“I just thought: Oh goodness, you can wear nice clothes and get your hair done and still be a feminist and a serious intellectual.”

“I think you can only make statements like ‘She was pathological’ if you are absolutely sure of your own sanity, which I consider a morally unacceptable position.”

“Some dumbass outside the reserve thinks you're wearing a butterfly on your arm, you'll get your ass kicked," Rafael said.”

“Sometimes you do have to laugh to keep from crying. And sometimes the world feels all right and good and kind of like it's becoming nice again around you. And you realize it, and realize how happy you are in it, and you just gotta laugh. ”

“You have to work to carve out your own little corner, and I'm certainly smacking my head against the wall trying to make a dent. I just hope I don't get brain-damaged before I get there”

“In Shoshone, there's a saying. It's a long one, and it doesn't have an English equivalent, so bear with me.Sutummu tukummuinna. It means, I don't speak your language, and you don't speak mine. But I still understand you. I don't need to walk in your footsteps if I can see the footprints you left behind.”

“I cleaned the shit off my pink high-tops and drove home, stopping for an espresso at the coffeehouse across from the college. Men and women were hunched over copies of Jean Paul Sartre and writing in their journals. Most wore the thin-rimmed tortoiseshell glasses favored by intellectuals. Their clothes were faded to a precisely fashionable degree; you can buy them that way from catalogs now, new clothes processed to look old. The intellectuals looked at me in my overalls the way such people inevitably look at farmers. I dumped a lot of sugar in my espresso and sipped it delicately at a corner table near the door. I looked at them the way farmers look at intellectuals.”