N. Scott Momaday Quotes
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Coyotes 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.
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The first word gives origin to the second, the first and second to the third, and the third to the fourth, and so on. You cannot begin with the second word.
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It's a landscape that has to be seen to be believed. And, as I say on occasion, it may have to be believed in order to be seen.
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I am interested in the way that we look at a given landscape and take possession of it in our blood and brain. None of us lives apart from the land entirely; such an isolation is unimaginable.
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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.
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I am a member of the Kiowa Gourd Dance Society; I visit sacred places such as Devil's Tower and the Medicine Wheel. These places are important to me, because they've been made sacred by sacrifice, by the investment of blood and experience and story.
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It is here that I can concentrate my mind upon the Remembered Earth. It is here that I am most conscious of being, here that wonder comes upon my blood, here I want to live forever; and it is no matter that I must die.
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Writing is not a matter of choice. Writers have to write. It is somehow in their temperament, in the blood, in tradition.
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The spiritual reality of the Indian world is very evident, very highly developed. I think it affects the life of every Indian person in one way or another.
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To look upon that landscape in the early morning, with the sun at your back, is to lose the sense of proportion.
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Indians are marvelous storytellers. In some ways, that oral tradition is stronger than the written tradition.
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Sometimes, I think the best kind of poem is one in which there is an acute balance between what is humorous and that which is very serious. That balance is very hard to strike. But it can be done.
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We 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.
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I have deep roots in this Oklahoma soil. It makes me proud.
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I 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.
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As far as I am concerned, poetry is a statement concerning the human condition, composed in verse.
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My line of vision was such that the creature filled the moon like a fossil. It had gone there, I thought, to live and die, for there, of all places, was its small definition made whole and eternal
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My father was a painter and he taught art. He once said to me, 'I never knew an Indian child who could not draw.'
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There 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.
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Words were medicine; they were magic and invisible. They came from nothing into sound and meaning. They were beyond price; they could neither be bought nor sold.
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Although my grandmother lived out her long life in the shadow of Rainy Mountian, the immense landscape of the continental interior lay like memory in her blood
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A word has power in and of itself. It comes from nothing into sound and meaning; it gives origin to all things.
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Once in his life a man ought to concentrate his mind upon the remembered earth. He ought to give himself up to a particular landscape in his experience; to look at it from as many angles as he can, to wonder upon it, and dwell upon it.
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For the storyteller, for the arrowmaker, language does indeed represent the only chance for survival.