Quotes from Linda Hogan

Walking by Stolen Creek the meaning of its name forgotten, the word remembered. Whatever happened here is recalled in another time and it's remembered inside the stolen self that my blood river passes through in thin and beautiful veins, not gold but only a mere human heartbeat, a circle of people standing, talking, making their plans as water passes by. Something, someone is still alive, telling. They think these are only stories not what holds the world together in its balance.

To be a hero you always have to betray something or someone.

When men decide in their secretly dark or hungry hearts to work their own will, there is little that can stop them. They have inner weather, sometimes unpredictable.

Hungry, we are hungry for the whole world. We are like the small fish in the sea, the ones who swim into the mouths of larger ones to take what's there.

And then we heard the train from a long ways off. It was how sound traveled her, where sometimes a sound from miles away seemed close at hand, and at other times a person in the same room sounded far away, distant and remote.

We are those who came from the ones who survived, buried in that place after walking the death trail from Mississippi. Missa Sipokna. We walked into this lost foreign place having no homes, no body of peace just the papers with signatures of those who made promises not held.

Those who loved Ruth--so many--touched her hand, her shoulder, held her lightly, but no one could read the world inside other human bones. They could touch the skin and not feel the grief and pain it held only a skin's-width away.

Something grows from eyes, taking root as if a potato sends to earth what it can see, and yet the seeing part is what they say is poisonous about the potato. That first sprout is what can grow, planted, moving upward, seeing in light.

Death is dancing me ragged.

Telling about our lives is important for those who come after as, for those who will see our experience as part of their own historical struggle.