Quotes from N. Scott Momaday

A word has power in and of itself. It comes from nothing into sound and meaning; it gives origin to all things.

If you believe in the power of words, you can bring about physical changes in the universe.

Anything is bearable if you can make a story out of it.

It's a landscape that has to be seen to be believed. And, as I say on occasion, it may have to be believed in order to be seen.

The highest human purpose is always to reinvent and celebrate the sacred.

In the beginning was the word, and it was spoken.

I am a member of the Kiowa Gourd Dance Society; I visit sacred places such as Devil's Tower and the Medicine Wheel. These places are important to me, because they've been made sacred by sacrifice, by the investment of blood and experience and story.

Your imagination comes to life, and this, you think, is where Creation was begun.

Although my grandmother lived out her long life in the shadow of Rainy Mountian, the immense landscape of the continental interior lay like memory in her blood

Indians are marvelous storytellers. In some ways, that oral tradition is stronger than the written tradition.

Writing is not a matter of choice. Writers have to write. It is somehow in their temperament, in the blood, in tradition.

I have deep roots in this Oklahoma soil. It makes me proud.

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

I wonder if, in the dark night of the sea, the octopus dreams of me.

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, they parley at the river with the dogs, their higher, sharper voices full of authority and rebuke. They are an old council of clowns, and they are listened to.

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 can befall us is to go unimagined.

They have assumed the names and gestures of their enemies, but have held on to their own, secret souls; and in this there is a resistance and an overcoming, a long outwaiting.

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 did not break upon the silence, but it was older than the silence and the silence was made of it.

In the beginning was the word, and it was spoken.

Art is affirmation.

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 the one hand but dangerous on the other. The result is that we have developed a kind of false security where language is concerned, and our sensitivity to language has deteriorated. And we have become in proportion insensitive to silence.

He wondered what his sorrow was and could not remember.

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

It was not an exclamation so much, I think, as it was a warding off, an exertion of language upon ignorance and disorder.