The Colour Of Lightning Quotes

“This was a world unto itself that lay between the Canadian River and the Rio Grande as if it had been designated on the day that God made it as the place where men would come to fight and kill one another. The Texans had brought their women and their children and their slaves right into the middle of the war land and expected to set up houses and fields and herds and live as if they were in Maryland, and were surprised on moonlit nights like this when Comanche arrows sang through the air in the dark.”
― Paulette Jiles, The Color of Lightning

“The Indians are what we have made them,” said Dr. Reed. “Every war between us and the red man has been precipitated by broken treaties. If they have attacked the settlers, it is because we have made them what they are.”
― Paulette Jiles, The Color of Lightning

“so he proceeded with great caution into an alien landscape of the mind and the mind’s eye.”
― Paulette Jiles, The Color of Lightning

“And now an amendment has been got up between the several states,” said Captain Kidd. He stared out over the men and the women with their pancake hats, their bonnets, as if in a trance. He seemed to be receiving messages from another world. “It is the Fifteenth Amendment to our glorious Constitution which Constitution was written under threat of arrest and execution by our forefathers who signed their names and their honor and their sacred fortunes. This Fifteenth Amendment allows the vote to all men qualified to vote without regard to race or color or previous condition of servitude. That means colored gentlemen. That means the sons of Ham.”
― Paulette Jiles, The Color of Lightning

“Britt was restless when they had to stay in town for any length of time. He was wary of the white men. It was better on the road, traveling free of any rules and away from ex-Confederates and strange men come into the country from distant places. It was better to travel and sleep under the wagons with no company but their own. The road was like a very long and thin nation to itself, a country whose citizens were isolate and untrammeled, whose passports were all carte blanche.”
― Paulette Jiles, The Color of Lightning

“Britt carried ammunition to Fort Belknap for the Ninth Cavalry, who were allowed to gallop after the Comanche raiders as far north as the Red. They stopped and watered their horses from the silky oranges and reds of the river. The black Ninth Cavalrymen slapped their hands together in frustration. They wanted a fight. They wanted to prove themselves. Instead they had a boil-up of coffee and ate some biscuits. Then they tightened their cinches on the hated McClellan army saddles and turned around and came back.”
― Paulette Jiles, The Color of Lightning

“For a moment he asked himself where it would be better. Cities of the North, with their sections for blacks only. The South in ruins and seething with bitter ex-Confederates and confused and rootless freedmen. Unknown places with unknown rules, and all in a perilous state of flux.”
― Paulette Jiles, The Color of Lightning

“She was afraid of the slow death of confinement. Of being trapped inside immovable houses and stiff clothing. Of the sky shuttered away from her sight, herself hidden from the operatic excitement of the constant wind and the high spirits that came when they struck out like cheerful vagabonds across the wide earth with all of life in front of them and unfolding and perpetually new. And now herself shut in a wooden cave. She could not go out at dawn alone and sing, she would not be seen and known by the rising sun.”
― Paulette Jiles, The Color of Lightning

“Thoughts have power. They can drift through the air unhindered. Ill will and hatred, the lust for revenge, can detach itself from the person who generates these thoughts if that person has a certain power from some being. Even after the person is dead.”
― Paulette Jiles, The Color of Lightning

“Americans are not comfortable with tragedy. Because of its insolubility. Tragedy is not amenable to reason and we are fixers, aren’t we? We can fix everything.”
― Paulette Jiles, The Color of Lightning

“They are our great mystery. They are America’s great otherwise. People fall back in the face of an impenetrable mystery and refuse it. Yes, they take captives. Sometimes they kill women and old people. But the settlers are people who shouldn’t be where they are in the first place and they know it and they take their chances.”
― Paulette Jiles, The Color of Lightning

“How many human beings remain in this world, unvanquished and at liberty in plains like these? So few, so few. Man was born free and everywhere he is in chains.”
― Paulette Jiles, The Color of Lightning

“As they rode Tissoyo spoke of the death of all the old people when his father was young, from the sickness that had come with the wagons that were going west. The wagons were all full of men and they were anxious to get to someplace called California. The fever was a malediction that grew and spread and ate people. It was invisible in the plains air but slaughtered whole villages nonetheless. They lay down and died and rotted in their tipis and whoever could walk or get on a horse left them there. Once a small girl lived through the fever in one of those decaying tipis, alone among the dead. She walked out on the empty land and a man called Twisted Horn came upon her but did not know whether she was still inhabited by the hostile, acidic beings, and so he left food and blankets for her, and stayed by her at a distance for days until it was clear she was going to live and that the fever had left her. Then he took her up behind him. Her face was full of holes as if she had been shot with birdshot.”
― Paulette Jiles, The Color of Lightning

“That night Samuel sent the guards back to Fort Sill. He would not have uniformed army soldiers anywhere near the agency buildings. He would win over these people with patience and kindness. They would understand that white men were no threat to them and would not attack them, or take their land, and thus they would leave off their raiding.”
― Paulette Jiles, The Color of Lightning

“Various realities out here unknown in the East, as I have learned.” He cleared his throat. “Here is the legal situation. It is illegal for Texas state troops or ranger companies to cross the Red River into Indian Territory and onto this reservation. It is against our orders to pursue raiding Indians over the line as well, even in hot pursuit. Once they come onto the reservation they are not to be confronted. In addition the reconstruction government in Texas is forbidding any state militia or ranger companies at all. The new requirements are that we cannot use force in any way. I am very happy with that. Believe me. But they do raid down into Texas, and they take captives. They say that was their hunting and raiding country long before we came. Then the parents and relatives come here to the agency and want the agency to get their children back, or whoever, but unless we offer money and trade goods we’re bolloxed.”
― Paulette Jiles, The Color of Lightning

“Yes, novel and untried,” said Deaver. He took up his knife and fork. “So they have given the most warlike tribes on the plains into the hands of Quakers. The most warlike and the least known. How interesting life is. How strange.” He ate a large bite of his steak. “How peculiar are the ways of government.”
― Paulette Jiles, The Color of Lightning

“Oh, I think we want to try some unusual methods in dealing with the Indian people. Honesty. Honoring our treaties with them. We will not use the military. Not on my agency.”
― Paulette Jiles, The Color of Lightning

“They sang as they came into camp. Fifty men all singing of what they had done and how they had charged into the farms and ranches of the enemy. And somebody started up a mourning song for Eaten Alive’s little brother, ah, it made me cry to hear them singing as they rode. You could hear their voices for a mile. They had a red scalp and two blond scalps, very long ones that waved and shook in the wind, and in that hair was the soul of the enemy held tight, tight. There was light all around them and all around their war horses and it was as beautiful and dangerous as the color of lightning.”
― Paulette Jiles, The Color of Lightning

“North Texas was a good place to be a black man; slave or free, they were all expected to carry arms. Every hand was needed to a gun or a plow or a branding iron and there were no records and what with the chaos of the war and incessant guerilla warfare with the Comanche and the Kiowa a person could pretty well do what he liked and he could be whatever he took a mind to as long as he had a strong back and a good aim. Britt walked to meet the men out of the smoke of the grass fires that burned in long, thin lines across his pastures.”
― Paulette Jiles, The Color of Lightning

“People did not really understand who they were until they had been tested, and then came the terrible surprise that they did not know who this new person was either.”
― Paulette Jiles, The Color of Lightning

“old man whose right hand shook all day and even in the night when he got up and walked around the lodges as if he carried an invisible rattle was called by words that meant possessed, inhabited, he counts out with that hand the remaining days of his life.”
― Paulette Jiles, The Color of Lightning

“Jube repeated this. Even though he knew she was not afraid of going hungry, or of starvation. She was afraid of the slow death of confinement. Of being trapped inside immovable houses and stiff clothing. Of the sky shuttered away from her sight, herself hidden from the operatic excitement of the constant wind and the high spirits that came when they struck out like cheerful vagabonds across the wide earth with all of life in front of them and unfolding and perpetually new. And now herself shut in a wooden cave. She could not go out at dawn alone and sing, she would not be seen and known by the rising sun.”
― Paulette Jiles, The Color of Lightning

“They had a red scalp and two blond scalps, very long ones that waved and shook in the wind, and in that hair was the soul of the enemy held tight, tight. There was light all around them and all around their war horses and it was as beautiful and dangerous as the color of lightning.”
― Paulette Jiles, The Color of Lightning

“He thought of himself alone and on foot in this immensity. On every side a deeper darkness marked the horizons of the earth and above the night sky alive with stars. He should have counted his steps. He did not want to wait for dawn and be caught afoot wandering in this no-man’s-land. He did not know where his horses were. He started walking again because it was the only thing he knew to do. This time he counted his steps. From time to time his spurs rang on stone. At six foot one he was the tallest object in this dark and limitless world. He had become the center of the universe because the only reference point was his lost self.”
― Paulette Jiles, The Color of Lightning

“the strange questing feeling that comes from abandonment, that were he to keep on searching about in his mind and memory he would find someone or something to comfort him. The”
― Paulette Jiles, The Color of Lightning

“All he had was the story of his life, which was as good as any other man’s, and in the end it is all we have.”
― Paulette Jiles, The Color of Lightning

“be.” He turned in the chair and reached for his coat. “They have provoked me into this.” “This is not going to be easy, Samuel.” “I know it.” Samuel stood up and jammed on his heavy wool coat with fierce and punitive thrusts of his arms. “Don’t sympathize with me, Colonel. I have lost all goodwill, here.” “You will need all your resolve,” said Grierson. “The Texans will want them executed by cannon, or machete or something.” “Oh yes, I have thought of that many times.” Samuel put on the brown felt hat that he had bought so long ago at Wanamaker’s on Market Street. “I am grateful for your prompt response.” “My duty,” said Grierson.

Jiles, Paulette. The Color of Lightning: A Novel (p. 307). HarperCollins e-books. Kindle Edition.”
― Paulette Jiles, The Colour Of Lightning

“When the headmen walked out of the gate in front, beyond the delicate and civilized little white fence, they were met and surrounded by soldiers and the soldiers reached out to them in a moving confusion of blue woolen arms and boots. The headmen were disarmed and handcuffed. A man named Big Tree fought for a short while but three soldiers flattened him on the ground and cuffed his hands behind him. A revolver fell from beneath the buffalo robe of Eaten Alive and it went off with a startling bang but nobody was hit. A soldier picked it up delicately by the grip between thumb and forefinger. He said that Agent Hammond might want to make out a receipt for this but the sergeant told him to shut up. The men walked away between the soldiers quietly and stepped into the army transport wagon. It was not dignified to struggle. The women and children had scattered to the horses and within moments they were gone.

Jiles, Paulette. The Color of Lightning: A Novel (p. 306). HarperCollins e-books. Kindle Edition.”
― Paulette Jiles, The Colour Of Lightning

“He tried to get them to sing, but they could not hit the note and had no sense of the musical rhythm of white people, but only the subtle and constantly varying beat of Comanche songs, the floating tenor. Samuel counted out pennies into their hands and sent them to the sutler’s store for hard candy so they could understand the meaning of money but when they came back they put the hard candies beneath their blankets in the army tent and did not eat them. They were afraid of being poisoned.

Jiles, Paulette. The Color of Lightning: A Novel (p. 302). HarperCollins e-books. Kindle Edition.”
― Paulette Jiles, The Colour Of Lightning

“distant band of Comanche brought in a boy with a thin, sensitive face, a wide mouth, and hooded eyes. He never looked at anyone from the moment he was brought in. He kept his head high and stiff and his eyes half closed and his gaze on the floorboards. He moved slowly and carefully. He seemed to be injured in some obscure way. His adopted father had bargained over his price, holding out for one more pound of coffee, another blanket. The Comanche had been traders for a century or more, and they were skilled at it. The boy listened with his beautiful eyes on the windowsill. Listened as he was sold by the man he had adored and whom he had imitated in everything. Followed across the hot plains, the man who had given him his Comanche name and approved of his aim with a rifle and his torture of a Mexican captive. He stood up like an automaton and followed the Indian agent, expecting to be killed, and when he was not killed, he was flooded by a feeling of contempt. He was crushed into whiteman’s clothing and led to a building.

Jiles, Paulette. The Color of Lightning: A Novel (pp. 300-301). HarperCollins e-books. Kindle Edition.”
― Paulette Jiles, The Colour Of Lightning