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Nothing happened to them but toil. Great things happened to other people. The married girls were lost.
She was pretty sure that the rules and trappings of ritual had nothing to do with God, that they were ways for people to imagine they were doing things right in order to escape from punishment, or harm, like children.
How intimately the trees seized the earth. How exquisitely she was included.
The peculiar aliveness of things struck by late afternoon sunlight—hold on to it.
You can never get enough of the ones you love, thought Thomas, rubbing his chest slowly, to vanquish the pains. “Here I have Biboon with me to this great old age, but I am greedy. I want him longer.”
Overnight the tribal chairman job had turned into a struggle to remain a problem. To not be solved.
His feelings were like weather. He just suffered or enjoyed them.
We have survived smallpox, the Winchester repeating rifle, the Hotchkiss gun, and tuberculosis. We have survived the flu epidemic of 1918, and fought in four or five deadly United States wars. But at last we will be destroyed by a collection of tedious words.
“I am too tired to die,”
There just wasn’t enough of anything and if he didn’t save what little there was from disappearing there was no imagining how anyone would get along.
Government is more like sex than people think. When you are having good sex, you don’t appreciate it enough. When you are having bad sex, it is all you can think about.”
Because everything was alive, responsive in its own way, capable of being hurt in its own way, capable of punishment in its own way, Zhaanat’s thinking was built on treating everything around her with great care.
They both started laughing in that desperate high-pitched way people laugh when their hearts are broken.
You cannot feel time grind against you. Time is nothing but everything, not the seconds, minutes, hours, days, years. Yet this substanceless substance, this bending and shaping, this warping, this is the way we understand our world.
We are poor, but even poor people can love their land. You do not need money to love your home.
The services that the government provides to Indians might be likened to rent. The rent for use of the entire country of the United States.
To seek police assistance for an Indian woman was almost sure to put her in the wrong. No matter what happened, she would be the one blamed and punished.
The forces he was up against were implacable and distant. But from their distance they could reach out and sweep away an entire people.
He’d thought that if he worked hard enough and followed their rules this would mean he could keep his family secure, his people from the worst harms, but none of that was true.
animals subject to the laws of earth, we think time is experience. But time is more a substance, like air, only of course not air. It is in fact a holy element.
How sad it was not to be sad.
You can’t assimilate Indian ghosts.
