Women Authors From The United States

"It’s as if everything breathes, hard and desperate, the land, the house, the water. The wind is a living force. We Taiga call the wind Oni. It enters us all at birth and stays with us all through life. It connects us to every other creature."

"it is only recently, in earth time, that the severing of the connections between people and land have taken place. Something in our human blood is still searching for it, still listening, still remembering. ("Creations" p83)"

"There is no real aloneness. There is solitude and the nurturing silence that is relationship with ourselves, but even then we are part of something larger. ("All My Relations" p41)"

"We are looking for a tongue that speaks with reverence for life, searching for an ecology of mind. Without it, we have no home, no place of our own within the creation. It is not only the vocabulary of science we desire. We want a language of that different yield. A yield rich as the harvests of the earth, a yield that returns us to our own sacredness, to a self-love and resort that will carry out to others. ("A Different Yield" p60)"

"What a strange alchemy we have worked, turning earth around to destroy itself, using earth's own elements to wound it. ("Deify the Wolf" p66)"

"I know this telling is the first part of the ceremony, my part in it. It is story, really, that finds its way into language, and story is at the very crux of healing, at the heart of every ceremony and ritual in the older America. ("All My Relations" p37)"

"I write out of respect for the natural world, recognizing that humankind is not separate from nature. Some of this work connects the small world of humans with the larger universe, containing us in the same way that native ceremonies do, showing us both our place and a way of seeing. (Preface)"

"A bird killed in the name of human power is in truth a loss of power from the world, not an addition to it. ("The Feathers" p15)"

"To walk on this earth is to walk on a living past, on the open pages of history and geology. ("Creations" p79)"

"Can we love what will swallow us when we are gone? I do. I love what will consume us all, the place where the tunneling worms and roots of plants dwell, where the slow deep centuries of earth are undoing and remaking themselves. ("The Caves" p30)"

"bacteria and enzymes grow new life from decay out of darkness and water. It’s into this that I want to fall, into swamp and mud and sludge, and it seems like falling is the natural way of things; gravity needs no fuel, no wings. It needs only stillness and waiting and time. (p95)"

"We Indian people who had inhabited the land had not been meant to survive and yet we did, some of us, carrying the souls of our ancestors, and now they speak through us. It was this that saved my life. (p49)"

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

"…She is a woman who lives in the body and that is very difficult to achieve in a civilized society where the mind overpowers it, keeps us out of touch. We do not find ourselves whole so much of the time. And again, it is a cultural gulf, but most of us here in America, even those of us I work with, are more involved with our work than with being conscious of our whole body self throughout the day. (2012)"

"Emptiness and estrangement are deep wounds, strongly felt in the present time. We have been split from what we could nurture, what could fill us. And we have been wounded by a dominating culture that has feared and hated the natural world, has not listened to the voice of the land, has not believed in the inner worlds of human dreaming and intuition, all things that have guided indigenous people since time stood up in the east and walked this world into existence, split from the connection between self and land. ("Creations" p82)"

"Decisions are made in a person's life by small moments of knowing, each moment opening until, like pieces of a quilt, one day everything comes together in a precise, clear knowing. It enters the present, as if it had come all of a piece. It was in this year that I began to understand who I was. Every piece of myself was together anew, a shifted pattern. For my people, the problem has always been this: that the only possibility of survival has been resistance. Not to strike back has meant certain loss and death. To strike back has also meant loss and death, only with a fighting chance. To fight has meant that we can respect ourselves, we Beautiful People. Now we believed in ourselves once again. The old songs were there, come back to us. Sometimes I think the ghost dancers were right, that we would return, that we are still returning. Even now. (p325)"

"There are such cruel tricks I have wondered about in nature, the way a whale must surface to breathe in the presence of its waiting killers, the way the white tails of deer and rabbit are so easily seen as they run from danger. There is something, too, in some human beings that wants to die, that drives us to our own destruction. There is something that makes us pretend to be less than we are, less than the other creatures with their grace and dignity. Perhaps it is this that makes us bow down to an angry god when we might better have knelt at the altar of our own love. (p344)"

"It has been my lifelong work to seek an understanding of the two views of the world, one as seen by native people and the other as seen by those who are new and young on this continent. It is clear that we have strayed from the treaties we once had with the land and with the animals. It is also clear, and heartening, that in our time there are many-Indian and non-Indian alike-who want to restore and honor these broken agreements. (Preface)"

"At the first light of morning I sat up in bed. The storm by then was dark green and there was still a rhythmic song of falling water, but a larger noise was behind the rain, a great disturbance of air. I went to the window and looked up. In the first spread of light above us was a cloud, a great cloud of flesh and feather so thick the sky itself appeared to be moving as the wings of tundra swans clattered together, as they pulled themselves south. Their voices seemed to wake the land itself, which at that moment lived only for the great, beautiful birds, the sky full and moving. I wasn't dreaming. I had no need to dream. This world I'd entered, however (chapter four p78)"

""Your mother was a door...Always closed. But sometimes I thought she was a window, instead, because through her I glimpsed scenes of suffering." Even young, I understood this in a way. I understood already from what the women said that my mother was stairs with no destination. She was a burning house, feeding on the air of others. She had no more foundation, no struts, no beams. Always, a person would think she was one step away from collapsing. But she remained standing."

"Change was in the air. It was palpable, a strong presence in the room. (chapter three, p51)"

"From my many grandmothers, I learned how I came from a circle of courageous women and strong men who had walls pulled down straight in front of them until the circle closed, the way rabbits are hunted in a narrowing circle, but some lived, some survived this narrowing circle of life. (chapter seven, p107)"

"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."

"I was seventeen when I returned to Adam's Rib on Tinselman's Ferry. It was the north country, the place where water was broken apart by land, land split open by water so that the maps showed places both bound and, if you knew the way in, boundless. The elders said it was where land and water had joined together in an ancient pact, now broken. The waterways on which I arrived had a history. They had been crossed by many before me..."

"I looked down, embarrassed, but she said only, "Some people see scars and it is wounding they remember. To me they are proof of the fact that there is healing." (p125)"

"Something must hold me this way, and you, and the thin blue tail of the galaxy, to keep us from leaving as life unfolds behind us over long roads and intricate, human waters."

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

"writing has changed me. And there is the powerful need we all have to tell a story, each of us with a piece of the whole pattern to complete. As Alice Walker says, We are all telling part of the same story, and as Sharon Olds has said, Every writer is a cell on the body politic of America."

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

"Writing begins for me with survival, with life and with freeing life, saving life, speaking life. It is work that speaks what can't be easily said. It originates from a compelling desire to live and be alive. For me, it is sometimes the need to speak for other forms of life, to take the side of human life, even our sometimes frivolous living, and our grief-filled living, our joyous living, our violent living, busy living, our peaceful living. It is about possibility. It is based in the world of matter. I am interested in how something small turns into an image that is large and strong with resonance, where the ordinary becomes beautiful. I believe the divine, the magic, is here in the weeds at our feet, unacknowledged. What a world this is. Where else could water rise up to the sky, turn into snow crystals, magnificently brought together, fall from the sky all around us, pile up billions deep, and catch the small sparks of sunlight as they return again to water?"

"This is what I know from science: that a grain of dust dwells at the center of every flake of snow, that ice can have its way with land, that wolves live inside a circle of their own beginning. This is what I know from blood: the first language is not our own."

"What I liked was that land refused to be shaped by the makers of maps. Land had its own will. The cartographers thought if they mapped it, everything would remain the same, but it didn't, and I respected it for that. Change was the one thing not accounted for. (p123)"

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

"I only knew that I and my many mothers had been lost in sky, water, and the galaxy, as we rested on a planet so small it was invisible to the turnings of other worlds. (p179)"

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

"Sometimes now I hear the voice of my great-grandmother, Agnes. It floats toward me like a soft breeze through an open window. (beginning of Prologue)"

"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)"

"Worlds are made of lies and dreams (p 200)"

"I was told Ammah was a silent god and rarely spoke. The reason for this was that all things--birdsongs, the moon, even my own life--grow from rich and splendid silence. (p265)"

"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)"

""Why are only white laws followed? This will kill the world. What is the law if not the earth's?" (p283)"

"But I could see right away that this lost him points in the white men's book. Tenderness was not a quality of strength to them. It was unmanly, an act they considered soft and unworthy. (p281)"

"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."

"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 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."

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