“I cannot think that we are useless or God would not have created us. There is one God looking down on us all. We are all the children of one God. The sun, the darkness, the winds are all listening to what we have to say.”

“The soldiers never explained to the government when an Indian was wronged, but reported the misdeeds of the Indians.”

“I was no chief and never had been, but because I had been more deeply wronged than others, this honor was conferred upon me, and I resolved to prove worthy of the trust.”

“I cannot think that we are useless or God would not have created us. There is one God looking down on us all. We are all the children of one God. The sun, the darkness, the winds are all listening to what we have to say.”

“Class is mostly a way to find something in myself I didn't know was there. Learning doesn't fill me up so much as opens me up. Shakes me loose and throws me off my habits -- might even rearrange me. It's like if you only rode Brandy and not Geronimo or Elvis. Once in a while I want to get on a horse that scares me sideways.”

“We have talked about Suzy and about her last days, but it's as if our lives stopped then and there. If I say anything to him about feeling lonesome, he goes outside and does some little chore. I can't tell if he is secretly blaming me, or himself, or just too full of pain to talk. That was the one thing we could always do together. I wish for the old days. I wish for the struggling days and the days of Geronimo, and the days of birthing Charlie with no one but Jack to help me. How happy and in love we were then. I want to be in love again, but all I feel is darkness and shadows. Everything is changed and different”

“If this were a courageous country,it would ask Gloria to lead itsince she is sane and funny and beautiful and smartand the National Leaders we've always hadare not.When I listen to her talk about women's rightschildren's rightsmen's rightsI think of the long line of Americans who should have been president, but weren't.Imagine Crazy Horse as president. Sojourner Truth.John Brown. Harriet Tubman. Black Elk or Geronimo.Imagine President Martin Luther King confrontingthe youthful "Oppie" Oppenheimer. Imagine PresidentMalcolm X going after the Klan. Imagine President StevieWonder dealing with the "Truly Needy."Imagine President Shirley Chisholm, Ron Dellums, orSweet Honey in the Rockdealing with Anything.It is imagining to make us weep with frustration,as we languish under real estate dealers, killers, and bad actors.”

“To be American is to be part of a dialogical and democratic operation that grapples with the challenge of being human in an open-ended and experimental manner. Although America is a romantic project in which a paradise, a land of dreams, is fanned and fueled with a religion of vast possibility, it is, more fundamentally, a fragile experiment-precious yet precarious-of dialogical and democratic human endeavor that yields forms of modern self-making and self-creating unprecedented in human history. From Thomas Jefferson to Elijah Muhammad, Geronimo to Dorothy Day, Jane Adams to Nathaniel West, it holds out the possibility of self-transformation and self-reliance to New World dwellers willing to start anew and recast themselves for the purpose of deliverance and betterment. This purpose requires only a restlessness, energy and boldness that galvanizes people to organize and mobilize themselves in a way that makes new opportunities and possibilities credible and worth the”

“Love is the first feeling we felt since birth and the last thing will need in Death.”

“He had thought it through, even though following his own logic was a bit like tracking a shadow through a tunnel, he was never sure the idea he was tailing at the exit was the same idea he had been following at the entrance.”

“The powerful intellect leashed by an impoverished vocabulary is a myth. Without a vocabulary, a language, the intellect cannot develop.”