Poets From The United States

"...Then they grow away from the earth then they grow away from the sun then they grow away from the plants and the animals. They see no life When they look they see only objects. The world is a dead thing for them the trees and the rivers are not alive. the mountains and stones are not alive. The deer and bear are objects They see no life. They fear They fear the world. They destroy what they fear. They fear themselves..."

"...But he had known the answer all along, even while the white doctors were telling him he could get well and he was trying to believe them: medicine didn't work that way, because the world didn't work that way. His sickness was only part of something larger, and his cure would be found only in something great and inclusive of everything. (p116)"

"But the effects were hidden, evident only in the sterility of their art, which continued to feed off the vitality of other cultures, and in the dissolution of their consciousness into dead objects: the plastic and neon, the concrete and steel. Hollow and lifeless as a witchery clay figure. And what little still remained to white people was shriveled like a seed hoarded too long, shrunken past its time, and split open now, to expose a fragile, pale leaf stem, perfectly formed and dead. (p190)"

"...how easy it was to stay alive now that he didn't care about being alive anymore. (p36)"

"It took only one person to tear away the delicate strands of the web, spilling the rays of sun into the sand, and the fragile world would be injured. (p35)"

"...an old white woman rolled down the window and said, ‘God bless you, God bless you,’ but it was the uniform, not them, she blessed. (p38)"

"[He] said that only humans had to endure anything, because only humans resisted what they saw outside themselves. Animals did not resist. But they persisted, because they became part of the wind. (p24)"

"That was the responsibility that went with being human, old Ku’oosh said, the story behind each word must be told so there could be no mistake in the meaning of what had been said; and this demanded great patience and love. (p33)"

"“They are afraid, Tayo. They feel something happening, they can see something happening around them, and it scares them. Indians or Mexicans or whites—most people are afraid of change. They think that if their children have the same color of skin, the same color of eyes, that nothing is changing.” She laughed softly. “They are fools. They blame us, the ones who look different. That way they don’t have to think about what has happened inside themselves.” (p92)"

"He could feel it inside his skull—the tension of little threads being pulled and how it was with tangled things, things tied together, and as he tried to pull them apart and rewind them into their places, they snagged and tangled even more. (p6)"

"Ceremony I will tell you something about stories, [he said] They aren’t just entertainment. Don’t be fooled. They are all we have, you see, all we have to fight off illness and death. You don’t have anything if you don’t have the stories. Their evil is mighty but it can’t stand up to our stories. So they try to destroy the stories let the stories be confused or forgotten. They would like that They would be happy Because we would be defenseless then. He rubbed his belly. I keep it in here [he said] Here, put your hand on it See, It is moving. There is life here for the people. And in the belly of this story the rituals and the ceremony are still growing."

"He made a story for all of them, a story to give them strength. The words of the story poured out of his mouth as if they had substance, pebbles and stone extending to hold the corporal up, to keep his knees from buckling, to keep his hands from letting go of the blanket. (p10)"

"There was something about the way the old man said the word "comfortable." It had a different meaning--not the comfort of big houses or rich food or even clean streets, but the comfort of belonging with the land, and the peace of being with these hills. (p108)"

"Distances and days existed in themselves then; they all had a story. They were not barriers. If a person wanted to get to the moon, there was a way; it all depended on whether you knew the directions-exactly which way to go and what to do to get there; it depended on whether you knew the story of how others before you had gone. (p17)"

"The breaking and crushing were gone, and the love pushed inside his chest, and when he cried now, it was because she loved him so much. (p211)"

"Earth was their mother, but her land and water could never be desecrated; blasted open and polluted by man, but never desecrated. Man only desecrated himself in such acts; puny humans could not affect the integrity of Earth. Earth always was and would ever be sacred. Mother Earth might be ravaged by the Destroyers, but she still loved the people. (Part Five, Book One: The Foes)"

"Yoeme said even idiots can understand a church that tortures and kills is a church that can no longer heal; thus the Europeans had arrived in the New World in precarious spiritual health. Christianity might work on other continents and with other human beings; Yoeme did not dispute those possibilities. But from the beginning in the Americas, the outsiders had sensed their Christianity was somehow inadequate in the face of the immensely powerful and splendid spirit beings who inhabited the vastness of the Americas. The Europeans had not been able to sleep soundly on the American continents, not even with a full military guard. (Part Six, Book One: Prophecy)"

"In the Americas the white man never referred to the past but only to the future. The white man didn’t seem to understand he had no future here because he had no past, no spirits of ancestors here. (Part Two, Book Two: Reign of Fire-Eye Macaw)"

"The powers who controlled the United States didn't want the people to know their history. If the people knew their history, they would realize they must rise up. (Part Three, Book Two: Arizona)"

"This book is dedicated to the storytellers as far back as memory goes and to the telling which continues and through which they all live and we with them."

"The white man had violated the Mother Earth, and he had been stricken with the sensation of a gaping emptiness between his throat and his heart. (Part One, Book Five: The Border)"

"the material world and the flesh are only temporary - there are no sins of the flesh, spirit is everything! (page 450)"

"Sacred time is always in the Present. (Part One, Book Five: The Border)"

"The ancestors had called Europeans “the orphan people” and had noted that as with orphans taken in by selfish or coldhearted clanspeople, few Europeans had remained whole. They failed to recognize the earth was their mother. Europeans were like their first parents, Adam and Eve, wandering aimlessly because the insane God who had sired them had abandoned them. (Part Two, Book One: Reign of Death-Eye Dog)"

"Money! You couldn't drink it or eat it, but people went crazy over it. (Part 9, p398)"

"She was an old woman now, and her life had become memories. (beginning of "Lullaby")"

"It is fashionable to suggest that cyberspace is some kind of _island of the blessed_ where people are free to indulge and express their Individuality...this is not true....i have seen many people spill their guts on-line, and i did so myself until...i began to see that i had commodified myself. commodification means that you turn something into a product which has a money-value. in the nineteenth century, commodities were made in factories...by workers who were mostly exploited....i created my interior thoughts as a means of production for the corporation that owned the board i was posting to...and that commodity was being sold to other commodity/consumer entities as entertainment... [Cyberspace] is a black hole. It absorbs energy and personality and then re-presents it as an emotional spectacle."

"So-called electronic communities encourage participation in fragmented, mostly silent, micro-groups who are primarily engaged in dialogues of self-congratulation. In other words, most people lurk; and the ones that post are pleased with themselves."

""Anybody can act violently - there is nothing to it; but not every person is able to destroy his enemy with words." (p222)"

"We are told we should love only the good and the beautiful, and these are defined for us so narrowly. Monday I will be 31. Maybe it has taken me this long to discover that we are liable to love anything-like characters in old Greek stories who set eyes on an oak tree or a bucket and fall in love hopelessly, there are no limits to our love."

"Sister Salt called her to come outside. The rain smelled heavenly. All over the sand dunes, datura blossoms round and white as moons breathed their fragrance of magic. (beginning of Part One)"

"The story was the important thing and little changes here and there were really part of the story. There were even stories about the different versions of stories and how they imagined the differing versions came to be. (p227)"

"I was born in Judaism, and have adhered to it through all my erratic career. Through that pure and simple religion I have found greatest comfort and blessing."

"She is a sensitive poet who, unfortunately, cannot write."

"While gazing at myself from yourself, I was beautiful."

"From one bell all the bells toll."

"Through everything I have passed but nowhere I have been."

"What you gain here, you lose on the other side."

"In the biggest and the smallest I sleep but at the same place I stay."

"Mathematics doesn’t care about those beyond the numbers."

"I lose faith in mathematics, logical and rigid. What with those that even zero doesn’t accept?"

"Long ago we conquered our passions Looking at ourselves in the mirror of eternity."

"Wherever I go, I run into myself."

"If I would really start talking, you would become silent."

"My mathematics is simple: one plus one = one."

"With me: one minus one = one; with you: it’s zero. Here lies the only difference."

"In a myriad of ways you tell one truth."

"I don’t know if you are me or I am neither I nor you."

"Long ago an uncalled rain fell And a called-upon God stayed equally distant."

"He will understand when it is too late that it is easier to love."