“There's a fine line between being practical and being a candyass, which is a word that my father used to describe someone whom he considered to be the opposite of tough. ... Because I'm very afraid of becoming a candyass, I'll sometimes do things that I know to be impractical just so I don't have to worry about being a candyass.”
“At once [the buffalo] is a symbol of the tenacity of wilderness and the destruction of wilderness; it's a symbol of Native American culture and the death of Native American culture; it's a symbol of the strength and vitality of America and the pettiness and greed of America; it represents a frontier both forgotten and remembered; it stands for freedom and captivity, extinction and salvation.”
“Every schoolboy knows that the Indians used every part of the buffalo, which is true. But they did not use every part of every buffalo.”
“I used to be endlessly troubled by meat-eating people who were uneasy with hunters and hunting. ... How can someone suggest that paying for the slaughter of animals is more justifiable than taking the responsibility for one's food into one's own hands? ... Civilization is a mechanism that allows us to avoid the necessary but ugly aspects of life; most of us do not euthanize our own pets, we don't unplug the life support on our own ailing grandparents, we don't repair our own cars, and we don't process our own raw sewage. Instead, the delegations of our less-pleasant responsibilities is so widespread that taking these things on is almost like trying to swim upriver. It's easier not to do them, and those who insist on doing so are bound to look a little odd.”
“Indians only needed so many implements and decorations. If a tribe drove three hundred buffalo over a cliff, they wouldn’t feel obligated to make twenty-four hundred buffalo-hoof spoons and six hundred buffalo-horn charcoal carriers. Rather, they might just take the meat and hides from the best-looking female buffalo, those that weren’t too smashed up or buried under other buffalo. That might be all they touched. After all, their time and energy had value, just as ours does.”
“My foot slips on a narrow ledge; in that split second, as needles of fear pierce heart and temples, eternity intersects with present time. Thought and action are not different, and stone, air, ice, sun, fear, and self are one. What is exhilarating is to extend this acute awareness into ordinary moments, in the moment-by-moment experiencing of the lammergeier and the wolf, which, finding themselves at the center of things, have no need for any secret of true being. In this very breath that we take now lies the secret that all great teachers try to tell us…the present moment. The purpose of mediation practice is not enlightenment’ it is to pay attention even at unextraordinary times, to be of the present, nothing-but-the-present, to bear this mindfulness of now into each event of ordinary life.”
“Knowledge can be like the skin on the surface of the water in a pond, or it can go all the way down to the mud. It can be the tiny tip of the iceberg or the whole hundred percent.”
“Today I was a teacher, employed. True, I was also a teacher untried, but that could also be an advantage. I would learn, by God I’d learn. Nothing was going to stop me.”
“I was a child and she was a child,
In this kingdom by the sea,
But we loved with a love that was more than love—
I and my Annabel Lee—”
“Does "doing exactly what I want" mean not thinking about other people's feelings? Because that's just not the kind of person I am.
Maybe it can mean whatever I want it to mean, like taking care of myselfand not letting people walk over me.”
BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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