01UndatedWriting engenders in us certain attitudes toward language. It encourages us to take words for granted. Writing has enabled us to store vast quantities of words indefinitely. This is advantageous on the one hand but dangerous on the other. The result is that we have developed a kind of false security where language is concerned, and our sensitivity to language has deteriorated. And we have become in proportion insensitive to silence.N. Scott Momaday / quote ↗
02UndatedThere was only the dark infinity in which nothing was. And something happened. At the distance of a star something happened, and everything began. The Word did not come into being, but it was. It did not break upon the silence, but it was older than the silence and the silence was made of it.N. Scott Momaday / quote ↗
03UndatedTo encounter the sacred is to be alive at the deepest center of human existence. Sacred places are the truest definitions of the earth; they stand for the earth immediately and forever; they are its flags and shields. If you would know the earth for what it really is, learn it through its sacred places. At Devil’s Tower or Canyon de Chelly or the Cahokia Mounds, you touch the pulse of the living planet; you feel its breath upon you. You become one with a spirit that pervades geologic time and space.N. Scott Momaday / quote ↗
04UndatedI wonder if, in the dark night of the sea, the octopus dreams of me.N. Scott Momaday / quote ↗
06UndatedCoyotes have the gift of seldom being seen; they keep to the edge of vision and beyond, loping in and out of cover on the plains and highlands. And at night, when the whole world belongs to them, they parley at the river with the dogs, their higher, sharper voices full of authority and rebuke. They are an old council of clowns, and they are listened to.N. Scott Momaday / quote ↗
07UndatedIn the white man's world, language, too -- and the way which the white man thinks of it--has undergone a process of change. The white man takes such things as words and literatures for granted, as indeed he must, for nothing in his world is so commonplace. On every side of him there are words by the millions, an unending succession of pamphlets and papers, letters and books, bills and bulletins, commentaries and conversations. He has diluted and multiplied the Word, and words have begun to close in on him. He is sated and insensitive; his regard for language -- for the Word itself -- as an instrument of creation has diminished nearly to the point of no return. It may be that he will perish by the Word.N. Scott Momaday / quote ↗
08UndatedWe are what we imagine. Our very existence consists in our imagination of ourselves. Our best destiny is to imagine, at least, completely, who and what, and that we are. The greatest tragedy that can befall us is to go unimagined.N. Scott Momaday / quote ↗
09UndatedHe used both hands when he made the bear. Imagine a bear proceeding from the hands of God.N. Scott Momaday / quote ↗
10UndatedThe people of the town have little need. They do not hanker after progress and have never changed their essential way of life. Their invaders were a long time in conquering them; and now, after four centuries of Christianity, they still pray in Tanoan to the old deities of the earth and sky and make their living from the things that are and have always been within their reach; while in the discrimination of pride they acquire from their conquerors only the luxury of example. They have assumed the names and gestures of their enemies, but have held on to their own, secret souls; and in this there is a resistance and an overcoming; a long outwaiting.N. Scott Momaday / quote ↗
11UndatedI prayed. He was going home, and I wanted to pray. Look out for me, I said; look out each day and listen for me. And we were going together on horses to the hills. We were going to ride out in the first light to the hills. We were going to see how it was, and always was, how the sun came up with a little wind and the light ran out upon the land. We were going to get drunk, I said. We were going to be all alone, and we were going to get drunk and sing. We were going to sing about the way it always was. And it was going to be right and beautiful. It was going to be the last time. And he was going home.N. Scott Momaday / quote ↗
12UndatedTo look upon that landscape in the early morning, with the sun at your back, is to lose the sense of proportion.N. Scott Momaday / quote ↗
13UndatedIf coupling should but make us whole / And of the selfsame mind and soul, / Then couple let's in celebration; / We have contained the population.N. Scott Momaday / quote ↗
14UndatedI have a pretty good knowledge of the Indian world by virtue of living on several different reservations and being exposed to several different cultures and languages.N. Scott Momaday / quote ↗
15UndatedAs far as I am concerned, poetry is a statement concerning the human condition, composed in verse.N. Scott Momaday / quote ↗
