Quotes from John G. Neihardt

And while I stood there I saw more than I can tell and I understood more than I saw; for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shape of all shapes as they must live together like one being.

I could see that the Wasichus did not care for each other the way our people did before the nation's hoop was broken. They would take everything from each other if they could, and so there were some who had more of everything than they could use, while crowds of people had nothing at all and maybe were starving. They had forgotten that the earth was their mother.10 This

A goal, in itself, is an empty thing; all the virtue lies in the moving toward the goal.

When I started for the head of navigation a friend asked me what I expected to find on the trip. "Some more of myself," I answered. And, after all, that is the Great Discovery.

These things I shall remember by the way, and often they may seem to be the very tale itself, as when I was living them in happiness and sorrow. But now that I can see it all as from a lonely hilltop, I know it was the story of a mighty vision given to a man too weak to use it; of a holy tree that should have flourished in a people's heart with flowers and singing birds, and now is withered; and of a people's dream that died in bloody snow.

But the Missouri—my brother—is the eternal Fighting Man!

Capricious river draughts, sucking up the damp defile, whipped upward into the blistering sunlight gray spiral towers that leaped into opal fires and dissolved in showers of diamond and pearl and amethyst.

growing power is rooted in mystery like the night, and reaches lightward. Seeds sprout in the darkness of the ground before they know the summer and the day. In the night of the womb the spirit quickens into flesh.

Many-colored mosses, sickly green, pale, feverish red, yellow like fear, black like despair, purple like the lips of a strangled man, clung there.

Scotland, say, and in Montana?" I did not. "Well," he proceeded, "over in Scotland when a feller sees a sheepman coming down the road with his sheep, he says: 'Behold the gentle shepherd with his fleecy flock!' That's poetry. Now in Montana, that same feller says, when he sees the same feller coming over a ridge with the same sheep: 'Look at that crazy blankety-blank with his woolies!' That's fact. You mind what I say, or you'll get spurred.

I think Job and I understand each other better now. It was not the boils, but the free advice!

The only cowards are sinners fighting the fight is all.