Quotes from Richard Wagamese

When your innocence is stripped from you, when your people are denigrated, when the family you came from is denounced and your tribal ways and rituals are pronounced backward, primitive, savage, you come to see yourself as less than human. That is hell on earth, that sense of unworthiness. That's what they inflicted on us.

We need mystery. Creator in her wisdom knew this. Mystery fills us with awe and wonder. They are the foundations of humility, and humility is the foundation of all learning. So we do not seek to unravel this. We honour it by letting it be that way forever." The quote of a grandmother explaining The Great Mystery of the universe to her grandson.

She only nodded. "It's all we are in the end. Our stories.

I understood then that when you miss a thing it leaves a hole that only the thing you miss can fill.

There is such a powerful eloquence in silence. True genius is knowing when to say nothing, to allow the experience, the moment itself, to carry the message, to say what needs to be said. Words are less important, less effective than feeling. When you can sit in perfect silence with someone, you truly know how to communicate.

I discovered that being someone you are not is often easier than living with the person you are.

The head has no answers, and the heart has no questions, Jack would say." Quoting his teacher and good friend Jack Kakakaway

I gave them nothing back because all I knew was the vast amount they had taken from me, robbed me of, cheated me out of, all in the name of a God whose son bore the long hair none of us were allowed to wear any more.

I don't want to touch you skin to skin. I want to touch you deeply, beneath the surface, where our real stories lie.

that land's my home. That land's my deepest wish, my wildest dream, the only prayer and the only temple i'm ever gonna need.

Sometimes when things get taken away from you it feels like there's a hole at your centre where you can feel the wind blow through, that's sure.

Teachings come from everywhere when you open yourself to them. That's the trick of it really, to open yourself to everything and everything opens itself to you.

This is how you change the world, the smallest circles first… That humble energy, the kind that says, 'I will do what I can do right now in my own small way,' creates a ripple effect on the world.

That open country is so huge you can feel lost and abandoned in it or you can work to feel a part of it, like ya belong to it and it belongs to you. Like a part of you is rock and stone and stream and all the open sky. Ya get past lonesome then...them creatures is all my family and i'm family to them as well.

For my wife Deborah, for allowing me to bask in her light and become more.

Watching the morning break, I realize again that darkness doesn't kill the light—it defines it.

We need mystery," she said. "Creator in her wisdom knew this. Mystery fills us with awe and wonder. They are the foundations of humility, and humility, grandson, is the foundation of all learning.

That's what's important really, Keeper says. Learning how to be what the Creator created you to be. Face your truth.

I saw kids die of tuberculosis, influenza, pneumonia and broken hearts at St. Jerome's.

Actions born of contemplation are wiser than those made in quiet desperation. If all that's true, and I feel it is, then I have grown some in these 61 years. I have learned and become a better person. And from that maybe it's the years ahead that will be the richest of my life. A quiet man moving forward, gladly beyond all expectation.

We become eternal by being held in memory's loving arms.

It seems to me sometimes that seasons leave us in the way people do, never just gone, but degree by degree, fading like the smell on a loved one's favourite sweater, until the vanishing one day evolves into memory.

There are a thousand ways to say no — but, I can't, it's impossible, it's too late — but there's only one way to say yes: with your whole being. When you do that you chose that word, it becomes the most spiritual word in the universe and your world can change.

We were taught to be God-fearing," my mother said. "One who loves does not brandish fear or require it.