Leslie Marmon Silko Quotes

Being alive was all right then: he had not breathed like that for a long time.

Janice Gould is one of our best poets. The music of her poetry will delight you, and her gentle courageous accounts of tribal, family, and personal history make this book unforgettable. Doubters and Dreamers is a master-piece.

Distances and days existed in themselves then; they all had a story. They were not barriers. If a person wanted to get to the moon, there is a way; it all depended on whether you knew the directions ... on whether you knew the story of how others before you had gone. He had believed in the stories for a long time, until the teachers at Indian school taught him not to believe in that kind of "nonsense". But they had been wrong.

The material world and the flesh are only temporary - there are no sins of the flesh, spirit is everything!

You damn your own soul better than I ever could.

The ancient people perceived the world and themselves within that world as part of an ancient continuous story composed of innumerable bundles of other stories.

Night. Heavenly delicious sweet night of the desert that calls all of us to love her. The night is our comfort with her coolness and darkness. On wings, on feet, on our bellies, out we all come to glory in the night.

I am overwhelmed sometimes and feel a great deal of wonder at words, just simple words and how deeply we can touch each other with them, though I know that most of the time language is the most abused of all human abilities or traits.

He was overwhelmed by the love he felt for her; tears filled his eyes and the ache in his throat ran deep into his chest. He ran down the hill to the river, through the light rain until th pain faded like fog mist. He stood and watched the rainy dawn, and he knew he would find her again.

Moonflowers blossom in the sand hills before dawn, just as I followed him.

He had to keep busy; he had to keep moving so that the sinews connected behind his eyes did not slip loose and spin his eyes to the interior of his skull where the scenes waited for him.

What is it about us human beings that we can't let go of lost things?

Stories themselves have spirit and being, and they have a way of communicating on different levels. The story itself communicates with us regardless of what language it is told in. Of course stories are always funnier and more vivid when they are told in their original language by a good storyteller. But what I love about stories is they can survive and continue in some form or other resembling themselves regardless of how good or how bad the storyteller is, no matter what language they are told or written in. This is because the human brain favors stories or the narrative form as a primary means of organizing and relating human experience. Stories contain large amounts of valuable information even when they storyteller forgets or invents details.

rip the tongue from the darkness
shake the earth with your breathing
and explode gray ice dreams of eternity

But sometimes what we call 'memory' and what we call 'imagination' are not so easily distinguished.

The only way to get change is not through the courts or - heaven forbid - the politicians, but through a change of human consciousness and through a change of heart. Only through the arts - music, poetry, dance, painting, writing - can we really reach each other,

But it left something with him; as long as the hummingbird had not abandoned the land, somewhere there were still flowers, and they could all go on.

Josiah said that only humans had to endure anything, because only humans resisted what they saw outside themselves. Animals did not resist. But they persisted, because they became part of the wind. ( ... ) So they moved with the snow, became part of the snowstorm which drifted up against the trees and fences. And when they died, frozen solid against a fence, with the snow drifted around their heads? "Ah, Tayo," Josiah said, "the wind convinced them they were the ice.

The story was the important thing and little changes here and there were really part of the story. There were even stories about the different versions of stories and how they imagined the differing versions came to be.

Writing can't change the world overnight, but writing may have an enormous effect over time, over the long haul.

When someone dies, you don't get over it by forgetting; you get over it by remembering, and you are aware that no person is ever truly lost or gone once they have been in our life and loved us, as we have loved them.

Memory is tricky-memory for certain facts and or details is probably more imaginative than anything, but the important thing is to keep the feeling the story has. I never forget that: the feeling one has of the story is what you must strive to bring forth faithfully.

They are afraid, Tayo. They feel something happening, they can see something happening around them, and it scares them. Indians or Mexicans or whites - most people are afraid of change. They think that if their children have the same color of skin, the same color of eyes, that nothing is changing." She laughed softly. "They are fools. They blame us, the ones who look different. That way they don't have to think about what has happened inside themselves.

Late at night, when she and Ferro had waited on the ridge or had ridden on horseback into the steep canyons to wait for a drop, she had watched the meteor showers. They would begin shortly after midnight and continue until two A. M. On those nights it seemed as if the sky had overtaken the earth and was closing over it, so that the volcanic rocks and soil themselves reflected light like the surface of the moon. At those moments she could not think of any other place on the earth that she would rather be. She thought about the old ones and Yoeme and how they watched the sky relentlessly, translating sudden bursts of light into lengthy messages concerning the future and the past.

For a long time he had been white smoke. He did not realize that until he left the hospital, because white smoke had no consciousness of itself. It faded into the white world of their bed sheets and walls; it was sucked away by the words of doctors who tried to talk to the invisible scattered smoke ... They saw his outline but they did not realize it was hollow inside.

Fortunately, her year of graduate classes prepared her for obnoxious conduct.

You don't have anything if you don't have the stories.

Relationships. That's all there really is. There's your relationship with the dust that just blew in your face, or with the person who just kicked you end over end ... You have to come to terms, to some kind of equilibrium, with those people around you, those people who care for you, your environment.

Then they grow away from the earth then they grow away from the sun then they grow away from the plants and the animals. They see no life. When they look they see only objects. The world is a dead thing for them the trees and the rivers are not alive. the mountains and stones are not alive. The deer and bear are objects. They see no life. They fear. They fear the world. They destroy what they fear. They fear themselves.

To be able to make up stories has been a great gift to me from my ancestors and from the storytellers who were so numerous at Laguna Pueblo when I was growing up. I learned to read as soon as I could because I wanted stories without having to depend on adults to tell or read stories to me.

He liked the way she talked. There was something in her eyes too. He saw it the first time when she had said, 'I've seen you before many times, and I always remembered you.' Josiah could not remember ever seeing her before, but there was something in her hazel brown eyes that made him believe her.

Because if you weren't born white, you were forced to see differences; or if you weren't born what they called normal, or if you got injured, then you were left to explore the world of the different.

The truth of course was otherwise, but Lecha had never felt she owed anyone the truth, unless it was truth about their own lives, and then they had to pay her to tell them.

He could get no rest as long as the memories were tangled with the present

The snow ... came in thick tufts like new wool - washed before the weaver spins it.

The room pulsed with feeling,

Things which don't shift and grow are dead things.

Time limits are fictional. Losing all sense of time is actually the way to reality. We use clocks and calendars for convenience sake, not because that kind of time is real.

The Indian wars have never ended in the Americas.