Quotes from N. Scott Momaday

His mane is made of short rainbows.

How many lifeless things are placed each day between us and the living earth? A friend in Brooklyn told me that his little son had gone out to watch workmen breaking up a sidewalk. He was fascinated to see earth under the cement. He had never seen it before.

There is no love without loss. I hear the drums that vibrate to the heartbeat of the earth. They set me dancing. I see the clouds that wreathe the summits. They set me dreaming. I know the wonder of waves that shake the headlands. They awaken my soul. I hear the screams of eagles on the wind. And I ponder, what are these things to me who loves and does not reckon loss? Do I not keep the earth?

You are the dark shape I find On nights of the spilling moon, Pale in the pool of heaven. — N. Scott Momaday, from "Revenant" The Death of Sitting Bear: New and Selected Poems (HarperCollins, 2020)

When the wild herds were destroyed, so too was the will of the Kiowa people; there was nothing to sustain them in spirit.

A hawk sailed past the sun, its shadow slithering in the grass.

The dream becomes a story, a myth. . . . And the story becomes a dream.

In school Set was taught that art was resistance. . . . Water follows the line of least resistance. . . . It has shaped some of the most impressive forms on the face of the earth.

Nous avons vu la mer' We have been lovers, you and I. We have been alive in the clear mornings of Genesis; in the afternoons, among the prisms of the air, our hands have shaped perfect silences. We have seen the sea; wonder is well known to us.

Wreckage' Had my bones, like the sun, been splintered on this canyon wall and burned among these buckled plates, this bright debris; had it been so, I should not have lingered so long among my losses. I should have come loudly, like a warrior, to my time.

I am a man of the ancient earth For I have known the desert at dawn.

And the journey is an evocation of three things in particular: a landscape that is incomparable, a time that is gone forever, and the human spirit, which endures.

Loneliness is an aspect of the land. All things in the plain are isolated; there is no confusion of objects in the eye, but one hill or one tree or one man. To look upon that landscape in the early morning, with the sun at your back, is to lose the sense of proportion. Your imagination comes to life, and this, you think, is where Creation was begun.

I do not speak Kiowa, and I never understood her prayers, but there was something inherently sad in the sound, some merest hesitation upon the syllables of sorrow.

There was a woman whose body was swollen up with child, and she got stuck in the log. After that, no one could get through, and that is why the Kiowas are a small tribe in number.

Yes, I thought, now I see the earth as it really is; never again will I see things as I saw them yesterday or the day before.

I have walked in a mountain meadow bright with Indian paintbrush, lupine, and wild buckwheat, and I have seen high in the branches of a lodgepole pine the male pine grosbeak, round and rose-colored, its dark, striped wings nearly invisible in the soft, mottled light. And the uppermost branches of the tree seemed very slowly to ride across the blue sky.

In the autumn of 1874, the Kiowas were driven southward towards the Staked Plains. Columns of troops were converging upon them from all sides, and they were bone-weary and afraid.

A word has power in and of itself. It comes from nothing into sound and meaning; it gives origin to all things. By means of words can a man deal with the world on equal terms. And the word is sacred. A man's name is his own; he can keep it or give it away as he likes.

Such vastness makes for illusion, a kind of illusion that comprehends reality, and where it exists there is always wonder and exhilaration.

To say "beyond the mountain," and to mean it, to mean, simply, beyond everything for which the mountain stands, of which it signifies the being. Somewhere, if only she could see it, there was neither nothing nor anything. And there, just there, that was the last reality.

Division There is a depth of darkness In the wild country, days of evening And the silence of the moon. I have crept upon the bare ground Where animals have left their tracks, And faint cries carry on the summits, Or sink to silence in the muffled leaves. Here is the world of wolves and bears And of old, instinctive being, So noble and indifferent as to be remote To human knowing. The scales upon which We seek a balance measure only a divide.

The Essence of Belonging: …You persist, And a clean wind measures your persistence. Along a cleavage in space the day becomes, And you conspire in the invention of belonging, Radiant, jealously imagined, estranged from time, And to the crowded habitation of the mind You bring a solitude, a mere and sensual silence In which the essence of belonging belongs.

Song of Longing Will you come to me now Thee white moon shines on the cornfields Evening falls among the melon rows The orange sun sets on the mountains The river runs sparkling on blue stones And the long reeds bend and sway I will welcome you with sweetgrass and sage Will you come to me now I sing in my heart of your coming I sing in my soul of your coming