Quotes from Richard Wagamese

Can you stand?" Waabooz asked. "Yes," Buffalo said. "Why?" "If you stand there calmly you won't sink any farther and we can work together to get you out of there." "Are you certain?" Buffalo asked. "I feel the bog pull at me even now." "I am not certain," Waabooz said. "But Trust does not require certainty.

There was a feeling in him like a bruise, a purple ache that set between his ribs. He tasted a cry building at the back of his throat. It was too familiar and made him fearful.

I wondered how people could live with things set in place, fixed, their places determined by the power of the recollection they contained, the memories they held. It was what made a home, I believed; the things we keep, the sum of us.

I got out without another word and stood in the snow and watched his old car disappear around the bend. His leaving was an ache that stayed with me for days. I would never see him again.

Love is not about rescue, I understand now - it's about allowing. In the Ojibway world, love is the process of you leading me back to who I am. You do that by stepping back and allowing the creative, nurturing energy of the universe to work. That's the most courageous thing you can do when you love somebody. Deb showed me that. Both of us knew we'd found communion with one another. We're loyal to the vision of our togetherness.

I've come to understand that the pain of a wound or a loss is over as it happens. What follows is the pain of getting well.

Love is unbroken country. Every step ya take deeper into it changes you. Makes you more. Changes the geography of who you are. And if yer brave enough to enter it alone and find your place in it, ya can't never be lonesome again on accounta ya come to live in everything love touches.

I have come from the Land of the Spirits," she said in a voice that was both humble and strong. "We have been watching you and we have been distressed at what we have seen. You have allowed this time of scarcity to take you away from the Teachings. Instead of sharing and living in harmony with each other, you steal and fight and plot against each other. Instead of living in gratitude for what you have, you live in anger for what you do not have. Instead of seeking to live in balance

He held his hand up to his face and licked the wound. Blood. Old-tasting and rich like the sediment of a river. He looked at Jimmy. The blood on their faces meant they were part of the same stream now, bobbing in the current, borne forward effortlessly under the slowly twirling dome of the sky.

choice is our superhuman power. It allows us to change everything all at once,

They scooped out our insides, Saul. We are not responsible for that. We are not responsible for what happened to us. None of us are," Fred said. LBut our healing - that's up to us.

If I am in ceremony and prayer for the right reasons, I leave all that up to Creator. When I surrender outcome, all things good and pure and peaceful come to me. My job is to choose what appears. Easy to say but hard to do, to get out of the way enough to allow the energy to flow.

ya prove who ya are in the day yer in.

To be depleted in the pursuit of a grander something is never truly exhausting. Certainly the tiredness is real and daunting but the lingering effects of perhaps helping to change and alter lives for the better and the majestic transcend all that. Today I am depleted. But I am also filled with energy and purpose.

Ils ont refusé de me laisser être juste un hockeyeur. Pour eux, je serais toujours un indien.

I am not here in this life to be well balanced or admired. I'm here to be an oddball, eccentric, different, wildly imaginative, creative, daring, curious, inventive and even a tad strange at times.

I learned that I could draw the boundaries of my physical self inward, collapse the space I occupied and become a mote, a speck, an indifferent atom in its own peculiar orbit.

The change that comes our way will come in many forms. In sights that are mysterious to our eyes, in sounds that are grating on our ears, in ways of thinking that will crash like thunder in our hearts and minds. But we must learn to ride each one of these horses of change. It is what the future asks of us and our survival depends on it.

Jimmy used to say we're a Great Mystery. Everything. Said the things they done, those old-time indians, was all about learnin' to live with that mystery. Not solving it, not comin' to grips with it, not even tryin' to guess it out. Just bein' with it. I guess I wish I'da learned the secret to doing that.

She's a tale spinner," he said. "She spins 'em right outta the air. Tells 'em whole so's you'd think yer readin' a book.

There was a feeling in him like waiting for a punishment.

All that we are is story...It is what we arrive with. It is all we leave behind.

I had some once. They didn't pan out. I don't have them anymore.

Beggary. It's not the sole