Jim Fergus Quotes

#1. can't help but think once again what a foolish, loutish creature is man. Is there another on earth that kills for the pure joy of it?

Jim Fergus

#2. 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

#3. 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

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

Jim Fergus

#5. Ah but Art never fails anyone, magic and medicine may certainly fail, but never Art.

Jim Fergus

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

Jim Fergus

#7. 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

#8. 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

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

Jim Fergus

#10. The law of the jungle which I learned at a young age, and have been trying to escape ever since, is that we what we must to survive.

Jim Fergus

#11. 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

#12. 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

#13. 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