Top 60 Paulette Jiles Quotes (2026 Update)

1. “Laughter is good for the soul and all your interior works.”

— Paulette Jiles

2. “At the age he had attained with his life span short before him he had begun to look upon the human world with the indifference of a condemned man.”

— Paulette Jiles

3. “Who cares for your fashions and your wars and your causes? I will shortly be gone and I have seen many fashions come and go and many causes so passionately defended only to be forgotten.”

— Paulette Jiles

4. “The road to hell was paved with the bones of men who did not know when to quit fighting.”

— Paulette Jiles

5. “Maybe life is just carrying news. Surviving to carry the news. Maybe we have just one message, and it is delivered to us when we are born and we are never sure what it says; it may have nothing to do with us personally but it must be carried by hand through a life, all the way, and at the end handed over, sealed. He.”

— Paulette Jiles

6. “The road ran along the north side of the river, a shy and obsequious road that dodged every bank and lift and wound through the pecan trees and never insisted on its own way.”

— Paulette Jiles

7. “Haain-a? No. Absolutely not. No. No scalping. He lifted her up and swung her up over the ledges of stone and then followed. He said, It is considered very impolite.”

— Paulette Jiles

8. “This is writing. This is printing. This tells us of all the things we ought to know in the world. And also that we ought to want to know.”

— Paulette Jiles

9. “A Kiowa’s first and last resort was courage. A Kiowa did not beg or plead or appease. She knew at the bitter end she could starve away the despair, deny any sustenance to surrender. She wiped her face again and climbed up into the wagon. Ausay gya kii, gyao boi tol. Prepare for a hard winter, prepare for hard times. She braided her hair as if for battle. And so she became quiet and stilled.”

— Paulette Jiles

10. “Anne DeGrace is a gifted story teller and Far From Home contains some of her most intriguing characters. Thoroughly enjoyable.”

— Paulette Jiles

11. “If people had true knowledge of the world perhaps they would not take up arms and so perhaps he could be an aggregator of information from distant places and then the world would be a more peaceful place. He had been perfectly serious. That illusion had lasted from age forty-nine to age sixty-five. And.”

— Paulette Jiles

12. “Some people were born unsupplied with a human conscience and those people needed killing.”

— Paulette Jiles

13. “She said something in Kiowa in a happy tone. My name is Ay-ti-Podle, the Cicada, whose song means there is a fruit ripening nearby. She gestured back toward the big bay saddle horse and tossed her hair back. It was as if she wanted to include Pasha in this newfound happiness.”

— Paulette Jiles

14. “Life was not safe and nothing could make it so, neither fashionable dresses nor bank accounts. The baseline of human life was courage.”

— Paulette Jiles

15. “Time seems to have been sweeping ahead very fast these last years. How many years I worried about you and also delighted in your company. And now it is time for me to give you away.”

— Paulette Jiles

16. “Falls. He saw her bright, fierce little face break into laughter when the crowd laughed. It was good. Laughter is good for the soul and all your interior works. THAT.”

— Paulette Jiles

17. “My name is John Calley, the man said. He poured coins back into the can out of his large, callused hand. He said, We should not have taken your money this morning on the road. I am regretting it.”

— Paulette Jiles

18. “It was in this way he asked people to enter another realm of the mind. Places far away, and mysterious, brought to them by details which they did not understand but which entranced them.”

— Paulette Jiles

19. “She never learned to value those things that white people valued. The greatest pride of the Kiowa was to do without, to make use of anything at hand; they were almost vain of their ability to go without water, food, and shelter. Life was not safe and nothing could make it so, neither fashionable dresses nor bank accounts. The baseline of human life was courage.”

— Paulette Jiles

20. “Loss of reputation and the regard of our fellow persons is in any society, from Iceland to Malaysia, a terrible blow to the spirit. It is worse than being penniless and more cutting than the blades of enemies.”

— Paulette Jiles

21. “He made a list: feed, flour, ammunition, soap, beef, candles, faith, hope, charity.”

— Paulette Jiles

22. “Johanna bent her head far back to look up into the leafy canopy and the rainy sky. There was a cautious wonder on her face. She said something in Kiowa in a low voice. So much water, such giant trees, each possessing a spirit. Drops like jewels cascaded from their spidery hands.”

— Paulette Jiles

23. “The Indians are what we have made them,” said Dr. Reed. “Every war between us and the red man has been precipitated by broken treaties. If they have attacked the settlers, it is because we have made them what they are.”

— Paulette Jiles

24. “Perhaps it was something like this that changed the captive children forever; the violence they had endured when they were captured, their parents killed. Perhaps it sank down in their young minds and stayed there, invisible and unacknowledged but very powerful. He.”

— Paulette Jiles

25. “Curative Waters wagon he threw his shotgun, purchases of tinned butter and dried beef, bacon, two sheepskins, a small box.”

— Paulette Jiles

26. “It seemed to him she understood but was not willing to concede they might be on the same side against anyone or anything.”

— Paulette Jiles

27. “Yes, novel and untried,” said Deaver. He took up his knife and fork. “So they have given the most warlike tribes on the plains into the hands of Quakers. The most warlike and the least known. How interesting life is. How strange.” He ate a large bite of his steak. “How peculiar are the ways of government.”

— Paulette Jiles

28. “Captain Kidd said, It has been said by authorities that the law should apply the same to the king and to the peasant both, it should be written out and placed in the city square for all to see, it should be written simply and in the language of the common people, lest the people grow weary of their burdens.”

— Paulette Jiles

29. “For a moment he asked himself where it would be better. Cities of the North, with their sections for blacks only. The South in ruins and seething with bitter ex-Confederates and confused and rootless freedmen. Unknown places with unknown rules, and all in a perilous state of flux.”

— Paulette Jiles

30. “How many human beings remain in this world, unvanquished and at liberty in plains like these? So few, so few. Man was born free and everywhere he is in chains.”

— Paulette Jiles

31. “Everyone has come to celebrate her return. They will go home and talk about it forever, unto the next generation. But they will not come here and ask about her welfare.”

— Paulette Jiles

32. “An Gorta Mor, she said. In the famine children saw their parents die and then went to live with the people on the other side. In their minds they went. When they came back they were unfinished. They are forever falling. She shook out her wet, pinned-up skirt and watched as Johanna carefully ate pieces of bacon with her hands.”

— Paulette Jiles

33. “In the famine children saw their parents die and then went to live with the people on the other side. In their minds they went. When they came back they were unfinished. They are forever falling.”

— Paulette Jiles

34. “You are not thinking of reading law, are you? he said. Oh God no! John Calley stood holding the paint can. I am looking for honest work.”

— Paulette Jiles

35. “What held the civilized world together was the thinnest tissue of nothing but human will.”

— Paulette Jiles

36. “More than ever knowing in his fragile bones that it was the duty of men who aspired to the condition of humanity to protect children and kill for them if necessary.”

— Paulette Jiles

37. “Young people could get away with rough clothing but unless the elderly dressed with care they looked like homeless vagabonds.”

— Paulette Jiles

38. “It would stay with him always as everything you ever did stayed with you, every horse you ever saddled, every morning he awoke with Maria Luisa beside him, and every slap of the paten on fresh paper, every time he had thrown open the shutters in the Betancort house, and his captain dying under his hands, always there like a tangle of telegraph wires in the brain where no dispatch was ever lost, what an odd thing, an odd thing.”

— Paulette Jiles

39. “Americans are not comfortable with tragedy. Because of its insolubility. Tragedy is not amenable to reason and we are fixers, aren’t we? We can fix everything.”

— Paulette Jiles

40. “Britt was restless when they had to stay in town for any length of time. He was wary of the white men. It was better on the road, traveling free of any rules and away from ex-Confederates and strange men come into the country from distant places. It was better to travel and sleep under the wagons with no company but their own. The road was like a very long and thin nation to itself, a country whose citizens were isolate and untrammeled, whose passports were all carte blanche.”

— Paulette Jiles

41. “It was a puzzling thing as to why they packed up in towns in the way they did.”

— Paulette Jiles

42. “He broke down the .38, cleaned it, reassembled it. He made a list: feed, flour, ammunition, soap, beef, candles, faith, hope, charity.”

— Paulette Jiles

43. “A thin watery sun laid its gunmetal shine on the country below.”

— Paulette Jiles

44. “Thoughts have power. They can drift through the air unhindered. Ill will and hatred, the lust for revenge, can detach itself from the person who generates these thoughts if that person has a certain power from some being. Even after the person is dead.”

— Paulette Jiles

45. “No matter what side you were on, if you had survived Gettysburg you were to be congratulated.”

— Paulette Jiles

46. “Oh, I think we want to try some unusual methods in dealing with the Indian people. Honesty. Honoring our treaties with them. We will not use the military. Not on my agency.”

— Paulette Jiles

47. “The Captain stuffed tobacco into his kaolin pipe. And here he was in his mild and mindless way still roaming, still reading out the news of the world in the hope that it would do some good, but in the end he must carry a weapon in his belt and he had a child to protect and no printed story or tale would alter that. He considered the men who must be following them and also that the smell of tobacco smoke carried far and wide, far more than meat smoke, so on second thought he laid down the pipe.”

— Paulette Jiles

48. “That night Samuel sent the guards back to Fort Sill. He would not have uniformed army soldiers anywhere near the agency buildings. He would win over these people with patience and kindness. They would understand that white men were no threat to them and would not attack them, or take their land, and thus they would leave off their raiding.”

— Paulette Jiles

49. “Above and behind them the Dipper turned on its great handle as if to pour night itself out onto the dreaming continent and each of its seven stars gleamed from between the fitful clouds.”

— Paulette Jiles

50. “The Captain’s hand went to his forehead. A dreadful loss of status in the world. In his world. Loss of reputation and the regard of our fellow persons is in any society, from Iceland to East Indies, a terrible blow to the spirit.”

— Paulette Jiles