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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“Fine. I give myself permission, thanks. It’s what we white folk do.”
― 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

“I didn’t mean to name that buffalo calf that, but once I said it I couldn’t take it back. But Wolf Calf told me when I was young that a real Pikuni gives away what’s closest to him, and my childhood name was the one thing the Cat Man and the soldiers hadn’t been able to touch. So I had to give it away.”
― Stephen Graham Jones, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter

“But we are German still, from the old country.” “The old country,” he said, unable not to grin. “That’s where the Pikuni are from as well. Maybe we’re German like you.”
― 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

“We never called this place ours like that, though, but that didn't mean it was yours.”
― 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

“I was born the year the stars fell.”
― 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 must be this stupid to ride this ride.”
― Stephen Graham Jones, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter

“but napikwans are just what happens when we forget we’re Pikuni. When we think a many-shots gun is more important than beaver medicine.”
― Stephen Graham Jones, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter

“At the same time, not everyone feared to be on a drinking binge is actually drunken.”
― Stephen Graham Jones, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter

“Killing them now will be mercy, an act which the Father who sees all will look kindly on, recognizing in you a man made in His very mold, and following His tenets and teachings.”
― Stephen Graham Jones, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter

“And, lastly, damning my immortal soul, “God looks the other way when men must dole out justice. I can show you in the Bible whereof it speaks that. No forgiveness is necessary when those you punish are naught but savages.”
― Stephen Graham Jones, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter

“When she opens her mouth back to me, I can smell plundered open mice on her breath. But she is warm and solid, and her purring is a comfort I don’t deserve but hoard all the same, as it fills me with life, and satisfaction, and wards away the loneliness, which I would have previously termed solitude.”
― Stephen Graham Jones, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter

“We don’t choose the shape or meter of our struggles, however. Our duty, insofar as this aging pastor can tell, is to simply endure them, and, when and if opportunity arises, overcome them.”
― Stephen Graham Jones, The Buffalo Hunter Hunter

“I know the Lord sees all. But, too, I have to imagine He’s inured to the many and various frailties contained in His multitudinous children. Perhaps we’re even amusing to him.”
― 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