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41 " And the newspapers, they say nothing about this at all or about the poor at all, Doris said. There are great holes in your newspapers. Nobody sees them. God sees them. The "
― Paulette Jiles , News of the World
42 " It would stay with him always as everything you ever did stayed with you, every horse you ever saddled, every morning he awoke with Maria Luisa beside him, and every slap of the paten on fresh paper, every time he had thrown open the shutters in the Betancort house, and his captain dying under his hands, always there like a tangle of telegraph wires in the brain where no dispatch was ever lost, what an odd thing, an odd thing. "
43 " 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 Colour Of Lightning
44 " THIS IS A PRINTING OFFICE CROSSROADS OF CIVILIZATION Refuge of all the arts against the ravages of time ARMOURY OF FEARLESS TRUTH AGAINST WHISPERING RUMOR INCESSANT TRUMPET OF TRADE From this place words may fly abroad NOT TO PERISH ON WAVES OF SOUND NOT TO VARY WITH THE WRITER’S HAND BUT FIXED IN TIME HAVING BEEN VERIFIED IN PROOF Friend you stand on sacred ground "
45 " A Kiowa’s first and last resort was courage. A Kiowa did not beg or plead or appease. She knew at the bitter end she could starve away the despair, deny any sustenance to surrender. She wiped her face again and climbed up into the wagon. Ausay gya kii, gyao boi tol. Prepare for a hard winter, prepare for hard times. She braided her hair as if for battle. And so she became quiet and stilled. "
46 " 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. "
47 " she is like an elf. She is like a fairy person from the glamorie. They are not one thing or another. "
48 " You never knew. Cultures were mine fields. "
49 " Time seems to have been sweeping ahead very fast these last years. How many years I worried about you and also delighted in your company. And now it is time for me to give you away. "
50 " To go through our first creation is a turning of the soul we hope toward the light, out of the animal world. God be with us. To go through another tears all the making of the first creation and sometimes it falls to bits. We fall into pieces. She is asking, Where is that rock of my creation? "
51 " Someone called, Why are you not reading from Governor Davis’s state journal? The Captain folded his newspapers. He said, Sir, you know very well why. He leaned forward over the podium. His white hair shone, his gold-rim glasses winked in the bull’s-eye lantern beam. He was the image of elderly wisdom and reason. Because there would be a fistfight here within moments, if not shooting. Men have lost the ability to discuss any political event in Texas in a reasonable manner. There is no debate, only force. In point of fact, regard the soldiers beyond the door. He slapped his newspapers into the portfolio. He "
52 " If people had true knowledge of the world perhaps they would not take up arms and so perhaps he could be an aggregator of information from distant places and then the world would be a more peaceful place. He had been perfectly serious. That illusion had lasted from age forty-nine to age sixty-five. And "
53 " More than ever knowing in his fragile bones that it was the duty of men who aspired to the condition of humanity to protect children and kill for them if necessary. It comes to a person most clearly when he has daughters. "
54 " He knew that he did not play music so much as walk into it, as if into a palace of great riches, with rooms opening into other rooms, which opened into still other rooms, and in these rooms were courtyards and fountains with passageways to yet more mysterious spaces of melody, "
― Paulette Jiles , Simon the Fiddler
55 " Young people could get away with rough clothing but unless the elderly dressed with care they looked like homeless vagabonds "
56 " In the famine children saw their parents die and then went to live with the people on the other side. In their minds they went. When they came back they were unfinished. They are forever falling. "
57 " No, seventy-two. He had just turned seventy-two on March 15, yesterday, as he had turned sixteen just before Horseshoe Bend and at that time it would have been beyond belief that he would even live to see this age, much less be traveling along a distant road far to the west, still in one piece, alive and unaccountably happy. "
58 " At the age he had attained with his life span short before him he had begun to look upon the human world with the indifference of a condemned man. "
59 " The fashion has been in literary fiction for the depressing ending, and for more or less passive characters who have terrible things happen to them . . . So why not have a happy ending? Is there a law? "
60 " Haain-a? No. Absolutely not. No. No scalping. He lifted her up and swung her up over the ledges of stone and then followed. He said, It is considered very impolite. "