Quotes by N. Scott Momaday

“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 d...”

“To 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 it...”

“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, t...”

“I wonder if, in the dark night of the sea, the octopus dreams of 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 words indefinitely. This is advantageous on...”

“In 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 ...”

“Art is affirmation.”

“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 c...”

“He used both hands when he made the bear. Imagine a bear proceeding from the hands of God.”

“In the beginning was the Word'. I have taken as my text this evening the almighty Word itself. Now get this: 'There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. The same came for a witness, to bea...”

“The 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 fou...”

“I 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 ...”

“To look upon that landscape in the early morning, with the sun at your back, is to lose the sense of proportion.”

“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.”

“As far as I am concerned, poetry is a statement concerning the human condition, composed in verse.”

“If coupling should but make us whole / And of the selfsame mind and soul, / Then couple let's in celebration; / We have contained the population.”

“There was a house made of dawn. It was made of pollen and of rain, and the land was very old and everlasting.”

“...and Abel was running. Against the winter sky and the long, light valley of the landscape at dawn, he seemed almost to be standing still, very little and alone.”

“Now and then in winter, great angles of geese fly through the valley, and then the sky and the geese are the same color and the air is hard and damp and smoke rises from the houses of the town.”

“Every six or seven years there is a great harvest of piñones far to the east of town. That harvest, like the deer in the mountains, is the gift of God.”