Thirteen Moons Quotes
"There is no scatheless rapture. Love and time put me in this condition."
"The belief I’ve acquired over a generous and nevertheless inadequate time on earth is that we arrive in the afterlife as broken as when we departed from the world."
"Many decades ago, when I built my farm out of raw land, I oriented the front of the house to aim west toward the highest range of mountains."
"The gist of the story is that even when all else is lost and gone forever, there is yearning."
"Survive long enough and you get to a far point in life where nothing else of particular interest is going to happen."
"The law is an axe. It cuts whatever it falls on. The man that wins knows how to aim the sharp edge away from himself."
"We all reach a point where we would like to draw a line across time and declare everything on the far side null."
"Nevertheless, let us begin. But not with senator, colonel, or chief. With a bound boy."
"We stood together shivering. I could smell her scent, some attar or fragrant water. Lavender. I held her and it was like falling down a well."
"Desire abides. It is all people have that stands proof against time. Everything else rots."
"I wandered for days through the mountains, following whatever paths led west."
"I didn’t sleep well and had taken a cramping stomach ailment that frequently left me squatting in the woods."
"Bear looked at me without changing his posture or any other manifestation of his thoughts, as if twenty lost boys a day passed by this porch and one more was not worth even a quizzical expression."
"The trade post sat on a little level patch of ground with a bold creek running loud to one side and big dark hemlocks growing serene and gloomy all around."
"Bear said, The moon, he’s like men are. He slips around in the dark."
"Bear said he judged the Bible to be a sound book. Nevertheless, he wondered why the white people were not better than they are, having had it for so long."
"All translations miss something. Some miss almost everything."
"The Cherokee were about the same as everybody else; they considered themselves the only people that mattered."
"Bear’s position, if I understood it, was that refusal to fear these general terms of existence is an honorable act of defiance."
"Bear claimed there were old men and women who practiced a deep form of winter sleep and could den up nearly as long as bear or groundhog."
"I figured that writing down all the details of every transaction would be a good start."
"But even after I could understand most of what he was saying, I still didn’t think his jokes were funny."
"The newly dead are noted for their absolute lack of pity."
"Have you fallen in love with me yet? she said."
"It had been my understanding, both from reading novels and from some consonant feeling in my own heart, that women put a great deal of stock in the desire of men."
"But really, sometimes success just falls on you. Or you step in it."
"Getting what you wanted was largely a matter of claiming what you wanted."
"I looked about and saw Featherstone and Claire off past a little fenced herb garden near an edge of woods. They were laughing."
"Together, we looked so fine that day I wished I could sit on a porch and watch us ride by."
"The future suddenly rose up before me, bright as a red sunrise."
"It was nothing more than paper stacked on paper, varieties of hope and speculation."
"All of a sudden the world felt a great deal more expansive now that I was no longer owned but an owner."
"Be as you are and then go on your way to the Nightland is my belief."
"I would not have felt right leaving you unaccounted for."
"It could, for a start, set you free and make a place for you in the world."
"Men held their honor like a wild bird’s egg cupped in their hands, ready to break at the slightest breath of insult."
"I’ve heard of men who accepted challenges in their parlors with a bloody mind but then later, on the dueling ground, only discharged their pistols into the air."
"And my age precludes considering any account I might give as definitive. Something happened. Beyond that, nothing is knowable."
"The diameter of their world was tightly drawn, just as it was for most of their white neighbors."
"In a country like this and at a season the most unpropitious for surveying operations, it is natural to suppose many difficulties have been encountered."
"It would appear obvious from the nature of the ground, that the most effectual mode of reducing Indians would be by compelling them to come in by the pressure of want and privation."
"They are very illy provided with arms and ammunition. It is thought that there are not more than 400 rifles among them, and those for the most part useless or in bad repair."
"The soldiers fell on the land like calamity."
"From that point forward, everything changed entirely in the village."
"The enlisted men were let out only on rare occasions."
"Most days of the week, they hung about my trading post."
"GREEN CORN MOON, the weeks leading up to the summer solstice, had long been one of my favorite stretches of time."
"In the afternoon I watched them march families and old folks into the holding pen."
"Many of them were contemptible, but I guess no greater portion than the generality of people."
"A few, though, resembled actual human beings and seemed shaken and saddened by what they were doing."
"By dusk, they’d have thirty or forty people walking ahead of them."
"Sometimes out of exuberance the followers would set fire to a place after they’d emptied it."
"She stopped and insisted on feeding her chickens before she was taken away."
"But at some point, he said, it was just a job."
"I’ve always numbered myself among the drunks."
"The roads were filled with uniformed Federal soldiers and heavily armed Tennessee mercenaries."
"What to say to her other than Love me, love me. Don’t go. Stay with me."
"She would not even accept an embrace in the dooryard."
"I stayed at Cranshaw three days that were like a compression of our two summers back in green youth."
"I just held her tight and let myself be happy and hopeless and free of further desire."
"Claire was beautiful, beautiful. Every single part of her."
"But Claire rode away as the condemned ride the final cart to the gallows."
"They eat at you like heartworm, coring you out until you are just a skin enclosing nothing."
"I thought then that if she would look up and say one more word, I would turn my back on the life."
"A man can’t live in the woods. They’ve emptied out. Everything’s gone."
"I do not see how this place could support a lone man in the wild, much less a large population of fugitives."
"The Indians are ignorant beyond all reckoning and the whites too, mostly the dregs of Scotland and Ireland."
"The country is no better than a jungle of unpracticable mountains."
"The word bleak would pretty well describe every element of those footslogging days."
"The generations surrounding me were as desperate as you can drive people to be."
"After which it would just keep moving forward like a wave on the sea, oblivious to individual pain."
"The entire direction of the new world, though, was against peace."
"People suffer and die in ignorance and delusion."
"History in the making, at least on the personal level, is almost exclusively pathetic."
"We talked for three or four drinks about our mountain homeland, how it had been and how it had changed."
"We didn’t even bother talking about green. Without question, every shade of it would be accounted for by our homeland."
"Washington said he had never gotten used to this edge of the prairie and found the great flat emptiness to the west like a suckhole in a river."
"And the longer I looked, the deeper down I thought I saw. The shape of Creation appeared like a funnel, a maelstrom, a maw."
"At the breakfast table, I secretly probed my rib cage but found no positive evidence of fissures."
"In the outer world, there had been various forms of inoculation against the disease, at least as far back as when old insane Cotton Mather was taught the trick by his slave Onesimus."