"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)

"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

"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 opinionis a highly overrated human condition invented by white folks"
— 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: A Novel)

"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

""...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: A Novel)

"...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)

"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)

""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 (The Wild Girl: A Novel)