Jim Fergus Quotes

Don't you know that I laugh because it is my last defense against tears?

— Jim Fergus

How odd to think of one's life not as chapters in a book but as complete volumes, separate and distinct.

— 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

Your power as a woman, as a mother, is your medicine, and it saved you. Take your courage in that.

— Jim Fergus

“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 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

“For their part, the savage men appear to spend an inordinate amount of time lounging around their lodges, smoking and gossiping among themselves ... so that it occurs to me that perhaps our cultures are not so different after all: the women do all the work while the men do all the talking.”

— Jim Fergus

“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

I, personally, have resolved never to display weakness, to be always strong and firm and forthright, to show neither fear nor uncertainty
no matter how fearful and uncertain I may be inside; I see no other way to survive this ordeal.

— Jim Fergus

“I push him from my mind. This is no act of easy omission on my part; I do not consign him casually to a forgotten past. It is rather an act of will
a kind of self-performed surgery on my soul ... the bloodiest of mutilations.”

— Jim Fergus

“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