One Thousand White Women: The Journals of May Dodd

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

But others of us believed that the only true happiness our Sara had ever known in her short life on this earth had been among these people. And we wished for her soul to go to the place the Cheyennes called Seano – the place of the dead – which is reached by following the Hanging Road in the Sky, the Milky Way. Here the Cheyennes believe that all the People who have ever died live with their Creator, He’amaveho’e. In Seano they live in villages just as they did on earth – hunting, working, eating, playing, loving, and making war. And all go to the place of the dead, regardless of whether they were good or bad on earth, virtuous or evil, brave or cowardly – everyone – and eventually in Seano all are reunited with the souls of their loved ones.

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?

Good-bye, Harry, wherever you may be … never has it been more clear to me that the part of my life which you occupied is over forever … I could not be further away from you if I were on the moon … how odd to think of one’s life not as chapters in a book but as complete volumes, separate and distinct.

My definition of LUNATIC ASYLUM: A place where lunatics are created.

It was our understanding that we were to be instructing them in the ways of the civilized world, not being made beasts of burden, but, as Helen Flight has pointed out, of what use are table manners to those without tables.

Franchement vu la façon dont j'ai été traitée par les gens dits "civilisés", il me tarde finalement d'aller vivre chez les sauvages.