“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”

“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.”

“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.”

“...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.”

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

“As I squat to pee I look upward at the billions of stars and planets in the heavens and somehow my own insignificance no longer terrifies me as it once did, but comforts me, makes me feel a part, however tiny, of the whole complete and perfect universe. . . and when I die the wind will still blow and the stars still shine, for the place I occupy on earth is no more permanent than the water I now make, absorbed by the the sandy soil, dried instantly by the constant prairie wind . . .”