People From Albuquerque

"From Leslie Silko we hear, perhaps for the first time, the voice of contemporary Indian America rising above dull anthropological reports"

"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)"

"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)"

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

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

"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."

"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)"

"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)"

"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 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)"

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

"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)"

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

"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)"

"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."

"(There is an ongoing debate in the literary world regarding writers who attempt to write from a different cultural, racial perspective than their own. What are your thoughts on this?) LMS: That's been going on for hundreds of years. There are two thoughts I have on this. If this were the best of all possible worlds, which it isn't, then publishing wouldn't concern itself with pigeonholing and marketing to certain groups. There would be a level playing ground. Everyone would have the same chance of getting a novel published. If our education system would include education on different cultures and groups of people who are a part of the United States, you wouldn't have this. When people get excluded, that's when you have this sort of fragmentation and things being broken down into categories. It's a political problem. If there were many books by Pueblo people out there, for example, then we could say, "Let that guy publish that book on Pueblo culture or oral literature," because there's all these other books by Pueblo writers or people from that community that are out there so that there's an opportunity for people to see the difference between someone who's just pretending, someone who is trying to wrap themselves in the mantle of a culture, versus someone who is actually from there. The problem is in this country is that you have this political machine in the arts that suppresses Indian writers to take power away from the people. They have continued to publish books about Indians by non-Indians for political reasons. Non-Indians, generally, even if they've tried to be very sympathetic, can't help but replicate a worldview that is sympathetic to the political ends of the power structure. Yet you can't limit the freedom of the artist. We can't say, "You can't use your imagination." It's extremely difficult for a person to imagine themselves in the shoes, life and culture of someone else, but let's not put any limitations on what possibly could happen. We can't limit human beings and the human imagination. The reason there is so much strong feeling about, let's say, non-Indian writers writing about non-Indian subjects is because good Indian writers don't get published and bad white writers do. That's the problem. It's getting to the point, though, where there's enough good writing out there and there's gradually becoming more knowledge of Indian culture. Readers can now pick up a book by a non-Indian with a bad imagination and say, "This is crap." As long as certain communities are marginalized, it's a political act against them to allow a stranger to portray them. It's a part of suppression. Once there's an opening up and a political equality, a political power given to marginalized people, then it won't matter. I think we’re gradually getting enough good Indian writers out there that only the most brilliant imaginings by non-Indians of what it would be to be part of some other culture would get published. One example of such a work is a collection of poetry entitled Crazy Horse in Stillness by William Heyen. (2015)"

"The writer's life is a constant battle to balance your responsibility to your writing with your responsibilities to the everyday world, meaning people, your pets, your landlord, whatever. There's that constant pull of the world, which is opposed to the need to clear out a kind of psychic space with plenty of time and no interruptions. Time to think and gradually to descend into the area where you have to work. In a way it's like working underground. It's not easy to get down there and it's not easy to get back. You can never reach that perfect balance. You always feel that one part or the other is not getting enough time. (2015)"

"What I would tell young writers is to put the focus on the work. You have to live doing it. You can't think that it's going to make you money; you can't think that it's even going to support you. You can't think like that because what you'll end up having to do is sacrifice your own ideas to fall in line with what they want you to do. (2015)"

"The morning of the funeral an honor guard from Albuquerque fired the salute; two big flags covered the coffins completely, and it looked as if the people from the village had gathered only to bury the flags. (p240)"

"He cried the relief he felt at finally seeing the pattern, the way all the stories fit together—the old stories, the war stories, their stories—to become the story that was still being told. He was not crazy; he had never been crazy. He had only seen and heard the world as it always was: no boundaries, only transitions through all distances and time. (p229)"

""...as long as you remember what you have seen, then nothing is gone. As long as you remember, it is part of this story we have together." (p215)"

"Only destruction is capable of arousing a sensation, the remains of something alive in them; and each time they do it, the scar thickens, and they feel less and less, yet still hungering for more. (p213)"

"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)"

"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)"

"The people had been taught to despise themselves because they were left with barren land and dry rivers. But they were wrong. It was the white people who had nothing; it was the white people who were suffering as thieves do, never able to forget that their pride was wrapped in something stolen, something that had never been, and could never be, theirs. The destroyers had tricked the white people as completely as they had fooled the Indians, and now only a few people understood how the filthy deception worked; only a few people knew that the lie was destroying the white people faster than it was destroying Indian people. 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. (p189)"

"If the white people never looked beyond the lie, to see that theirs was a nation built on stolen land, then they would never be able to understand how they had been used by the witchery; they would never know that they were still being manipulated by those who knew how to stir the ingredients together: white thievery and injustice boiling up the anger and hatred that would finally destroy the world: the starving against the fat, the colored against the white. The destroyers had only to set it into motion, and sit back to count the casualties. But it was more than a body count; the lies devoured white hearts, and for more than two hundred years white people had worked to fill their emptiness; they tried to glut the hollowness with patriotic wars and with great technology and the wealth it brought. And always they had been fooling themselves, and they knew it. (p178)"

"...feeling the instant of the dawn was an event which in a single moment gathered all things together—the last stars, the mountaintops, the clouds, and the winds—celebrating this coming. The power of each day spilled over the hills in great silence. Sunrise. (p169)"

"Being alive was all right then: he had not breathed like that for a long time. (p168)"

"He crawled deeper into the black gauzy web where he could rest in the silence, where his coming and going through this world was no more than a star falling across the night sky. He left behind the pain and buzzing in his head; they were shut out by the wide dark distance. (p154)"

"...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..."

"...as I tell the story it will begin to happen..."

"the fact that people get twisted cuts across lines of skin color and culture. It has to do with who buys that authoritarianism."

"...humor is sacred. Laughing is sacred. The world would become sterile and cold and die if there wasn't the clowning and the joking and the laughter. And that in order to have a perfect balance or harmony you have to have humor."

"This is my 763-page indictment for five hundred years of theft, murder, pillage, and rape. So is Almanac long? Sure, but federal indictments are long...And mine is a little more interesting reading than a straight-on legal indictment."

"When you grow up and look around you every day and say, "Oh, there is stolen property. It was ours and it was stolen," you're not nearly as quick to swallow the kinds of rationales that everybody else accepts. That's one of the tragedies of the United States - a sort of collective amnesia about the past"

"What can you do when you're writing about five hundred years and it just happens to be five hundred years of slaughter, slaughter, slaughter? What do you do when that's your task, and all these other people before you have cleaned it up, and you're the one that has to come and say, "No, the priests didn't come for God, glory, and then gold. The Church came here for money"?"

"At some point when you're writing a novel, the characters really are more interesting and exciting than living people. That's one of the reasons people read novels. It's almost like you become seduced by your own making, except that I know damn well that even though I imagine so much, especially in Almanac, that it's not something completely separate from all of the past and all past stories and things I've heard."

"It’s a matter of transitions, you see; the changing, the becoming must be cared for closely. You would do as much for the seedlings as they become plants in the field. (p120)"

""She taught me this above all else: things which don't shift and grow are dead things. They are things the witchery people want. Witchery works to scare people, to make them fear growth. But it has always been necessary, and more than ever now, it is. Otherwise we won't make it. We won't survive..." (p116)"

"...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)"

"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)"

"“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)"

"...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)"

"...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)"

"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)"

"[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)"

"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)"

"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)"