
― Jim Fergus, One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd

“The law of the jungle which I learned at a young age, and have been trying to escape ever since, is that we what we must to survive.”
― Jim Fergus

“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,”
― Jim Fergus, One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd

“Your power as a woman, as a mother, is your medicine, and it saved you. Take your courage in that.”
― Jim Fergus, One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd

“in which all children born belong to their mother’s tribe, this seemed to the Cheyennes to be the perfect means of assimilation into the white man’s world—a terrifying new world that even as early as 1854, the Native Americans clearly recognized held no place for them. Needless to say, the Cheyennes’ request was not well received by the white authorities—the peace conference collapsed, the Cheyennes went home, and, of course, the white women did not come. In this novel they do.”
― Jim Fergus, One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd

“Do not underestimate the power of a mother’s vengeance.”
― Jim Fergus, The Vengeance of Mothers: The Journals of Margaret Kelly & Molly McGill

“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.”
― Jim Fergus, One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd