Poets

"From everything that man erects and builds in his urge for living nothing is in my eyes better and more valuable than bridges. They are more important than houses, more sacred than shrines. Belonging to everyone and being equal to everyone, useful, always built with a sense, on the spot where most human needs are crossing, they are more durable than other buildings and they do not serve for anything secret or bad."

"For the greater part of its course the river Drina flows through narrow gorges between steep mountains or through deep ravines with precipitous banks. In a few places only the river banks spread out to form valleys with level or rolling stretches of fertile land suitable for cultivation and settlement on both sides."

"The town and its outskirts were only the settlements which always and inevitably grow up around an important centre of communications and on either side of great and important bridges. Here also in time the houses crowded together and the settlements multiplied at both ends of the bridge. The town owed its existence to the bridge and grew out of it as if from an imperishable root."

"There are no buildings that have been built by chance, remote from the human society where they have grown and its needs, hopes and understandings, even as there are no arbitrary lines and motiveless forms in the work of the masons. The life and existence of every great, beautiful and useful building, as well as its relation to the place where it has been built, often bears within itself complex and mysterious drama and history."

"The common people remember and tell of what they are able to grasp and what they are able to transform into legend. Anything else passes them by without deeper trace, with the dumb indifference of nameless natural phenomena, which do not touch the imagination or remain in the memory. This hard and long building process was for them a foreign task undertaken at another's expense. Only when, as the fruit of this effort, the great bridge arose, men began to remember details and to embroider the creation of a real, skilfully built and lasting bridge with fabulous tales which they well knew how to weave and to remember."

"Whenever a government feels the need of promising peace and prosperity to its citizens by means of a proclamation, it is time to be on guard and expect the opposite."

"Lost in his thoughts he looked out from his shop at the shining loveliness of that first day of March. Opposite him, a little to the side, stood the eternal bridge, everlastingly the same; through its white arches could be seen the green, sparkling, tumultous waters of the Drina, so that they seemed like some strange diadem in two colours which sparkled in the sun."

"For a man filled with a great, true and unselfish love, even if it be on one side only, there open horizons and possibilities and paths which are closed and unknown to so many clever, ambitious and selfish men."

"The people were divided into the persecuted and those who persecuted them. That wild beast, which lives in man and does not dare to show itself until the barriers of law and custom have been removed, was now set free. The signal was given, the barriers were down. As has so often happened in the history of man, permission was tacitly granted for acts of violence and plunder, even for murder, if they were carried out in the name of higher interests, according to established rules, and against a limited number of men of a particular type and belief. A man who saw clearly and with open eyes and was then living could see how this miracle took place and how the whole of a society could, in a single day, be transformed. In a few minutes the business quarter, based on centuries of tradition, was wiped out. It is true that there had always been concealed enmities and jealousies and religious intolerance, coarseness and cruelty, but there had also been courage and fellowship and a feeling for measure and order, which restrained all these instincts within the limits of the supportable and, in the end, calmed them down and submitted them to the general interest of life in common. Men who had been leaders in the commercial quarter for forty years vanished overnight as if they had all died suddenly, together with the habits, customs and institutions which they represented."

"You listen and live prudently, in fact you do not live at all, but work and save and are burdened with cares; and so your whole life passes. Then, all of a sudden, the whole thing turns upside down; times come when the world mocks at reason, when the Church shuts its doors and is silent, when authority becomes mere brute force, when they who have made their money honestly and with the sweat of their brows lose both their time and their money, and the violent win the game. No one recognizes your efforts and there is no one to help or advise you how to keep what you have earned and saved. Can this be? Surely this cannot be?"

"The bridge remained as if under sentence of death, but none the less still whole and untouched, between the two warring sides."

"If they destroy here, then somewhere else someone else is building. Surely there are still peaceful countries and men of good sense who know of God's love? If God had abandoned this unlucky town on the Drina, he had surely not abandoned the whole world that was beneath the skies? They would not do this for ever. But who knows?"

"Perhaps this impure infidel faith that puts everything in order, cleans everything up, repairs and embellishes everything only in order suddenly and violently to demolish and destroy, might spread through the whole world; it might make of all God's world an empty field for its senseless building and criminal destruction, a pasturage for its insatiable hunger and incomprehensible demands? Anything might happen. But one thing could not happen; it could not be that great and wise men of exalted soul who would raise lasting buildings for the love of God, so that the world should be more beautiful and man live in it better and more easily, should everywhere and for all time vanish from this earth. Should they too vanish, it would mean that the love of God was extinguished and had disappeared from the world. That could not be."

"The blind man sits in the dark, but for guests he turns on the light."

"If the Blues were wine, I'd be drunk all the time."

"In Jerusalem, the skies are closer."

"If you count the thorns, the flower disappears."

"If I had plenty, I'd be content with what I have."

"In Jerusalem, even the silence speaks. In Jerusalem, the Skies are Lower"

"Mama Rhino cries out loud, his nose is always the issue, every time he wipes his nose, he rips apart the tissue."

"Words flow under a bridge of silence."

"Rain was the nemesis of the snow, and the snow for the flowers. I Answer as if Someone Really Meant to Ask, Birds of the Mind and Chameleons of the Heart (1978)."

"Dry bones make good flutes"

"Inside every widow there's a spider that weaves it's webs in the corners of her heart."

"So many lovers, yet there is no love."

"To bend down for money is OK, but to bow is not."

"Once, my wife would make me coffee. These days, she hardly puts the kettle on."

"when a fool fails he says I was unlucky, when a wise man fails he says what a fool I had been. Song "If I was a Cat" live version."

"When you have a full bouquet you can't sit back and smell each flower."

"The mind is like a sea, few are those who dare sail, most stand on the shore and watch. Artist pages. (A.S.)"

"The Blues is an acoustic tear."

"A cup of kindness is better than a whole bottle of mercy can be."

"I'm afraid love is just a word."

"It was time, he thought, that tore everything to shreds."

"En tantas de la muerte liberias, Los cuerpos de esos huesos mal seguro Estudia Julio, y en su letra advierte, que son abecedarios de la muerte!"

"Julio, in those libraries of death study the bodies of those bones—an assured evil; and learn from those characters that they form the abecedary of death!"

"Verily, the soul is content when that which it desires is learned, and becomes importunate in its pursuit when it is spurned."

"The old man … received the Sabbath with sweet song and chanted the hallowing tunefully over raisin wine; while it was still day he hallowed and the sun came to gaze at his glass. … The table was well spread with all manner of fruit, beans, greenstuffs and good pies, plum water tasting like wine, but of flesh and of fish there was never a sign. … in truth it is in no way obligatory to eat flesh and fish … He and she, meaning the old man and the old woman, had never tasted flesh since growing to maturity."

"Lest I slight any creature, I must also mention the domestic animals, the beasts and birds from whom I have learned. Job said long ago (35:11): «Who teacheth us more than the beasts of the earth, And maketh us wiser than the fowls of heaven?» Some of what I have learned from them I have written in my books, but I fear that I have not learned as much as I should have, for when I hear a dog bark, or a bird twitter, or a cock crow, I do not know whether they are thanking me for all I have told of them, or calling me to account."

"The Hebrew writers who I feel should be more widely appreciated my own mentors, I suppose-are Micha Berdyczewski, Yosef Haim Brenner, and, of course, Shmuel Yosef Agnon."

"Once Jews no longer obeyed the imperatives of their religion, they were virtually obliged to create new forms of identity, turning accommodation from means to end. Literature was a proving ground for the reinvention of the self. One-tenth of the Nobel Prize winners for literature in the twentieth century were born Jews, but only two of them-Shmuel Yosef Agnon (1966) and Isaac Bashevis Singer (1978)-wrote in a Jewish language and only about half thought of themselves as Jews."

"Sekali berarti Sudah itu mati."

"Ah! hatiku jang tak mau memberi Mampus kau dikojak-kojak sepi."

"Aku mau hidup seribu tahun lagi."

"Bukan maksudku mau berbagi nasib, nasib adalah kesunjian masing-masing."

"Cinta adalah bahaya yang lekas jadi pudar."

"[Anwar was] a thin, pale youngster, careless of his appearance. His eyes were red, and very wild, but they always appeared thoughtful; his movements were slow, as if utterly indifferent. ... In his ideals, in his movements, and in his actions themselves, he stabbed, cut and smashed old notions, leading some of his friends to think him ignorant, unaware of custom, a kind of bandit, characterizations he himself thought an honor and necessary in order to influence his slower friends into revolutionary ways."

"My mother is like the bright light in the sky, a doe on the hillsides. She is the morning star, shining even at noon-time. She is precious cornelian, a topaz from Marhaci."

"O Nannaya, may your spirit be pleased, may your heart be at rest."

"“Bardesanes was also a great student of Indian religion, and wrote a book on the subject, from which the Platonist Porphyry subsequently quoted. But it is as a poet and writer on Christian theology and theosophy that Bardesanes gained so wide a reputation; he wrote many books in Syriac and also Greek ... [and] he was the first to adapt the Syriac tongue to metrical forms and set the words to music; these hymns became immensely popular, not only in the Edessene kingdom but wherever the Syriac tongue was spoken.”"

"Bardesanes’s faith was true after his master Valentinus, the founder of Gnostic schools in Alexandria and Rome, and orthodox Christians have cursed him bitterly for it. Ephraim of Edessa, a father of the Church, writing 120 years after his death, says that he died “with the Lord in his mouth and demons in his heart”. He accused Bardesanes of being a heretic and sophist, a greedy sheep-dog in league with the wolves, and a cunning dissembler practicing deceit with his songs. If this is what a Christian saint has to say about his theology, it is something of an irony that Roman Catholic scholars are so eager to accept his geography."

"By the gate of your generosity stands a sinner, who is mad with love, O best of mankind in radiance of face and countenance! Through you he seeks a means (tasawassala), hoping for Allah's forgiveness of slips; from fear of Hime, his eyelid is wet pouring tears. Althought his gerealogy attributes him to a stone (Ḥajar), how often tears have flowed, sweet, pure and fresh! Praise of you does not do you justice, but perhaps, In eternity, its verses will be transformed into mansions. My praise of you shall continue for as long as I live, For I see nothing that could ever deflect me from your praise."

"Every self-manifestation bestows a new creation and removes a pre-ceding creation. Its removal is the essence of annihilation (fanaa) in the passing self-manifestation and subsistence (baqaa) in the bestowal of the following self-manifestation."

"I take love as my religion wherever its caravans lead, for love is my religion and my faith."

"His is the wisdom of singularity because he is the most perfect existent in the human species. That is why the whole affair began with him and is sealed with him. For he was a prophet while Adam was between water and clay. Then, in his elemental configuration, he was the Seal of the Prophets. And three is the first of the singulars. Every singular beyond one derives from it."

"There was a house made of dawn. It was made of pollen and of rain, and the land was very old and everlasting."

"...and Abel was running. Against the winter sky and the long, light valley of the landscape at dawn, he seemed almost to be standing still, very little and alone."

"Now and then in winter, great angles of geese fly through the valley, and then the sky and the geese are the same color and the air is hard and damp and smoke rises from the houses of the town."

"Every six or seven years there is a great harvest of piñones far to the east of town. That harvest, like the deer in the mountains, is the gift of God."

"And Mariano fell and was exhausted. Fransisco held his stride all the way... and even then he could have gone on running, for no reason, for only the sake of running on."

"The mortar fire had stopped. ...The silence had awakened him—and the low, even mutter of the machine that was coming. ...His vision cleared and he saw the countless leaves dip and sail across the splinters of light. The machine... was coming. ...The sound of the machine brimmed at the ridge ...whole and deafening. His mouth fell open upon the cold, wet leaves, and he began to shake violently. ...Then, through the falling leaves, he saw the machine. It rose up behind the hill, black and massive, looming there in front of the sun, He saw it swell, deepen, and take shape on the skyline, as if it were some upheaval of earth. ...For a moment it seemed apart from the land ...Then it came crashing down to the grade, slow as a waterfall, thunderous, surpassing impact, nestling almost into the splash and boil of debris. He was shaking violently, and the machine bore down upon him, came close, and passed him by. A wind arose and ran along the slope, scattering the leaves."

""My grandfather is dead," Abel said. "You must bury him."... "My grandfather is dead," Abel repeated. His voice was low and even. There was no emotion, nothing."

"...and he began to run after them. He was running... and there was no reason to run but running itself and the land and the dawn appearing. The sun rose... and shone in shafts upon the road across the snow-covered valley and hills. ...His legs buckled and he fell in the snow. ...And he got up and ran on. He was alone and running on... he was past caring about the pain... and he could see at last without having to think. He could see the canyons and the mountains and the sky. He could see the rain and the river and the fields beyond... and under his breath he began to sing... House made of pollen, house made of dawn..."

"My Grandmother was a Storyteller; She knew her way around Words. She never learned to read and write, but somehow She knew the good of reading and writing; She had learned how to Listen and Delight. She had learned that in Words and in Language, and there only, She could have whole and consummate Being. You see for Her, Words were Medicine. They were Magic and Invisible. They came from Nothing into Sound and Meaning. They were beyond price. They could neither be bought nor sold, and She never threw Words away. She told me Stories and She taught me how to Listen. I was a Child, and I Listened."

"The journey began one day long ago on the edge of the northern Plains. It was carried on over the course of many generations... For the s the beginning was a struggle for existence in the bleak northern mountains."

"They began a long migration from the headwaters of the eastward to the and south to the . ...In alliance with the s they held dominion in the southern Plains for a hundred years."

"The young Plains culture of the Kiowas withered and died like grass that is burned in the prairie wind. ...in every direction, as far as the eye could see, carrion lay out on the land. The buffalo was the animal representation of the sun, the essential and sacrificial victim of the . When the wild herds were destroyed, so too was the will of the Kiowa people; there was nothing to sustain them in spirit."

"And the journey is an evocation of... a landscape that is incomparable, a time that is gone forever, and the human spirit, which endures."

"The imaginative experience and the historical express equally the traditions of man's reality."

"A single knole rises out of the plain in Oklahoma, north and west of the Witchita Range. For my people, the s, it is an old landmark, and they gave it the name . ...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."

"My grandmother had died in the Spring... Her name was Ajo... Her forebears came down from the high country in western nearly three centuries ago. ...In the late seventeenth century they began a long migration to the south and east. It was a journey toward the dawn, and it led to a golden age. Along the way the s were befriended by the Crows, who gave them the culture and religion of the Plains. They acquired horses... They acquired Tai-me, the sacred doll, from that moment the object and symbol of their worship, and so shared in the divinity of the sun."

"There is a perfect freedom in the mountains, but it belongs to the eagle and the elk, the badger and the bear. The Kiowas reckoned their stature by the distance they could see..."

"The sun is at home on the plains. Precisely there does it have the certain character of a god."

"She was ten when the Kiowas came together for the last time as a living Culture. They could find no buffalo... a company of soldiers rode out from ... to disperse the tribe. Forbidden without cause the essential act of their faith, having seen the wild herds slaughtered and left to rot upon the ground, the Kiowas backed away forever from the medicine tree. ...My grandmother was there. Without bitterness, and for as long as she lived, she bore a vision of deicide."

"The aged visitors who came to my grandmother's house when I was a child were made of lean and leather, and bore themselves upright. They wore great black hats and bright ample shirts that shook in the wind. They rubbed fat upon their hair and wound their braids with stripes of colored cloth. ...They were an old council of warlords, come to remind and be reminded of who they were."

"There were frequent prayer meetings and great nocturnal feasts. When I was a child I played with my cousins outside... where the lamplight fell upon the ground and the singing of the old people rose up around us and carried away into the darkness. ...And afterwards, ...I lay down with my grandmother and could hear the frogs away by the river and feel the motion of the air."

"[T]he s came out one by one into the world through a hollow log. ...They looked all around and saw the world. It made them glad to see so many things. They called themselves Kwuda, "coming out.""

"Before there were horses the Kiowas had need of dogs. There was a man who lived alone; he had been thrown away. ...He had one arrow left, and he shot a bear; but the bear... ran away. ...Then a dog came... and said that many enemies were coming... The man could think of no way to save himself. But the dog said, "...If you take care of my puppies, I will show you how to get away." The dog led the man... to safety."

"When my father was a boy, an old man used to come to Mammedaty's house and pay his respects. His name was Cheney, and he was an arrowmaker. ...Every morning ...Cheney would paint his wrinkled face, go out, and pray aloud to the rising sun. ...In my mind ...I know where he stands and where his voice goes on the rolling grasses and where the sun comes up... There, at dawn, you can feel the silence. It is cold and clear and deep like water. It takes hold of you and will not let you go."

"In the land is made of many colors. When I was a boy I rode out over the red and yellow and purple earth to the west of Jemez Pueblo. ...I came to know that country... truly and intimately, in every season, from a thousand points of view. I know the living sound motion of a horse and the sound of hooves. I know what it is, on a hot day in August or September, to ride into a bank of cold, fresh rain."

"I know how much he loved that animal; I think I know what was going on in his mind: If you will give me my life and the life of my family, I will give you the life of this black-eared horse."

"There have been times when I thought I understood how it was that a man might be moved to preserve the bones of a horse—and another to steal them away."

"In the dense growth of the bottomland a dark drift moves on the . A spider enters a small pool of light on Rainy Mountain Creek, and downstream, at the convergence, a Channel catfish turns around in the current and slithers to the surface, where a dragonfly hovers and darts. Away on the high ground grasshoppers and bees set up a crackle and roar in the fields, and the s and scissortails whistle and wheel about. Somewhere in the maze of gullies a calf shivers and balls in a tangle of chinaberry trees. And high in the distance a hawk turns in the sun and sails."

"Eleven magpies standing in the plain. They are illusion—wind and rain revolve— And they recede in the darkness, and dissolve."

"About the year 1850 in Kentucky a daughter was born to I. J. Galyen and his wife, Natachee, newcomers to the knobs from the foothills of the . ...He settled in the countryside known as "the knobs," for its numerous abrupt hills, in southwestern Kentucky. Natachee bore him four children, one of whom was Nancy Elizabeth, my great-grandmother. Nancy... married George Scott of Woodbury and bore him five children. Her first son was Theodore, my grandfather."

"My mother tells me that the ancestral house at Scott's Landing was built in 1784. Charles Scott was a general in the Revolutionary War and the fourth governor of Kentucky... he commanded the Kentucky troops in the ."

"Robie Ellis... said of Anne Elizabeth's children, his grandchildren: They will all be hanged by the time they are twenty for their damned Indian blood."

"In 1929 my mother was a Southern belle... It was about this time that she began to see herself as an Indian. That dim native heritage became a fascination and a cause... She imagined who she was. ...She was already a raving beauty. ...very black hair and very blue eyes; her skin... of an olive complexion... She moved... with certain confidence. Above all, she expected the world to be interesting; she would not stand to be bored. ...And she went off to Haskell Institute, the Indian school..."

"[1929] was the year in which the old woman Kau-au-ointy died... and was buried at Cemetery... The Kiowas, who stole people as well as horses... took her from her homeland of Mexico when she was a child. ...Kau-au-ointy outlived her slave status, married, and brought new blood to the tribe... In my dreams she [my great-great-grandmother] told me wonderful stories."

"Sampt'e drew the string back until he felt the bow wobble... and he let it go. It shot across the long light of the morning and struck the black face of a stone... glanced then away... limping... then it settled down in the grass and lay still. ...he believed that the arrow might take flight again, so much of his life did he give into it."

"Mammedaty was my grandfather, whom I never knew. Yet he came to be imagined posthumously... having invested the shadow of his presence in an object or a word, in his name above all. He enters into my dreams... His grandfather Guipagho the Elder was a famous chief. His mother... was the daughter of Kau-au-ointy... There was a considerable vitality in him... and a self-respect that verged upon arrogance."

"Just before Mammedaty's time the s had been brought to their knees in the infamous winter campaigns of the Seventh Cavalry, and their Plains culture... virtually destroyed."

"The Kiowas... For a hundred years... they ruled an area... from the Rocky Mountains to the Gulf of Mexico... But by the time Mammedaty was born the Kiowas had been routed in the Indian wars, the great herds of buffalo had been destroyed, and the sun dance prohibited by law."

"Now when I hear spoken—mostly by the older people who are passing away—it is to me very good. ...the sound is like a warm wind that arises from my childhood. It is the music of memory. ...much of the power and magic and music of words consist not in the meaning but in sound. Storytellers, actors, and children know this too."

"The Kiowas migrated from the Yellowstone to the southern plains, arriving at the drainage in the early 1700s. They were hunters and nomads and storytellers. ...They defined the warrior ideal, and they brought the... horse culture or culture to its fullest expression."

"My father told me stories from the Kiowa oral tradition even before I could talk. Those stories became permanent... the nourishment of my imagination for the whole of my life. They are among the most valuable gifts I have ever been given."

"The story of the arrowmaker, the "man made of words," is perhaps the first story I was told. ...it is a story about a story, about the efficacy of language and the power of words. ...I am sure I do not yet understand it in all of its consequent meanings. Nor do I expect to understand it so. The stories that I keep close... are those that yield more and more of their spirit in time."

"If an arrow is well made it will have tooth marks on it. ...The Kiowas ...straightened them with their teeth. Then they drew them to the bow to see that they were straight."

"Imagine: somewhere in the prehistoric distance a man holds up in his hand a crude instrument— ...like a daub or a broom bearing pigment—and fixes the wonderful image in his mind's eye to a wall or a rock. In that instant is accomplished... the advent of art. ...in the long reach of time he is utterly without distinction, except: he draws. ...all the stories of the world proceed from the moment in which he makes his mark. All literatures issue from his hand."

"At the heart of American Indian oral tradition is a deep and unconditional belief in the efficacy of language. Words are intrinsically powerful. They are magical. By means of words one can bring about physical change in the universe... one can quiet the raging weather, bring forth the harvest, ward off evil, rid the body of sickness and pain, subdue an enemy, capture the heart of a lover, live in the proper way, and venture beyond death. ...there is nothing more powerful. ...To be careless in the presence of words... is to violate a fundamental morality."

"It is sometimes enough that one places one's voice on the silence... [S]ilence too is powerful. It is the dimension in which ordinary and extraordinary events take their proper places. In the Indian world, a word is spoken or a song is sung not against, but within the silence. ...[S]ilence is the sanctuary of sound."

"Consider this ritual formula from the : ... My voice thou restore for me. Restore all for me in beauty. Make beautiful all that is before me. Make beautiful all that is behind me. It is done in beauty... ...the achieves a remarkable stability, an authority not unlike that of Scripture."

"The dullimer is... one of two known to exist, the second... unearthed... at Coatepec in 1958... Mine is... the better example of the armorer's art, especially with respect to the amulet, a leather bracelet to which the dullimer can be affixed and... activated with remarkable dispatch... used, according to oral tradition, to fell even the great beasts of the jungle. ...[O]ne day I laid the dullimer to rest once and for all. I had a dream in which it seemed to me that I could decipher the ancient markings on the amulet: I, Chopetl, am grown weary of war; I have been deadly even to the gods."

"... I am the fish that rolls, shining, in the water... I am the farthest star... the cold of dawn... the roaring of the rain I am the glitter on the crust of the snow I am the long track of the moon in a lake I am a flame of four colors... I am the whole dream of these things You see, I am alive, I am alive I stand in good relation to the earth... the gods... to all that is beautiful... Mine is a... shield... there is [the dangerous] anger... boasting in it there is [the beautiful] yellow pollen... red earth in it. ... there is [the sacred] vision... remembrance in it. ... there is [the powerful] medicine... a in it. My life is this shield..."

"One autumn morning in 1946 I woke up at Jemez Pueblo. ...in the bright morning ...I found the last, best home of my childhood."

"When my parents and I moved to Jemez I was twelve years old. ...The village and the valley, the canyons and the mountains had been there from the beginning of time, waiting form me."

"I was embarked upon the greatest adventure of all; I had come to the place of my growing up."

"The sun cast a golden light upon the adobe walls and the cornfields; it set fire to the leaves of willows and cottonwoods along the river; and a fresh cold wind ran down from the canyons and carried the good scents of pine and cedar smoke, of bread baking in the beehive ovens, and of rain in the mountains."

"I looked southward into the plain; there a caravan of covered wagons reached as far as the eye could see. These were the s... I had never seen such a pageant; it was as if the whole proud people, the Diné, had been concentrated into one endless migration. There was a great dignity to them... And when they set up camp in the streets, they were perfectly at home, their dogs about them. They made coffee and fried bread and roasted mutton on their open fires."

"In the winter dusk I heard coyotes barking away by the river, the sound of the drums in the , and the voice of the village crier, ringing at the rooftops."

"I came to know the land by going out upon it in all seasons... until it became the very element in which I lived my daily life."

"I had a horse named Pecos... Pecos could outrun all the other horses in the village, and he always wanted to prove it. ...My ancestors, who were s, should have been proud ..."

"Riding is an exercise of the mind. I dreamed a good deal on the back of my horse, going out into the hills alone."

"Bear and I are one... My Indian name is Tsoai-talee, which in Kiowa means "Rock-tree boy." Tsoai, "Rock-tree," is in Wyoming. That is where, long ago, a Kiowa boy turned into a bear and where his sisters were born into the sky and became the stars of the Big Dipper. Through the power of stories and names, I am the reincarnation of that boy. From the time the name Tsoai-talee was conferred onto me as an infant, I have been possessed of Bear's spirit. The Kiowas... believe that... Bear is the animal representation of the wilderness."

"Bear is an impractical visionary. His eyesight is weak, but he sees beyond the edge of the world, beyond time..."

"In western I was shown articles of the bear fest... In the presence of these things I felt their power. In their presence I understood something about Bear's transcendent spirit, how... Bear dances on the edge of life and death, crossing over and back again."

"Something in me hungers for wild mountains and rivers and plains. I love to be on Bear's ground... And Bear is welcome in my dreams, for in that cave of sleep I am at home to Bear."

"URSET I dream of berries... I dream of high meadows to which my kin come in the spring and summer when the wind is fragrant with buckwheat and camas and sweet roots are thick and tangled in the loam. ...lusty sows sauntering in the fields of flowers and of their cubs at play. ...clouds gathering at the summits and of rain descending in curtains on the dawn. ...hawks casting the shadows of their flight upon sunlit steeps. I dream of the moon riding and of leaves quaking on pale, speckled limbs, and darkness rising like water to the moon."

"YAHWEH A story in which there is not the realization of grace is but a shadow, a shell, a thing without substance. Grace is the substance of story, albeit invisible and remote. Grace is the soul of story. ...Or perhaps a mask behind which there is no presence. ...only silence, a perfect stillness."

"YAHWEH [Poetry] is the highest of all languages... higher even than mathematics. It is on a plane with music."

"YAHWEH Poor Man, he had been trying so hard to talk, for such a long time. Then the children went out and played together. At the end of the day they had possession of language."

"YAHWEH Nothing will come of [evolution], as it has come from nothing."

"Glen "Pop" Warner... has distinguished himself as a model of a successful coach... an eminent leader of men. ...He can take an ordinary team and make it extraordinary. In his team he has exceptional talent... And he has in arguably the greatest athlete of the twentieth century. But... his Indians have no "killer" instinct. They care more for honor and bravery than for winning. ...[A]n old man in the corner of the room ...listens ...This is ."

"Exterior. Football field. Late afternoon. The game is over. CARLISLE 27. ARMY 6. The players of both teams—dirty, bloody, exhausted—mingle, shaking hands on their way to the locker rooms. Dwight Eisenhower, limping badly, makes a great effort to intercept . He extends his hand and seems to want to say something but doesn't. His silence is pure tribute. Thorpe takes his hand, regards him for a moment."

"I believe that I fashion my own life out of words and images, and that's how I get by. If I didn't do those things, I think that I would find my existence a problem of some sort. Writing, giving expression to my spirit and to my mind, that's a way of surviving, of ordering one's life. That's a way of living, of making life acceptable to oneself. (1981)"

"I believe in a supremacy of the imagination. And I believe that fiction is a superior kind of reality. What we imagine is the best of us. (1981)"

"Favorite writers? Herman Melville. Norman McClain, Emily Dickinson, and Wallace Stevens. (1982)"

"Myth is at the beginning and ending of all story, of all literature. (1990)"

"I wouldn't be writing now if Momaday hadn't done that book. I would have died. (JB: What did it do for you?) ALLEN: It told me that I was sane-or if I was crazy at least fifty thousand people out there were just as nutty in exactly the same way I was, so it was okay. I was not all alone. It did that and it brought my land back to me."

"The voice with which he greeted me was warm and deep, and the words spoken in a way which gave weight to every syllable. It was a voice which one might expect from a man who wrote and continues to write of the magical nature and power of language."

"The authors who really touched my heart, of course, are authors like Vine Deloria and Scott Momaday...I mean, I've never read a novel as compelling as House Made of Dawn......there's not a word, a phrase that he can use that doesn't just haunt me. That includes much of his prose."

"Momaday speaks with a deep resonance using cultivated speech, for he cares as much about language sounds as how his words look on the page."

"House Made of Dawn borrows its title from a healing ceremony centuries old. The novel tells of a young Jemez Indian named Abel from the Pueblo where Momaday grew up, the age of twelve through high school. Its prose rhythms, complex narrative points-of-view, and flashbacks assimilate experimental techniques in modern fiction and New World romantic themes. ...Abel's dislocations as a contemporary Indian fracture a voice that searches for consciousness. His ancestors were exiled from the plains by plague and taken in at Jemez. ...Abel was kidnapped from his grandfather and put into a government boarding school, drafted into a world war, and sentence to prison for ritual homicide, then relocated in the urban ghetto of Los Angeles. Past, present, and future—Indian life as-it-was, then estranged among whites, followed by a prolonged return—disjoint the narrative. School, war, prison, and the city are white institutions where the martyred son of the earth, the biblical , lives through the Indian nightmare of a machine come into the garden."

"Once into the novel... a perceptive reader may begin to realize that sophistication in House Made of Dawn is of a different order from that in canonized texts. It is a sophistication of "otherness," a discourse requiring that readers pass through an "alien conceptual horizon" and engage a "reality" unfamiliar... What has matured with Momaday is not merely an undeniable facility with techniques and tropes of modernism, but... the profound awareness of conflicting epistemologies... With Momaday the American Indian novel shows its ability to appropriate the discourse of the privileged center and make it "bear the burden" of an "other" world-view. Momaday's novel represents more fully than any Native American novel before it the "assertion of a different perspective.""

"if Indians are left out of every other class on the university campus, even where they are pertinent-for example, leaving Scott Momaday out of a class on twentieth-century American literature, something like that somewhere else there has to be a balance. There has to be someone somewhere else who is going to emphasize Scott Momaday to the exclusion of the ones who are emphasized in the other class. I hope that at some point that will become balanced. I hope that pretty soon an American literature class will just automatically include someone like Scott Momaday-and some of the other people: Charles Eastman, you know, the other writers in our history."

"The new images of the Indian in the public mind have emerged as a result of primitivistic longings in a society whose trust in limitless technological advance and a purely scientific, materialistic view of the natural environment is no longer secure. The Indian as keeper of mystical knowledge or as natural ecologist is an updated version of earlier images which reveals more about the state of the dominant society than about contemporary Indians. Ironically, Momaday himself has come close to falling victim to the temptation of image making in his contributions to the Indian-as-ecologist debate. This shows that Indians are not immune to adopting images created by mainstream American culture. On the whole, however, Momaday's work depicts the worlds of American Indians objectively and without racial bias."

"N. Scott Momaday has made himself readily available for interviews throughout his career. Among the recurrent issues raised in these conversations are Momaday's multi-ethnic experience, his view of the Indian's place in American society, his synthesis of native oral traditions and the Western literary canon, his concern for ecology and conservation, his theories of language and the imagination, the influences on his academic and artistic development, his work as a teacher and painter, and, of course, his own comments on specific works. Momaday's responses to queries on these topics are remarkably consistent."

"I have seen him gradually comprehending, accepting, and even asserting his Indianness. Actually, of course, his Indianness is as much assumed as inborn."

"Don't be the first to punch; but do not ignore the one who punched you."

"The essence of wisdom is consulting others."

"Whoever draws his sword first, gets wounded the first."

"Past is the past."

"Accept the truth, and make peace with it."

"Think more, talk less."

"Once you crash the idea of normal in your mind, all impossibilities become possible."

"Men are nothing. They are fools. The penis between their legs is all they are useful for. And even then, if not that women needed their seed for children, it would be better to sit on a finger of green plantain. Listen to my words. Only a foolish woman leans heavily on a man’s promises."

"The choices we have to make in this world are hard and bitter. Sometimes we have no choices at all."

"I like doing things that put Africa and Africans on the map. My job and the stuff that I do allows me to come in contact with so many talented, incredibly hardworking people. Young but doing incredible stuff. I want the world to see them. And when I say the world, the truth is, in fact, more than anything, I’m talking about Africa, as in the African world."

"A real woman must always do the things she wants to do, and in her own time too. You must never allow yourself to be rushed into doing things you're not ready for."

"The sad truth is, polygamy constitutes a national embarrassment in any country that fantasises about progress and development. Polygamy devalues women and the only person who revels in it is the husband who gets to enjoy variety. You, poor women, will become nothing more than a dish at the buffet."

"Now, in my working life as a teacher and writer, and as a mother of four children, I watch with horror when women of my generation opt to be second or third wives. And I have been shocked by the ease with which men in their mid-30s marry additional wives."

"Husband-sharing is ugly and, one way or another, someone's dreams are crushed when a new wife joins a household."

"The world has no patience for spinsters. It spits them out."

"When a plan does not go right, you plot again. One day you will succeed. One day you will be able to damage the person who hurts you so completely that they will never be able to recover."

"Anyone who laughs at you for showing your family respect is a fool."

"“Only a foolish woman leans heavily on a man's promises”"

"“My daughters were born with eyes in their stomachs so they are quick to digest all that they see.”"

"“Even listening in on their plans for me did not take the tomato seller off my mind. After searching for days, I traced her to the farmland on the edge of our village. When I saw her, courage failed me. My liver weakened and I could not bring myself to talk to her. I abandoned my fufu and stalked her, overjoyed to be breathing the air she was breathing. I saw every man she teased. A gasp escaped my lips every time she rolled her hips and jiggled the beads that adorned her waist. Sweat was dripping from my neck like rain from the awning. I can’t explain why but I wanted her for myself. I wanted to build a house for her and keep the key between my breasts. I wanted to dress her in the finest aso oke so she could parade herself for my delight alone. I wanted to lock her between my thighs.”"

"“Men are so simple. They will believe anything.”"

"“How could I tell her that I had failed to preserve my dignity? I was too ashamed to let her see the fickle shell I’d become. Inevitably, it became unbearable. The more she pushed, the more I resisted. I didn’t want a job! I didn’t want a white wedding! I just wanted the war between who I used to be and who I’d become to end. I didn’t want to fight anymore.”"

"“If you drag her by the hair, she’ll follow you anywhere, I swear it!”"

"“Don’t think I can’t see the challenges ahead of me. People will say I am a secondhand woman. Men will hurt and ridicule me but I won’t let them hold me back. I will remain in the land of the living. I am back now and the world is spread before me like an egg cracked open.”"

"My fingers liked the feel of money. My eye liked to see the piles of money swell. I worshipped money."

"Even when the boys teased me over flap of flesh that circled my neck, I wasn't bothered. I looked at them and sniggered, knowing their father's fathers could not have a fraction of the wealth i have accummulated."

"Let us not allow the world to see our shame, let us keep our secrets from those who may seek to mock us"

"Taju claimed that he’d beaten his wife senseless for letting his only son suck on a coin. This happened about a week after a male senator slapped a female colleague. The slap had resonated through all the quiet meeting rooms of the senate building and into the heart of every man on the street…men were slapping their womenfolk as if it had become a national sport…peeved taxi drivers prodded the heads of mothers who bargained with them; young girls were assaulted and stripped naked in the streets. Even in the labour wards baby girls frowned upon by their fathers. Taju too was inspired to throw his best punch"

"Baba Segi only comes to deposit his seed in my womb. He doesn’t smile or tickle me. He doesn’t make jokes about my youth; he just rams me into the mattress…"

"Your father left me for a beautiful woman. I told him I was pregnant but he didn’t want to hear it. He sliced me like okra and left."

"A mob wielding cudgels and cutlasses is hot on the heels of a youthwho desperately crosses to the other side of the road, narrowlymissing the fender of a truck. The mob follows growing bigger asit goes. The youth, looking over his shoulder as he runs, crashesinto a light pole and falls senseless to the ground. Before he canregain a second wind the mob is on him. I watch the cudgels riseand fall; I hear his wailing ululating screams finally turn into awhimper. They poured petrol on him and set him ablaze"

"The students, who should have been busy taking theirbaths and getting set for lectures, sat idly...discussing the boycottof lectures"

"More than once ourtaxi was forced to hug the kerb as siren blaring military jeepspassed at top speed...”"

"There had been an accident. Bola’s family-father, mother, and twosisters had been in a car crash. It was late in the evening...theywere on their way to Ibadan for a visit...The father driving hadfailed to see the truck laying on its side in the middle of the road.It was a military truck carrying the furniture of an officer ontransfer from Lagos to Ibadan. The father and mother, who were in front, had died instantly; Peju, the elder sister, died on the way to the hospital; the other sister, Lola, sustained minor injuries"

"Look out there, see the long queue of cars waiting for fuel. Someof them have been there for three days...And we are a majorproducer of oil"

"The houses were old and craggy and lichened. The place had theunfinished, abandoned appearance of an under waterscape.Crouching under the bigger or in their own clusters were hastilybuilt wood and zinc structures that housed an incredibly largenumber of families: the fathers were mostly out-of-work drivers,laborers, fugitives convalescing between prison terms"

"We don finally reach the end of the road. We don dey together since I was born, but now time don come wey me and you must part. Bye-bye.Goodnight. Ka chi foo. Oda ro. Sai gobe"

"Hagar takes to prostitution whenrejection and hunger look her straight in the face"

"Look, we are living under siege. Their very presence on our streetsand in the government house instead of the barrack where theybelong is an act of aggression. They hold us cowed with guns sothat they will steal our money—they will continue subjugating uskilling all dissenters one by one, sending them to exile till there isno competitor left to oppose them."

"We came to tell you sir, that our clinic is run-down and abandoned.We came to tell you that we don’t have a single borehole onMorgan street... we are here to protest against this neglect--- weare dying from diseases. We are dying from a lack of hope. Andthat is why we are here today to protest. And this is the way wefeel we ought to express our displeasure"

"You must take a year off, one of these days, before you’re old and tired and weighed down by responsibility. Go away somewhere, and read. Read all the important books. Educate yourself, then you’ll see the world in a different way."

"Can you continue to love a person regardless of such shortcomings? Maybe because you hope to save them? Or because you can't help it? Isn't that what love is all about?"

"Our job is to find out the truth, even if it is buried deep in the earth."

"The further from home you wander, the closer you get to Siberia."

"Nostalgia settled on my shoulders like the arm of a long-lost friend, urging me to look back and listen; it had been years since I heard such morning sounds, such silence."

"I've seen children snatched away from their mothers, never to be reunited. I've seen husbands taken from their wives and kids and sent away to prison. I've seen grown men flogged by soldiers in front of their kids. That's how history is made, and it's our job to witness it."

"There is no loneliness like the loneliness of a stranger in a strange city."

"Not all of us have that luxury, of a past. My history doesn't offer me much in that respect."

"Our story is over, the ink has dried, each of us must move on now and it will be as if we had never met, never loved, and never dreamt together."

"I didn't love him. He was a good, decent guy, but I wanted more at that time." She shrugged. "I was not so young anymore. Time was passing for me. I wanted more… excitement."

"Sometimes poets have to be imperfect so their poetry can be perfect."

"Happiness is important, but I wouldn't say it is the main purpose of human existence."

"My messages are mainly about bringing into discussions topics that our societies shy away from but are at the core of issues that we deal with."

"At times it’s challenging because I have to teach myself new skills."

"Poetry can be really heavy and being able to carry those emotions and hold them is something I get from my acting skills."

"I have a lot of content in music and poetry that is waiting for me to make visual content for it."

"If anybody is out there and wants to make their own content with big ideas, keep that dream but also scale it down to make it possible with what you have."

"It took some time but it’s because it required a huge set."

"This is an atrocity that happens and my hope is the piece pulls people in to be witnesses of what they are denying."

"When I find it hard to write or create, it’s often a sign to take a break and be with family and friends, but to also move in your body by doing some exercises."

"Sometimes, you need to completely take a break from creating and watch other people do their arts and allow yourself the time to get inspired from that."

"Stay true to yourself and work hard to become the person you dream to be."

"I am not going to say it’s easy but it’s definitely worth it when you love it and when you know what you are capable of and willing to go through thick and thin to make sure that what you envision for yourself becomes true."

"Create a work ethic that makes you stand out from people who just consider art as a hobby."

"However, as Rwandans, we need to realise that there is more that we can do to contribute to the life of an artiste."

"When they force me to accept the massacre as love Do you know that I am with you."

"The Blind Leading the Blind Take my hand. There are two of us in this cave. The sound you hear is water; you will hear it forever. ...You will learn toads from diamonds, the fist from the palm, love from the sweat of love, falling from flying. ...Once I fell off a precipice. Once I found gold. ...There are two of us here. Touch me."

"In the Thriving Season In memory of my mother. Now she catches fistfuls of sun ...My first child in her first spring stretches bare hands back to your darkness and heals your silence..."

"Bach Transcribing Vivaldi One remembered the sunrise, how clearly it gave substance and praise to the mountains... the other imagined twilight, the setting in blood, and a valley of fallen leaves where a stranger might rest."

"Moon Fishing ...And they fished till a traveler passed and said, "Fools, to catch the moon you must let your women spread their hair on the water— even the wiley moon will leap to that bobbing net of shimmering threads..." And they fished... ..."Fools, ...You must cut out your hearts and bait your hooks ...what matter you lose your hearts to reel in your dream?" And they fished... ..."Fools, what good is the moon to a heartless man? ...get on your knees, and drink as you never have, ...And they fished with their lips and tongues until the water was gone and the moon had slipped away in the soft bottomless mud."

"A Grackle Observed Watching the black grackle come out... into the sun, I am dazzled by an unsuspected sheen, yellow, purple and green, ...until he, unaware of what he means... hops back... and leaves the shining part ...behind, as though brightness must outgrow its... worldly dress and enter the mind... as vision... pure light."

""O Brave New World, That Hath Such People In It" Soon you will be like her, 's daughter, finding the door that leads out of yourself ...where you live with the gracious and light-footed creatures that thrive in the glaze of your art and freedom. ...Soon you will ...banish yourself from the one flawless place."

"A Holy Madness To say thou to the sun and call the wind brother; to be humble before a grain of sand and speak familiarly to the sea; to preach to the birds in earnest ...o holy love, sweet lunacy, which of us, seeing a child exhorting a deaf robin, does not bless that child for the paradise in his head? Be praised, my Lord, for Francis, brother to lilies..."

"A Prayer For Rain ...let love be brought to ignorance again."

"In The Rag And Bone Shop Trade me, shopkeeper Yeats, one filthy rag, one bone that can make poetry for all the jeweled bits. ...A rag to light a fire, a bone to whistle on! Proprietary, proud..."

"Messages ...Dogs talk to us with their bodies and accept our answers in words. Holes ask for rain; the stunted corpse of an elm is revealed as a sign. We keep breaking the code of the dead, we reply."

"The Levitation ...Whatever exists is floating: words without weight, bodies without resistance, feelings wavy as trailing scarves move through the gently dissolving center between heaven and earth where we live, briefly, in a mild light."

"On Finding a Bird's Bones in the Woods Even Einstein, gazing at the slender ribs of the world, ...even he, unlearning the bag and baggage of notion, must have kept some shred in which to clothe that shape, as we, who cannot escape ...swaddle this tiny world of bone in all that we have known..."

"The Biographer I came to live in your house restored your pictures, brought back your books, discovered the key to your desk, moved the yellow chair to the window— and now you come in, asking whose house this is."

"January Afternoon, With Billie Holiday ...The foolish old songs were right, the heart does, actually, ache from trying to push beyond itself... all that can be imagined; space is not enough... Desire has no object, it simply happens, rises and floats, lighter than air— but she knows that. ... tomorrow is something she remembers."

"Alive Together Speaking of marvels, I am alive together with you... I might have been... a woman without a name weeping in Master's bed for my husband, exchanged for a mule, ...I might have been stretched on a totem pole to appease a vindictive god or left, a useless girl-child, to die on a cliff. ... ...I might have been you. ...The odds against us are endless, our chances of being alive together statistically nonexistent; still we have made it, alive in a time when rationalists with square hats and hatless Jehovah's Witnesses agree it is almost over, alive with our lively children who—but for endless ifs— might have missed out..."

"On Reading An Anthology of Postwar German Poetry America saved me ...I was not crushed under rubble, nor was I beaten along a frozen highway; my children are not dead of postwar hunger; ...I have forced no one into a chamber of death. ...I know enough to refuse to say that life is good, but I act as though it were, and skeptical about love, I survive by the witness of my own."

"What the Dog Perhaps Hears ...We would like to ask the dog if there is a continuous whir because the child... keeps growing, if the snake really stretches full length without a click and the sun breaks through clouds without a decibel... whether in autum, when the trees dry up... there isn't a shudder... What is it like up there For us... the newborn bird is suddenly here, ... we heard nothing when the world changed."

"A Nude by Edward Hopper ...this body is home, my childhood is buried here, my sleep rises and sets inside, desire crested and wore itself thin between these bones— I live here."

"Monet Refuses the Operation Doctor, you say there are no haloes around the streetlights in Paris ...it has taken me all my life to arrive at the vision of... lamps as angels, to soften... blur and finally banish the edges... to learn that... the horizon does not exist and sky and water, ...apart, the same state of being. Fifty-four years before I could see Rouen cathedral... built of... shafts of sun and now you want... ...youthful errors: fixed notions of top and bottom, ...wisteria separate from the bridge... Houses of Parliament [that do not] dissolve ...to become the fluid dream of the Thames? I will not return to a universe of objects that don’t know each other, ...The world is flux, and light becomes what it touches, ...so quickly... it would take... ...my brush to catch it. To paint the speed of light! ...shapes, these ... burn to... change our bones... to gases. how heaven pulls earth... to claim this world, blue vapor without end."

"Letter from the End of the World I started out as a girl without a shadow, in iron shoes; now, at the end of the world I am a woman full of rain. The journey back should be easy; if this reaches you, wait for me."

"In Passing How swiftly... ...as if what exists, exists so that it can be lost and become precious"

"Curriculum Vitae 1992 2) In the year of my birth, money was shredded into confetti. ... 5) At home the bookshelves connected heaven and earth. 6) On Sundays the city child waded through pinecones and primrose marshes... 7) My country was struck by history more deadly than earthquakes and hurricanes. 8) My father was... eluding monsters. My mother told me walls had ears. ... 10) Two parents, two daughters, we followed the sun and the moon across the ocean. My grandparents stayed behind in the darkness. ... 13) The death of the mother hurt the daughter into poetry. ... 14) Ordinary life. Knots tying threads... The past pushed away, the future left unimagined for the... glorious, difficult, passionate present. ... 17) And then my father too disappeared. 18) I tried to go home... at the door to my childhood, but it was closed... 19) One day... everyone's face was younger than mine. 20)...The brilliant days and nights are breathless in their hurry. We follow..."

"Place and Time ...We're all pillars of salt. ...Where does the music come from and where does it go when it's over— the child's unanswered question about more than music. My mother is dead, and the piano ...burned with our city in World War II. ...it's still her black Bechstein each concert pianist plays for me and... her... fingers are behind each virtuoso performance on the stereo, giving me back my prewar childhood city intact and real."

"Immortality In Sleeping Beauty's castle the clock strikes one hundred years and the girl in the tower returns to the world [unchanged]. ...fear persists, and... the anger that causes fear persists, ...its trajectory can't be changed or broken, only interrupted."

"An Unanswered Question If I had been the lone survivor of my Tasmanian tribe, the only person in the world to speak my language (as she was), ...and if among all those people staring and pointing and laughing and making their meaningless sounds there had been one thoughtful face, who might have instinctively understood ...the indispensable word I must pass through the bars ...what word would it have been?"

"Midwinter Notes On my shelf of photographs the dead have come to outnumber the living. They stand like artificial flowers among the real ones, so lifelike even God might be fooled. ...Only after our garden became a graveyard ...did the white stem rise from the hermetic bulb, ...five lavender petals ...a brilliant contradiction, out of phase, like an angel strayed into Time, our world."

"The Laughter of Women ...Prisoners in underground cells imagine that they see daylight when they remember the laughter of women ...What language it is ... Long before law and scripture ...we understood freedom."

"Pigeons ...Once they were elegant, carefree; they called to each other in rich, deep voices, and we called them doves and welcomed them to our gardens."

"Imaginary Paintings 6 How Would I Paint the Big Lie Smooth, and deceptively small so that it can be swallowed like something we take for a cold. ...sweet and glossy, that pleases the tongue and goes down easy, never mind the poison inside. 7 How Would I Paint Nostalgia ...A radiant bride in white standing above a waterfall, watching the water rush away..."

"Things ...we grew lonely living among the things, so we gave the clock a face, the chair a back, the table four stout legs ...We fitted our shoes with tongues ...and hung tongues inside bells so we could listen ...the pitcher received a lip, the bottle a long, slender neck. ...we gave the country a heart, the storm an eye, the cave a mouth..."

"Tears She looked at the watchful gazelles and the heavy-lidded frogs; she looked at the glass-eyed birds and nervous, black-eyed mice. None of them wept, not even the fish ...Not even the man. Only she carried the sea inside her body."

"Heartland When did we enter the heartless age? ..."

"Happy and Unhappy Families II In the play, we know what must happen long before it happens, and we call it a tragedy. Here at home, this winter, we have no name for it."

"Why I Need the Birds ...By the time I arrive at evening, ...they are turning into the dreamwork of trees; and all of us... myself and the purple finches, and rusty blackbirds, the ruby cardinals, the white-throated sparrows with their liquid voices— ride the dark curve of the earth toward daylight, which they announce from their high lookouts before dawn has quite broken..."

"[H]er book is a testament to the miraculous power of language to interpret and transform our world. It is a testament that invites readers to share her vision of experiences we all have in common..."

"[H]er sense of the universality of the fairy tale to explore the human psyche gives her poems a metaphoric brilliance. And in the center of this brilliance is the power of the fairy tale-and, indeed, of the poem-to transform."

"[Mueller's] sense of history gives her poems a rare philosophical intensity."

"Mueller's poem Muse... interprets art through an individual perspective and latches onto lonesome painted figures. The major influence on her poetry is her childhood experience fleeing Nazi Germany with her family. Having witnessed atrocities in her homeland and escaped death she is both aware of injustice and thankful. Specifically, she is concerned with her position as an outsider in America. ...The poem ...chronicles her own discovery of the painting's meaning in relation to her life. ...[S]he translates the image to the present day. She fills in and rounds the images within contexts. ...She means, how does any artist know her work will endure when they sit alone, isolated, commenting on a melancholy world?"

"Is there anything else in this world other than love, that you will never get bored of recurrence?"

"There are worse things than having behaved foolishly in public. There are worse things than these miniature betrayals, committed or endured or suspected; there are worse things than not being able to sleep for thinking about them. It is 5 a.m. All the worse things come stalking in and stand icily about the bed looking worse and worse and worse"

"It is 5 a.m. All the worse things come stalking in and stand icily about the bed looking worse and worse and worse."

"But now that I am in love with a place which doesn’t care how I look, or if I’m happy,happy is how I look."

"I stopped writing poetry when I stopped smoking.... It was more complicated than that."

"I write in praise of the solitary act: of not feeling a trespassing tongue forced into one's mouth, one's breath smothered, nipples crushed against the ribcage, and that metallic tingling in the chin set off by a certain odd nerve: unpleasure."

"Somehow we manage it: to like our friends, to tolerate not only their little ways but their huge neuroses, their monumental oddness: "Oh well," we smile, "it's one of his funny days.""

"My verse forms are relatively traditional (traditions alter). In general they have moved away from strict classical patterns in the direction of greater freedom — as is usual with most artists learning a trade. It takes courage, however, to leave all props behind, to cast oneself, like Matisse, upon pure space. I still await that confidence."

"Perhaps relationships work more powerfully when there is absence and tension and a lot of heartache. I can't live with people."

"Poetry is a search for ways of communication; it must be conducted with openness, flexibility, and a constant readiness to listen."

"All poets, all writers, are terrible parasites. We use people and experiences."

"The thing is, Neil, you are all of us’ is one of the first parts of the book I wrote, back in 2011. I had known Neil Roberts’s story for some time and it had occurred to me it would be interesting to write a long poem about the incident. One of the things that struck me early on in my research, from reading various anarchist/ libertarian communist web entries, was the sense of ownership amongst these radical left communities for the story. It was as though each person who had re-told the story, while not endorsing Neil’s act, could identify with the way he must have felt. In this poem I drew on my own experience within the Wellington anarchist scene – although not every detail is ‘true’, the characters in this poem do approximate real people, myself included."

"Within this poem the ghost of an accentual meter can be heard, and the metrical scheme, while loose, is something near the traditional 4, 3, 4, 3 ballad stanza. And it is off-rhymed, xaxa. Perhaps the ballad was lurking behind the scenes all along. It has been mentioned that Dear Neil Roberts is rhythmically close to prose. I think this is true (as it is for a wide range of contemporary free verse), but I also think that writing to a regular stanzaic shape can lead to some interesting effects. For instance, rhymes frequently occur at line-ends. And there are lines in the book that are straight iambic pentameter. It has to be remembered that poetry is a genre, and can be written in verse, prose, or any combination of the two. Writing Dear Neil Roberts as a poem allowed me to present, juxtapose and interpret information in a different manner, than if I had set out to write an extended essay or a work of New Zealand history."

"Oh it's terrifying, yeah: you come up to publication day and you suddenly realise 'right that's it, it's out in the world'. I remember when my publishers were telling me that it was starting to get on the bestseller list, and I was thinking 'Okay, well I've got a lot of family and a lot of friends, so okay that accounts for the first week'. And then I started realising that absolute strangers were gonna be reading it and...yeah it is quite terrifying actually."

"...all those other 'How To' books were just about people that knew about this thing. This is different, because he's not a bird-watcher; this is his journey into that world . . . I'd like it hardbacked and leather, because it's a lovely book. It's one you'd want to treasure."

"Hers was the first voice like hers that I had discovered in literature before. I was good at English . . . I had never come across a voice like hers before. She was a black woman from the States, and she just blew my mind..."

"The fact that he can focus so deeply on a dinner, or a conversation at a beach, or you know, the impending non-consummation of a marriage, was really wonderful. It had all the depth. But I was quite captivated by the food, the English food, and how kind of unappealing it was. It was just so banal and humdrum."

"A great deal of my fiction deals with extreme violence erupting in normal lives."

"I never decided that I would; I was just never able to stop."

"The way Doyle paints it is that the brotherhood, the Sinn Féin became the home for all these poor — you know, the woebegotten souls who were like trying to find their way."

"It's not a world that I know but I came to know something about it though the book which was good, but I see...when I look at literature, when I look at books I look at the structure of them and ... I saw a fairy tale actually, when I think about it you know the traditional princess who becomes a maid who rises to become a queen and all these mad people inbetween on that journey..."

"I have a new scarlet coat and I look like a fire engine and I don't give a damn..."

"I'm always happy because your definition of 'young" is elastic..."

"He taught me everything. He just used to say, and I'll never forget that, he said 'it's not big words and adjectives — that's boring'. And I thought 'ah yes' . . . I learned from that. Simplicity is the art of writing."

"It's typically Jamesian because in a way its an unambiguous story: you know exactly what's going on, but it creates these ambiguities of feeling in you, because you want her protected, yet you can't like the father who's protecting her..."

"...I wouldn't really be interested in writing a biography about someone who was obvious and straightforward. It's the enigma of a particular personality, I think, that drives your interest as a biographer. With someone like [John] Mulgan, someone like [Ralph] Hotere, there is a core there which is truly enigmatic, and which obviously fuels the work."

"...I have a problem with historic novels, I think that they tend to become history lessons and this book at times becomes a history lesson"

"...a lot of really bad books, like just shit books, are written with really great plots that really move along, and why should the devil have all the good tunes you know? I like a good story in a book. It's not very fashionable to say that, because people associate good stories with the kind of books that are a cop-out: books that are like bad middlebrow popular fiction. But what's bad about being entertained?"

"Part of that shorthand is the way that she works as well. I mean she's got this very reduced, very spare kind of style, which I loved. But more than anything I found it so compelling because of this fantastic unconsummated love, that really acts as a huge narrative pull."

"Writing didn't really get a look in until we had children. I made the decision that I was going to stay home and bring the kids up myself, and oddly enough that gave me the opportunity and the time to write finally. I say time very loosely there..."

"Some phrases you have to say out loud. it's like someone has poured warm milk into your skull, you know? It's just beautiful — I loved it."

"...of course it wasn't called Lord of the Flies to begin with; it was called something awful like A Cry of Children. And it took 22 goes to get the manuscript actually on the desk at Faber and Faber for someone to accept it. All these stories come out . . . the professional book reader who looked at Lord of the Flies and said 'rubbish, dull, pointless'."

"...legends are not only necessary to us, but however strong the legend, even if you try to demolish it, you can't. In fact you end up reinforcing it . . . We writers are mythmakers, whether we like it or not. The moment you write a book, you are very often adding to and sometimes creating a myth, and I've done both and I'm very happy with that."

"...what I liked about it is . . . you never know if you're nuts, you know? And he had no idea, until they started finding the bodies..."

"It was just extraordinary from the moment I started reading it. It doesn't have any chapters, and you just don't want it to stop. It's like that feeling of being a child again when you're reading a book and you honestly stay up all night reading it."

"For me, the idea that people in the past can be present, is not a very strange idea when you've had a lot of experience with people that feel that way. Being with [knowing] elders like Eruera Stirling for 20 odd years . . . he looked at the ancestors as if they were just in the next room."

"If someone was to tell me that I'd be raving on TV about a book about Diana, that's pink, [reading on] the bus, as a straight male, I'd tell you that 'you're wrong'. Let me just tell you that it's one of the most compelling books I've read!"

"I love the title, I loved it. in the same way that the stories take on extra meaning after coming after the other stories. What I love about it is the way the title 'Opportunity' takes on so much meaning coming after the novel's provocation..."

"The place is the context of the poetry. It's not that I write about the place, but the poetry comes out of my life in the place. So in that way it is tremendously important To me, and I'm sure i wouldn't be writing what I'm writing if I weren't in Bluff."

"...she's not a sentimental writer. There are times when she's as referential as a nun. At times she leaps into a comic, clownish dance. And times when she thunders like an Old Testament prophet."

"The mind of a child is a very different thing, and getting into that mind and just seeing the way the mind works...my younger daughter says 'you know if you stand on your head, you don't blink'. Now I don't know if that's true or not, but what a great line and I'm going to use that in a book that I'm writing at the moment..."

"You can read it with a perfectly straight face but kind of chuckle inwardly; that's what I like."

"Molly's from his series Dance to the Music of Time, in episode ten"

"In fact her writing reminds me of your writing actually . . . it's insightful and it's layered. And it's a bit like intellectual quicksand"

"There is a duality to South Africa, as in all of life itself, that is evident, and as stark as the inequality among its citizens"

"Then I close my eyes, and I imagine a world where I sabi and you sabi that we are okay, as we are"

"Perhaps all South Africans need to embrace the mirror of yesteryear, and fear it not, for it holds the answers to the questions that we seek today. Questions that, if left unanswered, will still be asked by generations yet to come.”"

"In the stillness the voice inside is louder, much louder, and cannot be ignored"

"Our stories are important and need to be told"

"If there is a pure space inside of us that can access the eternal source, and give rise to great acts of kindness, create masterpiece artworks, inspire life changing technology, and drive a man to risk his life to save a woman and her baby in a flood, where then does that space exist inside us that gives rise to great acts of horror and pain?"

"Poetry is part of the struggle. You use the armed struggle; you use political methods… You recite a poem. It’s better than a three-hour speech. It gets to the heart of the matter. It moves people"

"On behalf of my mother, Lindiwe Mabuza we thank Rhodes University for this prestigious award. As a family, we are both humbled and honoured at the recognition of her contribution and commitment to the struggle and her beloved country, South Africa. It is most heartening that she was aware of this accolade as she received the letter from Rhodes shortly before her death. Indeed, I am convinced she is smiling down from the heavens"

"Our nation owes her an enormous debt of gratitude and appreciation for all the sacrifices she has made throughout her life as a committed freedom fighter, a determined cultural and literary activist and a champion for women’s emancipation. She was a phenomenal woman; a woman of grace; a woman of elegance; an embodiment of humility; and courage and dedication personified. Her use of poetry and other writings as a weapon against the brutal and iniquitous system of apartheid created hope for many who could not return to the place of their birth"

"A centipede was happy – quite! Until a toad in fun Said, "Pray, which leg moves after which?" This raised her doubts to such a pitch, She fell exhausted in the ditch Not knowing how to run."