The Buffalo Hunter Hunter Quotes

“What I am is the Indian who can’t die. I’m the worst dream America ever had.”
― Stephen Graham Jones, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter

“it wasn’t us, it would have been another regiment,” I said, calmer again. “You can’t stop a country from happening, Good Stab.” “But we were already a nation,” he said up to me. “We didn’t ask you to come.”
― Stephen Graham Jones, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter

“You put your reminders of pain on the wall and pray to them. We still hurt, so we don’t need that reminder.”
― Stephen Graham Jones, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter

“The depravity of man's heart knows no floor, and everyone in this hard country has a sordid chapter in the story of their life, that they're trying either to atone for, or stay ahead of.”
― Stephen Graham Jones, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter

“You don’t understand,” I said pleadingly as if to a higher power, longing to use my hands to gesture with, to make him see, to get him to understand that these were different times, with a different breed of men——the kind necessary to forge a new land, a better country, one that made use of its resources rather than letting them lie fallow. “I understand,” he said, however. “You wanted to make us cry. And so you did. You wanted our land, so you took it. You wanted us out of the way, so you killed us in our lodges. Is there more to it, Three-Persons?”
― Stephen Graham Jones, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter

“I didn’t look around, though. You can’t look around, every time you think you’re not alone. Once you start, you never stop.”
― Stephen Graham Jones, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter

“Good Stab fell to his knees, pressed his forehead to the floor and he screamed too, and I daresay our screams harmonized, at least in how much they pained us.

This, I believe, is the story of America, told in a forgotten church in the hinterlands, with a choir of the dead mutely witnessing.”
― Stephen Graham Jones, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter

“What I am is the Indian who can't die.
I'm the worst dream America ever had.”
― Stephen Graham Jones, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter

“You can’t stop a country from happening, Good Stab.” “But we were already a nation,” he said up to me. “We didn’t ask you to come.”
― Stephen Graham Jones, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter

“Weasel Plume. I never knew you, but God do I miss you.”
― Stephen Graham Jones, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter

“It flew above the Bear the day they killed Heavy Runner,” Good Stab said back without pause. “It flies above every camp of dead Indians. I will always pull them down. You put your reminders of pain on the wall and pray to them. We still hurt, so we don’t need that reminder.”
― Stephen Graham Jones, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter

“The depravity of man’s heart knows no floor, and everyone in this hard country has a sordid chapter in the story of their life, that they’re trying either to atone for, or stay ahead of. It’s what binds us one to the other.”
― Stephen Graham Jones, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter

“The humor of the west knows no bounds, respects no boundaries.”
― Stephen Graham Jones, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter

“Would but that I could equally take my memory down to the grain as such. But so says this whole nation, I know.”
― Stephen Graham Jones, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter

“You can’t stop a country from happening,”
― Stephen Graham Jones, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter

“and would that you have lived your life in safety in one of the cities of the east, and have never committed any acts you have lived to regret, such that that regret finally stands up on two legs, walks down across the Yellowstone, and tells you oblique tales that cause your hand to quake, your chest to tremble, your eyes to fill.”
― Stephen Graham Jones, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter

“That’s how many-faces men are. The world is funny to them. Or it’s funny how it all fits together, and it’s funny when it doesn’t.”
― Stephen Graham Jones, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter

“Either way, the time for scalping is well behind us,” I said. “This is a new day, is it not?” I lifted my arms, enveloping the whole grand chapel, and the civilized town beyond it.

“Or it’s a single, long night,”
― Stephen Graham Jones, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter

“It’s important that I sometimes am just another citizen, not a shepherd.”
― Stephen Graham Jones, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter

“I was born the year the stars fell.”
― Stephen Graham Jones, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter

“My band,” he said. “The Small Robes are a band of the Amskapi Pikuni.”
― Stephen Graham Jones, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter

“Sits-beside-him wife,” “big-mouth” and their coyote brethren the “little big-mouths”——it’s all so rational and easy, so descriptive and childlike. Over the course of our afternoon, this ancient language would pile up and up like a mountain of buffalo skulls——pardon, “blackhorn” skulls. “Real-bear.” “Long-legs.” “Coldmaker.” “Sticky-mouth.” This last one I take from context to be not quite a bear but more than a weasel, perhaps with a mouth characterized by saliva?”
― Stephen Graham Jones, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter

“I wasn't expecting Etsy, though. I wasn't expecting this academic wrapper at all, really. But, I'm not the boss. I just run along that splintery, decrepit fence between worlds and write down what I can see from the cracks and holes along the way. I don't think this is how Tolstoy did it, no.

--- Acknowledgements”
― Stephen Graham Jones, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter

“You killed this man and...and his children because I fathered them?" I asked.

"Because all of your blood has to spill," Good Stab said, himself again, grim and vengeful.

"When will it be enough?" I asked.

"When will napikwans have enough of our land?" he asked back.

I shut my eyes.”
― Stephen Graham Jones, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter

“You don't understand," I said pleadingly as if to a higher power, longing to use my hands to gesture with, to make him see, to get him to understand that these were different times, with a different breed of men - the kind necessary to forge a new land, a better country, one that made use of its resources rather than letting them lie fallow.

"I understand," he said, however. "You wanted to make us cry. And so you did. You wanted our land, so you took it. You wanted us out of the way, so you killed us in our lodges. Is there more to it, Three-Persons?”
― Stephen Graham Jones, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter

“My father used to tell me that I needed to pay attention to where I was instead of looking farther away than I could see, and I know he was right, but knowing and doing aren’t the same thing.”
― Stephen Graham Jones, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter

“One of them was yelling to the rest that the old one was for him, that he wanted that grey hair hanging off his saddle.”
― Stephen Graham Jones, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter

“You Black Robes know about drinking blood, don't you? You make your people in these wooded seats do it every time they're here.
In that way we're the same.”
― Stephen Graham Jones, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter

“... anyway, the traders didn't want them as much. Just winter-coat buffalo robes, as many as we could bring in, so that we had to imagine all the napikwans in their big camps huddled in the buffalo robes, making it look like the buffalo never went away, they just stayed in place, let the buildings and roads come up around them until they forgot they were grass eaters, started standing in line at banks and mailing letters.”
― Stephen Graham Jones, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter