Novelists From The United States

"It was a beautiful night, and she thought how wonderful it was to look out without fear (p373)"

"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."

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

"As an Indian woman, I come from a long history of people who have listened to the language of this continent, people who have known that corn grows with the songs and prayers of the people, that it has a story to tell, that the world is alive...This intuitive and common language is what I seek for my writing, work in touch with the mystery and force of life, work that speaks a few of the many voices around us...It is also poetry, this science, and I note how often scientific theories lead to the world of poetry and vision, theories telling us how atoms that were stars have been transformed into our living, breathing bodies. And in these theories, or maybe they should be called stories, we begin to understand how we are each many people, including the stars we once were, and how we are in essence the earth and the universe, how what we do travels clear around the earth and returns. In a single moment of our living, there is our ancestral and personal history, our future, even our deaths planted in us and already growing toward their fulfillment. The corn plants are there, and like all the rest we are forever merging our borders with theirs in the world collective. Our very lives might depend on this listening. In the Chernobyl nuclear accident, the wind told the story that was being suppressed by the people. It gave away the truth. It carried the story of danger to other countries. It was a poet, a prophet, a scientist. Sometimes, like the wind, poetry has its own laws speaking for the life of the planet. It is a language that wants to bring back together what the other words have torn apart. It is the language of life speaking through us about the sacredness of life."

"I think that in some ways maybe we've come to think of fiction as a lie. It's like the word “myth,” which means “lie” for many people; yet, myth is the highest form of truth. It is about the inner journey, about others before us who have gone that way and civilizations. It is about our life's task of becoming. In some ways I think fiction is like myth, but also fiction takes a fact or an event, even an imagined one, and it makes truth out of it. Prose is a process of uncovering, of getting to the bare, unstated facts of living. Maybe they are inner facts, maybe they are not historical, but they tell the highest truths."

"From the hills, the doings of town seemed distant and hazy to Belle. She fell into a new rhythm, more like the rhythm of earth, the cycles of night and day. (p 322)"

"All cruelty is needless. All fighting. Now do we need to build real estate in the Everglades or on migration lands or drill the earth? We have everything available to us for full, good lives, for peace. We must just simply step into it. Anyway, I just started thinking that being silent was in some way not being honest and that I did not want to be silent about the things that were very important and that our survival is very important. We've gone on-this progression is a very straight line progression into total destruction (Meridel Le Sueur says this also), and we're just on the border now. Like the earth is square again and we stand on her edge. I guess I feel, if I'm going to be killed and if my family is going to be killed, at least I don't want to go quietly. I want to feel as if I have done something and not just passively accepted it."

"(Do you see being mixed blood as a burden, or is it an advantage?) It depends on the day you ask me! It's a very difficult position to be in, but, on the other hand, it allows for a great amount of freedom. If you live on the boundaries between cultures, you are both of those cultures and neither of those cultures, and you can move with great mobility in any direction you want."

"...as you grow and develop, you betray your readers and you betray your own self. At each step, you're a different person with the new work, and that old person, while still there like the foundation I mentioned, is pushed further into the background. You can't remain true to your past and true to your readers and keep growing. Hopefully they will grow along with you."

""Right or wrong. For us, it is such a simple thing, only a matter of whether a wrong has been done, or someone harmed. But they have books filled with words, with rules about how the story can and cannot be spoken. There is not room enough, nor time, to search for the real story that lies beneath the rest." (p341)"

"They stared ahead, into another future. (p342)"

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

"I write because the poems speak what I can't say in my normal language. There's a kind of magic, an intuitive thing I feel when a poem or a story really works for me. It works on the deepest levels, all the levels of myself. Certainly, it works physically, and it also works psychologically, emotionally, and spiritually, and then the last priority for me is how it works intellectually…(you're saying that writing poetry or just creative writing is a heuristic device that brings about a different kind of understanding?) LH: It makes me change; it makes other people change. When you read something that is really put together well, something unresolved in the heart or psyche moves toward resolution and wholeness. It's magic."

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

"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)"

"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)"

""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)"

"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)"

"In tribal culture every person has their place and one who speaks more clearly with spirits than others is not a better person or is not in a higher position but simply performs one of many functions for the people. You and I have friends who do this daily and they make nothing of it. The woman who builds the fire is as important as the woman who guides the soul."

"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)"

"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)"

"We are here to rejoice with our full selves. We didn't come here to deprive ourselves. We aren't made for deprivation. We came here with work to do-balancing the forces-and with great capacities for love and joy to fulfill with/in our full selves."

"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)"

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

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

"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"

"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)"

"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."

"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?""

"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)"

"American people need to revise their ideas about spirituality. Spirituality ends up being very much like capitalism. It ends up being a force to control other people or to make yourself look good-to give yourself a position of power and integrity."

"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."

"we don't have to do anything special to have contact with the spirit world. It's just natural if you stop and listen. Just there, always. Like your own heartbeat."

"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."

"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"

"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."

"Beekeepers have a saying that honey begins with a drop of sugar, and misery starts with a mote of dust. (p 312)"

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

"being "traditional" means you have a great deal of responsibility. Rather than people cutting themselves off from white communities to be traditional, the more I think about it in my life the more I have thought that breaking down those barriers is much more important than building them up. Any kind of racism at this point is not good for any people. And to become anti-white is a mistake. It's self-destructive for those who do. Talk about a balance of things-talk about head and heart or head and soul-somehow I think that merging the two cultures in a really healthy way, not as done in the past, might be an integration in the way that we were talking about earlier. Indians have already begun that process. Years ago. Now I see white people integrating in that way. Mostly women at this point."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Blessed are they who listen when no one is left to speak."