Mayer Adelberg

“For almost five centuries, Holmberg’s Mistake—the supposition that Native Americans lived in an eternal, unhistoried state—held sway in scholarly work, and from there fanned out to high school textbooks, Hollywood movies, newspaper articles, environmental campaigns, romantic adventure books, and silk-screened T-shirts. It existed in many forms and was embraced both by those who hated Indians and those who admired them. Holmberg’s Mistake explained the colonists’ view of most Indians as incurably vicious barbarians; its mirror image was the dreamy stereotype of the Indian as a Noble Savage. Positive or negative, in both images Indians lacked what social scientists call agency—they were not actors in their own right, but passive recipients of whatever windfalls or disasters happenstance put in their way.”
― Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

“The more people you loved, the more goodbyes you had to endure.”
― Boo Walker, The Singing Trees

“The master has failed more times than the beginner has even tried.”
― Stephen McCranie

“When her daughter wasn’t criticizing every last detail of her mother’s appearance, her laugh, her choice of words, her opinions, her very existence—she was a wonderful human being.”
― Susin Nielsen, Snap: A Novel