“When asked why he wrote the book, Freed said: In the 1980s, I joined the small group of anthropologists who were writing about the history of their subject. I believed that I could add some balance to American anthropological history, and that the best place to start was with museums—where the story began. The more I delved into the archives, the more I was fascinated. I was hooked.”

“I wrote a book. It sucked. I wrote nine more books. They sucked, too. Meanwhile, I read every single thing I could find on publishing and writing, went to conferences, joined professional organizations, hooked up with fellow writers in critique groups, and didn’t give up. Then I wrote one more book.”

“There's no excuse for a dull book, a dull museum, or a dull speech. Especially when dealing with history—the most fascinating subject I know.”

“Josephy visited several leading Manhattan bookstores and sadly discovered the explanation [from his agent] to be generally correct; books about Indians were shelved in the back of the stores alongside books about natural history, dinosaurs, plants, birds, and animals rather than being placed alongside biographies and histories of Americans, Europeans, Asians, Africans, and other great world cultures. Puzzled, Josephy began asking bookstore managers for a justification of this marketing tactic and was informed that Indian books had “just always been placed there.” The longer he pondered booksellers’ indifference toward Indians, the more annoyed Josephy became with the realization that bookstore marketing tactics were simply a reflection of the pervasive thinking throughout the United States in 1961: Americans believed Indians to be a vanished people. “Thinking about it made me angry,” Josephy wrote in his autobiography, “and I vowed that someday, some way, I would do something about this ignorant insult.”

“I was someone hungry for stories; more specifically, I was someone who craved after facts...I was, you see, at the start of this tale, a person with history. I had no story of my own. Lacking this, I developed a curiosity about other people's lives.”

“Don't you think it's rather nice to think that we're in a book that God's writing? If I were writing a book, I might make mistakes. But God knows how to make the story end just right--in the way that's best for us."Do you really believe that, Mother?" Peter asked quietly.Yes," she said, "I do believe it--almost always--except when I'm so sad that I can't believe anything. But even when I don't believe it, I know it's true--and I try to believe it.”