Novelists From The United States

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

"in revolutions, it is the poets that are taken away. Because it speaks a truth that enters more than just the mind. It conveys a life and a life of change, of possibility, into the whole self. (2012)"

""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)"

"I pick these events and make them stories because only then will people listen. If I carry a sign, I am ignored. So I do it in the work."

"We are moving so quickly in today's world that our experiences are blurred. We need to slow down so that our senses will awaken and our hearts will open. When we learn this and reconnect to nature we are able to receive her energy and the many gifts she has for us."

"It's not my purpose to please all people. It's my purpose to write the most honest feeling work I can, work with integrity and respect for life."

"The gifts of the Earth are so precious and they are free. Mother Earth puts on a constant show and never charges admission. What I now see is incredible. I know that, as I continue to be in nature, I will be gifted with more and more sight."

"thinking about plot and character development is a much more linear way of thinking than it is to be in a poem. To be in a poem means you drop deeper down into yourself and your subject. And it's more resonant. I like the experience of writing poetry a lot better than composing fiction...I love to do poetry because it's so-- the experience of it is like a whole body experience and not just an exercise that's mental."

"What a joy to share what I loved most with those I loved most."

"I was struck by the fact that Native American tradition is to recognize Spirit in everything. I started to look at the natural world a little differently."

"Nature is the most profound multimedia event that you will ever experience. Why not turn off your television and go witness the greatest show on Earth. (p 152)"

"When we learn to align our own energy with that of the Earth's, we will move forward effortlessly. When we slow down and allow our senses to open, great transformations occur. Living on the planet Earth becomes living in the Garden of Eden. (p 212)"

"Each morning when I step outside my door I walk into the Garden of Eden. "O Great Spirit, thank you for this beautiful day." There has not been one day in the past 20 years that I have not started my day this way and really meant it. When you are truly connected to Mother Earth and Spirit, you see as much beauty in a cold, gray, sleety, December morning as a warm, sunny day in June."

"The inward may have been, all along, the wrong direction to seek. A person seems so little and small, and without is the river, the mountain, the forest of fern and tree, the desert with its lizards, the glacial meltings and freezings and movements of life. The cure for soul loss is in the mist of morning, the grass that grew a little through the night, the first warmth of sunlight, the waking human in a world infused with intelligence and spirit."

"There's nothing that can really prepare a person for a novel. It's not, for me, a static form of writing, but a process of seeing what will unfold, even a novel rooted in history as this one is."

"let your roots grow outward meeting and intertwining with other roots of those all over the planet consciously connecting for the same reason of maintaining peace and compassion. Feel the strength and support we give to the planet while connected with intent. (p 203)"

"Like the water, the earth, the universe, a story is forever unfolding. It floods and erupts. It births new worlds. It is circular as our planet and fluid as the words of the first people who came out from the ocean or out of the cave or down from the sky. Or those who came from a garden where rivers meet and whose god was a tempter to their fall, planning it into their creation along with all the rest. (p288)"

"It is a still day, everything silent. Even the wind isn't blowing. There is just a breeze of something living, like the breath of the universe. (p281)"

"...most of the [European] theories made nature smaller than it is and made the human larger. Vision was about the seer only, not the seen. Nothing could be more different from how tribal people on all continents have seen the world. From the perspectives of those who have remained in their own terrain for thousands of years, there were - and are other points of view. For tribal thinkers, the outside world creates the human: we are dive to processes within and without the self. It is more humble way to view the world, and far more steady. Nature is the creator, not the created. There exists too, a geography of spirit that is tied to and comes from the larger geography of nature. It offers to humans the bounty and richness of the world. If we are open enough, strong enough to connect with the world, we become something greater than we are."

"[He] wanted to plant the seed. It was hope. It was a future. He wanted a future to grow in this place made so nearly desolate by bombs, craters and burned woods. (p165)"

"Nature is now too often defined by people who are fragmented from the land. Such a world is seldom one that carries and creates the human spirit. Too rarely is it understood that the soul lies at all points of intersection between hum in consciousness and the rest of nature. Skin is hardly a container. Or boundaries are not solid, we are permeable, and even when we are solitary dreamers we are rooted in the soul outside."

"Soul loss is what happens as the world around us disappears...The cure for susto, soul sickness, is not in books. It is written in the bark of a tree, in the moonlit silence of night, in the bank of a river and the water's motion. The cure is outside ourselves."

"It really is true that the history of your people and your land is in the human body."

"All the stories live in our bodies, he thinks. Every last one. (p116)"

"He had a map. He looked at it, trying to figure out where he was. He'd studied the legend. Legend. It was a good word for kilometers and miles, things covering space. As if the world was merely a story, and it was, one story laid down over another. As it was in his older country, too. (p164)"

"The people her own age had not ever recovered from the war. The older people are still in the pain of history. (p64)"

""Why don't you go out more?" her mother always wanted to know. But she was out, just in another way. Out in the world. Out in the spray of ocean, the garden of heaven. Perhaps she was timid, but she preferred the world this way. There were times when the light of the moon had gone out and she felt a great loneliness. It wasn't for herself. It was for what had hap¬ pened in the grasses of their land, their waters, not just the massacre there, the slavery, but the killing of the ocean. (p65)"

"She was an anchor but at least now she knew it had an end, a stopping place. It hit bottom. She could fall no deeper. (p76)"

"The infant Thomas W. Just was born on July 2, 1947, to much happiness and many pictures of his mother smiling down at him. It was the day just before the octopus left the water, walked on all eight legs across land and into Seal Cave. Sometimes young people made love in that cave. Sometimes boys escaped school and smoked cigarettes there. But on this day, the day after Thomas was born, the octopus walked out of the sea and they watched it..."

"During the daylight hours he travels, without wanting to, the inside passage of his own self, a human labyrinth of memory, history, and the people that came before him. [He] is in trouble, not with the law, not with other people, but within. What lonely creatures humans are when they thread through these passages. It is an inner world, one of disasters and whirlwinds, unknown islands, and he must journey them all alone. There are circles inside the mind of a man, circles a man can't escape because each time he comes to a conclusion, it is the same place and it begins over again. It courses hard. And [he] harbors too many secrets."

"Even the land gives in to history. (from Prologue)"

"even stars come apart in the play of universal wind."

"If, when you are there, you see women wading on the water and clouds in the valley, the smell of rain, or a lotus blossom rises out of round green leaves, remember there is always something besides our own misery."

"Lies couldn't call out the way truth does. They feared discovery. They were constantly confused and had soft edges that overlapped. (p45)"

"Even today we focus on diversity as part of Earth's creativity while Euro Americans still search for the universal, an absolute, something that can be understood, spoken, be assimilated into their own system of knowledge. The Native understands the world as more complex and not the static that is implicit in an absolute where all communication remains within a narrow circle of like-minded. One group emphasizes the individual as part of the whole. The Euro emphasizes the individual. There is "we" and there is "I.""

"community lies beyond family within the surrounding, enfolding environment. We are co-creators in the universe, the world, within all the rest, all fluid, shifting movement, and without the emphasis on measurement. The world is there in its entirety, not in segments. And we inhabit it. This is what makes us human."

"We need to acknowledge the differences and their spectrum of human being, the significance of accepting all and not wishing for a monoculture. Diversity is a way of being, and the attempt to find an absolute is yet another part of the separate matrixes. Tribal peoples do not require a sameness of thought or belief. We come from different stories, different origins, and we respect the differences."

"lies are the first recognition of truth. (p45)"

"Most of us think of the earth as a living being and that we must live upon it with care and love and respect. The idea of subjugating the earth is the product of another mind. Even environmentalists, she maintains, are of another mind because they are not concerned so much with the sacred as with the idea of stewardship."

"Waking today just before winter when I try to name the color of grasses, how I feel their beauty, there is no word."

"The physical space we all share may be the same, but the philosophical space isn't."

"We are, in part, the body of earth (p 206)"

"Nowadays, it seems we are always trying to match the world to ourselves instead of ourselves to it, the way it truly is. Yet human smallness is only too apparent. In such great universes as ours, we should try to match ourselves to the outside world (p 206)"

"we are a story, each of us, a bundle of stories (p 205)"

"I feel the air as if I could move through it with my ancestors' wings. (p 202)"

"We live not only inside a body but within a story as well, and our story resides in the land as sure as the vision of Dorothea Lange's desperate, running horse. (p 204)"

"We feel it, long for them, without even knowing what it is that we feel and yearn toward. We try to replace what is lost with possessions, with belief, with false hope. Longing, as poet Ernesto Cardenal said, for something beyond what we want. (p 204)"

"For Native peoples, our systems of knowledge are not about beliefs but about ways of knowing and how we know, through experience itself. It is not what is taught in books, not in ordinary classes, but what lies beneath all the new ideas."

"The native tradition of respect for other species, for the land, and for the water, is a view of the world that informs my work. The more I study, the more I see that the traditional stories, the traditional ceremonies, and the ways of living in the world are superior to what has developed from the Western view. I use that word "superior" with hesitation. I mean that there isn't room for species extinction, for exploitation of the land or water. One thing that indigenous people on all continents have been able to do is to keep a balance between all the relationships of what is now called ecology."