Igjugarjuk Eskimo Quotes

Why are there no great women artists?' sounds as ignorant of human geography as the query 'Why are there no Eskimo tennis teams? ~ Francine Du Plessix Gray

Marriage is simply an economic necessity, and so there are no elaborate courtship displays or marriage celebrations among the Eskimo. ~ Peter Farb

With the solitary exception of the Eskimos, there isn't a people on Earth who doesn't use psychoactive plants to effect a change in consciousness, and there probably never has been. As for the Eskimos, their exception only proves the rule: historically, Eskimos didn't use psychoactive plants because none of them will grow in the Arctic. (As soon as the white man introduced the Eskimo to fermented grain, he immediately joined the consciousness changers.) What this suggests is that the desire to alter one's experience of consciousness may be universal. ~ Michael Pollan

Let's put to rest one cliché. You can sell refrigerators to Eskimos. The people of Savoonga are Yupiks, the westernmost of the Eskimo tribes, closer to Siberians than American Eskimos in their appearance, and their customs, and their distinctive, liquidly sibilant native language. And, yes, they all have refrigerators. In the winter, food gets freezer burn if left out in the elements. Eskimos need refrigerators to keep their food warm. ~ Gene Weingarten

In the very earliest times, when both people and animals lived on earth, a person could become an animal if he wanted to, and an animal could become a human being. Sometimes they were people and sometimes animals and there was no difference. All spoke the same language. That was the time when words were like magic. NALUNGLAQ, A NETSILIK ESKIMO ~ Virginia Morell

I have compromised down the line. I've disliked it intensely in the old days when you were trying to talk race relations and they would not allow you to talk about the legitimacies of race relations. In the old days, you didn't talk about black, you talked about Eskimo or American Indian, and the American Indian was assumed not to be a problem area. ~ Rod Serling

He could sell snow to an Eskimo.
--Overheard in a Real Estate Office ~ Bob Eckstein

Never open a book with weather. There are exceptions. If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways to describe ice and snow than an Eskimo, you can do all the weather reporting you want. ~ Elmore Leonard

The art of the great historic civilizations never impress us as much as an Eskimo harpoon or a mask from the South Pacific. The contact is physical, and the feeling we experience is very much like acute anxiety. Inner or outer space, the world below or beyond, becomes a great weight pressing down upon us. Each work is a solid block of time, time standing still, time more massive than a mountain, despite the fact that it is as intangible as air or thought. The handiwork of primitive peoples reveals the time before time. ~ Octavio Paz

Iconic clothing has been secularized ... A guardsman in a dress uniform is ostensibly an icon of aggression; his coat is red as the blood he hopes to shed. Seen on a coat-hanger, with no man inside it, the uniform loses all its blustering significance and, to the innocent eye seduced by decorative colour and tactile braid, it is as abstract in symbolic information as a parasol to an Eskimo. It becomes simply magnificent. ~ Angela Carter

Perhaps I am here because of last night's dream, when I stood on the frozen lake before a kayak made of sealskin. I walked on the ice toward the boat and picked up a handful of shredded hide and guts. An old Eskimo man said, "You have much to work with." Suddenly, the kayak was stripped of its skin. It was a rib cage of willow. It was the skeleton of a fish. I want to see it for myself, wild exposure, in January, when this desert is most severe. The lake is like steel. I wrap my alpaca shawl tight around my face until only my eyes are exposed. I must keep walking to stay warm. Even the land is frozen. There is no give beneath my feet. I want to see the lake as Woman, as myself, in her refusal to be tamed. The State of Utah may try to dike her, divert her waters, build roads across her shores, but ultimately, it won't matter. She will survive us. I recognize her as a wilderness, raw and self-defined. Great Salt Lake strips me of contrivances and conditioning, saying, "I am not what you see. Question me. Stand by your own impressions." We are taught not to trust our own experiences. Great Salt Lake teaches me experience is all we have. ~ Terry Tempest Williams

I compared what was really known about the stars with the account of creation as told in Genesis. I found that the writer of the inspired book had no knowledge of astronomy -- that he was as ignorant as a Choctaw chief -- as an Eskimo driver of dogs. Does any one imagine that the author of Genesis knew anything about the sun -- its size? that he was acquainted with Sirius, the North Star, with Capella, or that he knew anything of the clusters of stars so far away that their light, now visiting our eyes, has been traveling for two million years?

If he had known these facts would he have said that Jehovah worked nearly six days to make this world, and only a part of the afternoon of the fourth day to make the sun and moon and all the stars?

Yet millions of people insist that the writer of Genesis was inspired by the Creator of all worlds.

Now, intelligent men, who are not frightened, whose brains have not been paralyzed by fear, know that the sacred story of creation was written by an ignorant savage. The story is inconsistent with all known facts, and every star shining in the heavens testifies that its author was an uninspired barbarian.

I admit that this unknown writer was sincere, that he wrote what he believed to be true -- that he did the best he could. He did not claim to be inspired -- did not pretend that the story had been told to him by Jehovah. He simply stated the "facts" as he understood them.

After I had lear ~ Robert G. Ingersoll

That it does." I smile warmly. He rubs his nose against mine, Eskimo-style. "I just thought it would ~ Samantha Towle

I was thinking that it was regrettable that your tastes have grown canalized so young. There it
was, raining soup-and you were caught without a spoon. Even three days of what you were
offered-urged on you!-would have been something to treasure when you reach my age. And you, you
young idiot, let jealousy chase you away! Believe me, at your age I would have gone Eskimo in a big
way, thankful that I had been given a free pass instead of having to attend church and study Martian to
qualify. I'm so vicariously vexed that my only consolation is the sour one that I know you will live to
regret it. Age does not bring wisdom, Ben, but it does give perspective . . . and the saddest perspective
of all is to see far, far behind you, the temptations you've passed up. I have such regrets myself but all of
them are as nothing to the whopper of a regret I am happily certain you will suffer. ~ Robert A. Heinlein

I love ... Eskimo Joe's. I have tons of Eskimo Joe's clothes and cups in my house, 'cause I love Eskimo Joe's. ~ Brooke Elliott

A good salesman, as the old (and politically incorrect) saying goes, can sell a refrigerator to an Eskimo. It's a cliché, but there's some truth to it: Inuit who live above the Arctic Circle use insulated refrigerators to keep their food from freezing in subzero temperatures ~ Josh Kaufman

I tried to think the same thought in as many different religions as possible, so the thought itself wouldn't be limited by any particular way of reasoning, the way words restrict
the whole eskimo-seventeen-words-for-snow idea. ~ Patricia Geary

The only true wisdom lives far from mankind, out in the great loneliness, and it can be reached only through suffering. Privation and suffering alone can open the mind of man to all that is hidden to others. ~ Igjugarjuk

Human cultures vary widely in the plants they use to gratify the desire for a change of mind, but all cultures (save the Eskimo) sanction at least one such plant and, just as invariably, strenuously forbid certain others. Along with the temptation seems to come the taboo. ~ Michael Pollan

In Texas, if your name is Carlos, you're a Mexican. In Florida, you're a Cuban. In New York, you're a Puerto Rican. And I come here and I find out I'm an Eskimo. ~ Carlos Mencia

To be sure, there are hunter-gatherer societies that don't exhibit the elaborately organized violence denoted by the term "war." But often what turns out to be lacking is the organization, not the violence. The warless !Kung San were billed in the title of one book as The Harmless People, yet during the 1950s and 1960s, their homicide rate was between 20 and 80 times as high as that found in industrialized nations.114 Eskimos, to judge by popular accounts, are all cuddliness and generosity. Yet early this century, after westerners first made contact with a fifteen-family Eskimo village, they found that every adult male had been involved in a homicide. One reason the !Kung and most Eskimo haven't waged war is their habitat.115 With population sparse, friction is low. But when densely settled along fertile ground, hunter-gatherers have warred lavishly. The Ainu of Japan built hilltop fortresses and, when raiding a neighboring ~ Robert Wright

Eskimo: "If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?" Priest: "No, not if you did not know." Eskimo: "Then why did you tell me? ~ Annie Dillard

The Eskimo has fifty-names for snow because it is important to them; there ought to be as many for love. ~ Margaret Atwood

God is in everyone and everything. When we save each other or guide each other or just love each other, we are doing God's work. So God dresses in Eskimo clothing or other disguises, and responds to us whether or not we are aware enough to hear, see, or feel God's loving guidance. Everything is a tool of God, from DNA to the weather. ~ Bernie Siegel

God is dethroned; and although the incognizant masses are tardy in realizing the event, they feel the icy draught caused by that vacancy. Man enters upon a spiritual ice age; the established churches can no longer provide more than Eskimo huts where their shivering flock huddles together. ~ Arthur Koestler

In 1922 everything changed again. The Eskimo pie was invented; James Joyce's Ulysses was printed in Paris; snow fell on Mauna Loa, Hawaii; Babe Ruth signed a three-year contract with the New York Yankees; Eugene O'Neill was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama; Frederick Douglass's home was dedicated as a national shrine; former heavyweight champion of the world Jack Johnson invented the wrench ... ~ Bernice L. McFadden

The man who invented Eskimo Pie made a million dollars, so one is told, but E.E. Cummings, whose verse has been appearing off andon for three years now, and whose experiments should not be more appalling to those interested in poetry than the experiment of surrounding ice-cream with a layer of chocolate was to those interested in soda fountains, has hardly made a dent in the doughy minds of our so-called poetry lovers. ~ John Dos Passos

Now that our sexual experience is increasingly available to us as a subject for contemplation, we have to extend our language to express our new consciousness until we have as many words for sexuality as the Eskimo has for snow, that pervasive, beautiful, and mortal climate in which we all live. ~ Jane Rule

Privation and suffering alone open the mind to all that is hidden to others. (Igjugarjuk) ~ Joseph Campbell

What are you? From where did you come? I have never seen anything like you. The Creator Raven looked at Man and was ... surprised to find that this strange new being was so much like himself. ~ Eskimo Creation Myth

I could be the lone Eskimo, friend of whales and seals.
The Panopticon ~ Jenn Fagan

An Eskimo custom offers an angry person release by walking the emotion out of his or her system in a straight line across the landscape; the point at which the anger is conquered is marked with a stick, bearing witness to the strength or length of the rage. ~ Lucy R. Lippard

Perhaps they are not stars, but rather openings in heaven where the love of our lost ones pours through and shines down upon us to let us know they are happy. ~ Eskimo Proverb

People had always dreamed of a unified world. We thought it would be a richer one. It wasn't. It meant that the Eskimo got educated and learned cost accountancy, but it didn't mean that the German learned to hunt whales with a spear. It meant everyone learned how to press buttons, and no one remembered how to dive for pearls. ~ Terry Pratchett

They are just really stupid people in Hollywood. You write them a script, and they say they love it, they absolutely love it. Then they say, 'But doesn't it need a small dog, and an Eskimo, and shouldn't it be set in New Guinea?' And you say, 'But it is a sophisticated romantic comedy set in Paris.' ~ P. J. O'Rourke

Fear is the mother of all emotion. Before love, hate, spite, grief, rage, and all the rest, there was fear, and fear gave birth to them all, and ask every combat soldier knows there are as many incarnations and species of fear as the Eskimo language has words for snow. ~ Ben Fountain

Sometimes string figures were used to illustrate stories, as in the case of an Eskimo example that depicts a man catching a salmon. Sometimes they had magic or religious significance. ~ Louis Leakey

How comes Eskimos haven't turned into icy-cubes? Like ice people?....when they die where do they go? They can't get buried under the grass like we do....it's a whole new whole this Eskimo world, it really is ~ Jade Goody

In place of science, the Eskimo has only magic to bridge the gap between what he can understand and what is not known. Without magic, his life would be one long panic. ~ Peter Farb