N. Scott Momaday Quotes

31 quotes in 545 categories

• 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…
• The turn of the century was the lowest point for the devastation of Indian culture by disease and persecution, and it's a wonder to me…
• Writing engenders in us certain attitudes toward language. It encourages us to take words for granted. Writing has enabled us to store vast quantities of…
• In the beginning was the word, and it was spoken.
• To look upon that landscape in the early morning, with the sun at your back, is to lose the sense of proportion.
• He used both hands when he made the bear. Imagine a bear proceeding from the hands of God.
• I sometimes think the contemporary white American is more culturally deprived than the Indian.
• For the storyteller, for the arrowmaker, language does indeed represent the only chance for survival.
• 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…
• There is a great good in returning to a landscape that has had extraordinary meaning in one's life. It happens that we return to such…
• 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…
• Your imagination comes to life, and this, you think, is where Creation was begun.
• If you believe in the power of words, you can bring about physical changes in the universe.
• The highest human purpose is always to reinvent and celebrate the sacred.
• My father was a painter and he taught art. He once said to me, 'I never knew an Indian child who could not draw.'
• Indians are marvelous storytellers. In some ways, that oral tradition is stronger than the written tradition.
• 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…
• I wonder if, in the dark night of the sea, the octopus dreams of me.
• 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…
• 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…

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