Linda Hogan (writer)

"We have stories as old as the great seas breaking through the chest, flying out the mouth, noisy tongues that once were silenced, all the oceans we contain coming to light"

"For American Indian people the journey home is what tells us our human history, the mystery of our lives here, and leads us toward fullness and strength. These first poems were part of that return for me, an identification with my tribe and the Oklahoma earth, a deep knowing and telling how I was formed of these two powers called ancestors and clay."

"At the first light of morning I sat up in bed. The storm by then was dark green and there was still a rhythmic song of falling water, but a larger noise was behind the rain, a great disturbance of air. I went to the window and looked up. In the first spread of light above us was a cloud, a great cloud of flesh and feather so thick the sky itself appeared to be moving as the wings of tundra swans clattered together, as they pulled themselves south. Their voices seemed to wake the land itself, which at that moment lived only for the great, beautiful birds, the sky full and moving. I wasn't dreaming. I had no need to dream. This world I'd entered, however (chapter four p78)"

"Change was in the air. It was palpable, a strong presence in the room. (chapter three, p51)"

""Your mother was a door...Always closed. But sometimes I thought she was a window, instead, because through her I glimpsed scenes of suffering." Even young, I understood this in a way. I understood already from what the women said that my mother was stairs with no destination. She was a burning house, feeding on the air of others. She had no more foundation, no struts, no beams. Always, a person would think she was one step away from collapsing. But she remained standing."

"From my many grandmothers, I learned how I came from a circle of courageous women and strong men who had walls pulled down straight in front of them until the circle closed, the way rabbits are hunted in a narrowing circle, but some lived, some survived this narrowing circle of life. (chapter seven, p107)"

"I looked down, embarrassed, but she said only, "Some people see scars and it is wounding they remember. To me they are proof of the fact that there is healing." (p125)"

"What I liked was that land refused to be shaped by the makers of maps. Land had its own will. The cartographers thought if they mapped it, everything would remain the same, but it didn't, and I respected it for that. Change was the one thing not accounted for. (p123)"

"I only knew that I and my many mothers had been lost in sky, water, and the galaxy, as we rested on a planet so small it was invisible to the turnings of other worlds. (p179)"

"I was told Ammah was a silent god and rarely spoke. The reason for this was that all things--birdsongs, the moon, even my own life--grow from rich and splendid silence. (p265)"

"But I could see right away that this lost him points in the white men's book. Tenderness was not a quality of strength to them. It was unmanly, an act they considered soft and unworthy. (p281)"

""Why are only white laws followed? This will kill the world. What is the law if not the earth's?" (p283)"

""Are you afraid?" [she] curled up to [him]. "Yes." He held her hand. Such comfort in the flesh. Then he turned toward her, grateful for her presence, and held her, and because the desire for life goes on under all circumstances, they made love. (p230)"

"I was seventeen when I returned to Adam's Rib on Tinselman's Ferry. It was the north country, the place where water was broken apart by land, land split open by water so that the maps showed places both bound and, if you knew the way in, boundless. The elders said it was where land and water had joined together in an ancient pact, now broken. The waterways on which I arrived had a history. They had been crossed by many before me..."

"Sometimes now I hear the voice of my great-grandmother, Agnes. It floats toward me like a soft breeze through an open window. (beginning of Prologue)"

"Uncle Sam was a cold uncle with a mean soul and a cruel spirit. (p219)"

"I am done with weeping. The bones of this body say, dance. Dance the story of life"

"This is what I know from science: that a grain of dust dwells at the center of every flake of snow, that ice can have its way with land, that wolves live inside a circle of their own beginning. This is what I know from blood: the first language is not our own."

"Something must hold me this way, and you, and the thin blue tail of the galaxy, to keep us from leaving as life unfolds behind us over long roads and intricate, human waters."

"He thought that even a prophet, even a warrior, could not survive the ways of the Americans, especially the government with rules and words that kept human life at a distance and made it live by their regulations and books. (p219)"

"She was a faith healer, of sorts. By that, I mean she always held a cure for hopelessness, could lay a hand on misery and make it smile could ever hold."

"beginning and end together the way sunlight on skin is still connected to the fiery storms of its origins"

"[He] held his daughter's hand. They were praying. None of them spoke. No one had to. The silence was stronger than words. (p 202)"

"Throw open the windows, it's spring! All I held in my winter breast turns back into the world, an inverse body, the universe turned inside out singing and breaking through the four red chambers of earth's heart. Everything is alive."

"The desperate need to articulate this was what went into these early poems, the need to say what hadn't been spoken, to tell an untold story of our lives. They are home speaking through me. Home is in blood, and I am still on the journey of calling myself home."

"By incorporating history, by remembering, Indian women continue to define themselves. It is through this remembering that we survive. It is through this speaking out that our history is preserved more whole and intact than it was in the past."

"these words, these words are proof there is healing"

"fire flashes from the gun like a flower that blooms madness and is gone."

"Love, Lettie thought, it hurts and gladdens us no matter what a woman's age. (p177)"

"live so nothing will be left for death at the end"

"Writing begins for me with survival, with life and with freeing life, saving life, speaking life. It is work that speaks what can't be easily said. It originates from a compelling desire to live and be alive. For me, it is sometimes the need to speak for other forms of life, to take the side of human life, even our sometimes frivolous living, and our grief-filled living, our joyous living, our violent living, busy living, our peaceful living. It is about possibility. It is based in the world of matter. I am interested in how something small turns into an image that is large and strong with resonance, where the ordinary becomes beautiful. I believe the divine, the magic, is here in the weeds at our feet, unacknowledged. What a world this is. Where else could water rise up to the sky, turn into snow crystals, magnificently brought together, fall from the sky all around us, pile up billions deep, and catch the small sparks of sunlight as they return again to water?"

"After the second dinner, [he] blew out a candle. In the darkness, the stars and Milky Way lit up. No one noticed the electricity was turned off. The people all stood in front of the map of the universe, amazed by the lights on the wall. It was something, it really was, everyone thought. It was a fine, strong feeling, being there together with the stars lit up before them. Even if things were going wrong, the bad feelings disappeared in front of those stars. They wanted to touch each other that night and hold hands. (p 176)"

"At night, alone, the world is a river in me."

"It is also honest land. It doesn’t lie or hide anything. Neither does Ama. Everything she is, everything she is about to do, is clear in her face and in her movement and in her words. The way everything is open to view when sunlight comes down through the hold where all life entered this world. (Chapter 3, p55)"

"I have already forgotten such things as music exist. Ama doesn’t hear it, though, she only hears the deer walk. “Listen to its hooves,” she says, and I wonder how, always, she puts this world away as if it never happened and how she hears the little feet of the deer. (Chapter 3, p54)"

"writing has changed me. And there is the powerful need we all have to tell a story, each of us with a piece of the whole pattern to complete. As Alice Walker says, We are all telling part of the same story, and as Sharon Olds has said, Every writer is a cell on the body politic of America."

"I feel watched. By nature. I think now. It’s what I felt watching me, all along. It knows us. It watches us. The animals have eyes that see us. The birds, the trees, everything knows what we do. (Chapter 3, p59)"

"“What do you know and what do you just believe?” I thought about that for the longest time. I know nothing, I only believe in things. (Chapter 3, p67)"

"Whatever has ended, whatever has begun, is strong in the air. (Chapter 3, p73)"

"I can hear everyone in the living room watching TV. They are together, as if to show that now I am outside this family. I am the source of their problems. I have brought them closer together, joined them in their judgement of me. (p94)"

"bacteria and enzymes grow new life from decay out of darkness and water. It’s into this that I want to fall, into swamp and mud and sludge, and it seems like falling is the natural way of things; gravity needs no fuel, no wings. It needs only stillness and waiting and time. (p95)"

"Two worlds exist. Maybe it’s always been this way, but I enter them both like I am two people. Above and below. Land and water. Now and then. (Chapter 4, p97)"

"resurrection ferns that wait for a rain like dead things and then open up new and green and beautiful like they are doing right now out on the hurricane felled trees, like they didn’t know it was catastrophe that gave them life. Maybe, I think, I am like those ferns. Ama’s like the rain. (Chapter 5, p101)"

"It’s a good feeling to be empty-handed, to feel naked as if a whole life was blown off my back by a storm. (Chapter 5, p105)"

"...I hate the smell of school, but I’ve been good at it, this world where we study war and numbers that combine to destroy life. (Chapter 5, p105)"

"at school I have learned there’s no room in sky for my mother’s heaven; there’s no room at the center of the earth for hell, either. It is new worlds I will have to look for. (Chapter 5, p106)"

"The people, are watching Ama, studying her. She’s a curiosity. She is a human being of a different kind. She makes them doubt, I see that. (Chapter 5, p134)"

"They still hold themselves in a beautiful manner; that’s what we used to call it, “a beautiful manner.” It’s the way of living that holds tight to memory, creation, and earth. You can see this goodness of life on their peaceful faces, on their skin. (Chapter 6, p154)"

"The place itself seems alive. Here, the land itself seems to have a sound, the soft brush of a breeze. (Chapter 6, p159)"

"it has always been Ama’s skill to live with the world and not against it. (Chapter 3, p47)"