Linda Hogan (writer)

"the evidence of healing is all around us. A scar, for instance, is evidence that a wound has healed. But the poems are also about wilderness; they're about animals that live in the wilderness and humans who go into the human wilderness, and who also fear the wilderness outside them. In some ways the poems are an investigation of the depths of people, the history of land."

"(asked about poetry and fiction) the two genres are very connected in some way, because they're both doing the same thing. It's a descent into something older, deeper and more powerful than our everyday being or reality."

"Simon Ortiz says, "It's fiction and you'd better believe it." I always loved that line. Another way to say it is that fiction is a vertical descent; it's a drop into an event or into history or into the depths of some kind of meaning in order to understand humans, and to somehow decipher what history speaks, the story beneath the story."

"People who write about wilderness and the environment are going away from themselves to do it. They don't look at the inner wilderness and what motivates people to be destructive. I think everything is connected, that I'm a part of the destruction; we all are. Investigating why we're sometimes apathetic is probably the best work we could do."

"The humor was always there also, because even in desperate situations people are human. They still do funny things, and they still have their obsessions and habits. It bothers me when I read a book where everything is clear-cut and there isn't anything human about or in it. One of the things that often happens between cultures is the denial of common humanity."

"When the stories of your people center around the name of one stone, one place, the whole land around you becomes a part of everything that you know: your religion, your mythology, your family history."

"I see my everyday life in a historical context. We are living in the midst of history; it's important that somebody keeps records."

"The exciting thing about writing is how it happens, how a story takes on life, begins to move in its own direction, surprises the writer with its growing. When it's working, time passes quickly, the characters speak inside your inner ear, the scenes are there just needing words. When it's working, the story shows you a new way to live, it offers a writer wisdom one would never have without it."

"We're all affected by place whether we realize it or not. For one thing, all our stories-creation stories, myths, oral traditions-are, in part, about storied land. Stories live in the land. They "take place" in context with all the rest. Our daily lives are linked to place. One of the problems with the dominant culture is that it wants to escape this connection. As Rachel Rosenthal said in a recent performance, people use intellect and science as a tool so they won't have to dirty their hands with matter. For indigenous people, the link between the person and the land is a connecting point, not only with ordinary, daily life, but with the cosmos. It is about relationship. And relationship is the most central part of our lives, our being, not only relationship with other people, but with all things. I believe a lot of neuroses have to do with a lack of healthy relationship with the land, with self, with creation and the creative spirit."

"I think protest and legal actions lack the emotions, the feelings of the people, and story is a way to touch the heart. It often carries a weight that the grey language of law lacks."

"Home was always, in my heart, Oklahoma. I can feel even now the stillness of the land, the smell of it. But I've lived a long time in Colorado, so I believe it is home too. Especially since I know the stories there, the land, the animals, and the people in our community. But I am thinking that home is larger than this. As the earth has grown smaller and we know its fragility, it is important for us now to expand our view of home to a larger space, a global community, and to think of land, ocean, mountains, desert, as home. And we need to extend our sense of community to include animals and other forms of life."

"Working at a university I've made the observation that many student writers write for the sake of writing. They are really writing for other writers, not to tell a necessary story, not out of urgency and need. I have keenly felt that writing must be more than that, that it must have a power to enter the world, to begin to change the stories people live by, to open that story into something larger, into something that helps us know how to live. This means that we have to expand not only our work but our ideas about audience. It wouldn't bother me to have academics reject my work if somebody read it and it changed their attitude about deforestation, for example. I think I began to write out of a desire to make change in the world, searching for language that would help me speak my innermost hopes and ways. Writing was something of a foreign language I learned to be fluent in so that I could communicate emotions and what I knew was important-an ethical way of thinking about the world-communicate what racism is and what it does to people."

"The real place of writing is to make change in the world, and it's a very powerful medium."

"I loved poetry. I still do. I love the process of writing it, the very sort of quiet way of being in the world. I think it's more about being than it is about thinking, and I like that...I think the poetry is a basic language for writing, the most condensed, every word cared about. It's preparation for all the other shapes and kinds of writing."

"of course property is an abstract economic concept on a hidden dollar that has been the cause of the death of people...I mean this country and most others that work out of our economic system are founded on the idea of property, and most of the transgressions that take place here have to do with property. There were massive slaughters of some of the California tribes during the gold rush, and the same thing happened to the Cherokee in Georgia. So, you know, property is no insignificant thing for us to think about if we ever want to change the world."

"I never wanted to be a writer, either, but I suppose we each find a calling and fall into it."

"The planet is so much smaller than we ever thought in the past I think of the whole planet as home, a whole ecosystem that seems important to our growth as people and our survival."

"the more I observe the world, the more I learn about it, the more I think that there's a vast terrestrial intelligence all around us."

"I find that my writing now, in the softness I would like, looks at the political, and even when I don’t wish it. Because more and more the world is revealed to us. I am, have been, more of a writer who thinks about environment, but the kind of world we are living with now seems to require that we speak the words that open it and keep it in the minds of all people. The corruption of the past lives in the present and while I would prefer to talk about trees and their plant communities, their root systems, etc. I end up in the process writing about the root system of America. (2012)"

"The literature contemporary Indian women write is a necessity. It is existence and survival given shape in written language. It is more than poetry and prose. It is an expression of entire cultures and their perceptions of the world and universe. It is often a transmission, through written language, of the oral traditions that were, and still are, passed on by word of mouth."

"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."

"Feminism is a complicated issue for Indian women because what affects the women also affects the entire community. As individual nations, we have allegiances to the members of our tribes that seldom exist for non-Indian American women. Political and economic injustices are practiced against entire tribes, and are not limited to just the women. The issue of survival affects all people and the major efforts of Indian feminists have been struggles against the dominant society."

"Day is breaking through doors. Earth has made another revolution."

"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."

"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."

"Together we created an illustration of how the oral becomes the written, how life becomes a story, how new angles and layers of information create a form of energy that lets the story enter."

"Writing is a way to uncover and discover a new truth. It comes from, and speaks to, the deepest well-spring of the human being, the place that is the source of our inner knowledge, intuition and instinct."

"I think of that word, power, and what it means. It means you feed your people, you help the world. I never understood what else there was to it But I watched its struggles daily, its games"

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

"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."

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

"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"

"May all the walls be like those of the jungle, filled with animals singing into the ears of night Let them be made of the mysteries further in in the heart, joined with the lives of all, all bridges of flesh all singing, all covering the wounded land showing again, again that boundaries are all lies."

"Take my hand. This river beside us is singing. It is saying Yes to our touching of hands, this uprising of arms, around one another, the hearts beating on this hemisphere and that."

"In the first light I remember who rewards me for living, not bosses but singing birds and blue sky"

"Beyond walls are lakes and plains, canyons and the universe"

"It was here, in religion, that all their sorrow came out. Moses could hear the Indian preacher speak, "And when the spirit touches us, there won't be any more danger here on earth," said the evangelist. "No mean spirits walking this land, no smallness in people, no heartaches, no sorrow, nor any pain." Moses knew the man's arms were raised up before the sad adults, and he heard the congregation cry out, "Amen," and in that word they were bound together. (p 71)"

""The law is on their side because it's their law." (p111)"

"In spite of the wedding, it was a year of separations. Not only were people turning away from one another, but there were other splittings, mind from heart, body from spirit. Some broke quickly, weeping openly and without shame in public places. In others...the changes were barely visible. (p 170)"

"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)"

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

"[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)"

"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)"

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

""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)"

"The next day as he rode on toward the bluffs, Stace Red Hawk felt a renewal of faith, the kind of feeling that comes to a man in silence, when he takes notice that a tree is older than himself, and that it will remain when he is gone. (p 230)"

"Spring was rich and heavy in the air. All the plants were turning over, beginning another journey upward toward the sun. (p 244)"

""I think the Bible is full of mistakes. I thought I would correct them. For instance, where does it say that all living things are equal?" The priest shook his head. 'It doesn't say that. It says man has dominion over the creatures of the earth.' "'Well, that's where it needs to be fixed. That's part of the trouble, don't you see?'" (270)"

"when all of them joined in to sing about lovers and fights and broken-down cars, it was a shared world, between all tribes, all nations. (p 296)"

"he glanced toward them, swallowed, and said quietly, "So sorry...It's not me doing it. It's not even the leasers. It's what is legal." Belle sat down. "Why is it that so many crimes are backed up by your laws?""