Writers

"I looked southward into the plain; there a caravan of covered wagons reached as far as the eye could see. These were the s... I had never seen such a pageant; it was as if the whole proud people, the Diné, had been concentrated into one endless migration. There was a great dignity to them... And when they set up camp in the streets, they were perfectly at home, their dogs about them. They made coffee and fried bread and roasted mutton on their open fires."

"In the winter dusk I heard coyotes barking away by the river, the sound of the drums in the , and the voice of the village crier, ringing at the rooftops."

"I came to know the land by going out upon it in all seasons... until it became the very element in which I lived my daily life."

"I had a horse named Pecos... Pecos could outrun all the other horses in the village, and he always wanted to prove it. ...My ancestors, who were s, should have been proud ..."

"Riding is an exercise of the mind. I dreamed a good deal on the back of my horse, going out into the hills alone."

"Bear and I are one... My Indian name is Tsoai-talee, which in Kiowa means "Rock-tree boy." Tsoai, "Rock-tree," is in Wyoming. That is where, long ago, a Kiowa boy turned into a bear and where his sisters were born into the sky and became the stars of the Big Dipper. Through the power of stories and names, I am the reincarnation of that boy. From the time the name Tsoai-talee was conferred onto me as an infant, I have been possessed of Bear's spirit. The Kiowas... believe that... Bear is the animal representation of the wilderness."

"Bear is an impractical visionary. His eyesight is weak, but he sees beyond the edge of the world, beyond time..."

"In western I was shown articles of the bear fest... In the presence of these things I felt their power. In their presence I understood something about Bear's transcendent spirit, how... Bear dances on the edge of life and death, crossing over and back again."

"Something in me hungers for wild mountains and rivers and plains. I love to be on Bear's ground... And Bear is welcome in my dreams, for in that cave of sleep I am at home to Bear."

"URSET I dream of berries... I dream of high meadows to which my kin come in the spring and summer when the wind is fragrant with buckwheat and camas and sweet roots are thick and tangled in the loam. ...lusty sows sauntering in the fields of flowers and of their cubs at play. ...clouds gathering at the summits and of rain descending in curtains on the dawn. ...hawks casting the shadows of their flight upon sunlit steeps. I dream of the moon riding and of leaves quaking on pale, speckled limbs, and darkness rising like water to the moon."

"YAHWEH A story in which there is not the realization of grace is but a shadow, a shell, a thing without substance. Grace is the substance of story, albeit invisible and remote. Grace is the soul of story. ...Or perhaps a mask behind which there is no presence. ...only silence, a perfect stillness."

"YAHWEH [Poetry] is the highest of all languages... higher even than mathematics. It is on a plane with music."

"YAHWEH Poor Man, he had been trying so hard to talk, for such a long time. Then the children went out and played together. At the end of the day they had possession of language."

"YAHWEH Nothing will come of [evolution], as it has come from nothing."

"Glen "Pop" Warner... has distinguished himself as a model of a successful coach... an eminent leader of men. ...He can take an ordinary team and make it extraordinary. In his team he has exceptional talent... And he has in arguably the greatest athlete of the twentieth century. But... his Indians have no "killer" instinct. They care more for honor and bravery than for winning. ...[A]n old man in the corner of the room ...listens ...This is ."

"Exterior. Football field. Late afternoon. The game is over. CARLISLE 27. ARMY 6. The players of both teams—dirty, bloody, exhausted—mingle, shaking hands on their way to the locker rooms. Dwight Eisenhower, limping badly, makes a great effort to intercept . He extends his hand and seems to want to say something but doesn't. His silence is pure tribute. Thorpe takes his hand, regards him for a moment."

"I believe that I fashion my own life out of words and images, and that's how I get by. If I didn't do those things, I think that I would find my existence a problem of some sort. Writing, giving expression to my spirit and to my mind, that's a way of surviving, of ordering one's life. That's a way of living, of making life acceptable to oneself. (1981)"

"I believe in a supremacy of the imagination. And I believe that fiction is a superior kind of reality. What we imagine is the best of us. (1981)"

"Favorite writers? Herman Melville. Norman McClain, Emily Dickinson, and Wallace Stevens. (1982)"

"Myth is at the beginning and ending of all story, of all literature. (1990)"

"I wouldn't be writing now if Momaday hadn't done that book. I would have died. (JB: What did it do for you?) ALLEN: It told me that I was sane-or if I was crazy at least fifty thousand people out there were just as nutty in exactly the same way I was, so it was okay. I was not all alone. It did that and it brought my land back to me."

"The voice with which he greeted me was warm and deep, and the words spoken in a way which gave weight to every syllable. It was a voice which one might expect from a man who wrote and continues to write of the magical nature and power of language."

"The authors who really touched my heart, of course, are authors like Vine Deloria and Scott Momaday...I mean, I've never read a novel as compelling as House Made of Dawn......there's not a word, a phrase that he can use that doesn't just haunt me. That includes much of his prose."

"House Made of Dawn borrows its title from a healing ceremony centuries old. The novel tells of a young Jemez Indian named Abel from the Pueblo where Momaday grew up, the age of twelve through high school. Its prose rhythms, complex narrative points-of-view, and flashbacks assimilate experimental techniques in modern fiction and New World romantic themes. ...Abel's dislocations as a contemporary Indian fracture a voice that searches for consciousness. His ancestors were exiled from the plains by plague and taken in at Jemez. ...Abel was kidnapped from his grandfather and put into a government boarding school, drafted into a world war, and sentence to prison for ritual homicide, then relocated in the urban ghetto of Los Angeles. Past, present, and future—Indian life as-it-was, then estranged among whites, followed by a prolonged return—disjoint the narrative. School, war, prison, and the city are white institutions where the martyred son of the earth, the biblical , lives through the Indian nightmare of a machine come into the garden."

"Once into the novel... a perceptive reader may begin to realize that sophistication in House Made of Dawn is of a different order from that in canonized texts. It is a sophistication of "otherness," a discourse requiring that readers pass through an "alien conceptual horizon" and engage a "reality" unfamiliar... What has matured with Momaday is not merely an undeniable facility with techniques and tropes of modernism, but... the profound awareness of conflicting epistemologies... With Momaday the American Indian novel shows its ability to appropriate the discourse of the privileged center and make it "bear the burden" of an "other" world-view. Momaday's novel represents more fully than any Native American novel before it the "assertion of a different perspective.""

"if Indians are left out of every other class on the university campus, even where they are pertinent-for example, leaving Scott Momaday out of a class on twentieth-century American literature, something like that somewhere else there has to be a balance. There has to be someone somewhere else who is going to emphasize Scott Momaday to the exclusion of the ones who are emphasized in the other class. I hope that at some point that will become balanced. I hope that pretty soon an American literature class will just automatically include someone like Scott Momaday-and some of the other people: Charles Eastman, you know, the other writers in our history."

"The new images of the Indian in the public mind have emerged as a result of primitivistic longings in a society whose trust in limitless technological advance and a purely scientific, materialistic view of the natural environment is no longer secure. The Indian as keeper of mystical knowledge or as natural ecologist is an updated version of earlier images which reveals more about the state of the dominant society than about contemporary Indians. Ironically, Momaday himself has come close to falling victim to the temptation of image making in his contributions to the Indian-as-ecologist debate. This shows that Indians are not immune to adopting images created by mainstream American culture. On the whole, however, Momaday's work depicts the worlds of American Indians objectively and without racial bias."

"N. Scott Momaday has made himself readily available for interviews throughout his career. Among the recurrent issues raised in these conversations are Momaday's multi-ethnic experience, his view of the Indian's place in American society, his synthesis of native oral traditions and the Western literary canon, his concern for ecology and conservation, his theories of language and the imagination, the influences on his academic and artistic development, his work as a teacher and painter, and, of course, his own comments on specific works. Momaday's responses to queries on these topics are remarkably consistent."

"I have seen him gradually comprehending, accepting, and even asserting his Indianness. Actually, of course, his Indianness is as much assumed as inborn."

"Writers collect things. We read magazines, we ride buses and eavesdrop on other people's conversations, we stop and read posters on telephone poles, we examine soup cans and old clothing stores and babies and pets and sewer covers and weather reports. We delve into ancient history, old gossip, rumors, hints of rumors, maps, brochures, irrelevant details, bad advice, good omens, lucky stars, and things that are nobody's business. In short, we are called to be witnesses. Things may happen, but unless someone takes note of it, it might not matter."

"Smooth verse, inspired by no unlettered Muse."

"So must the writer, whose productions should Take with the vulgar, be of vulgar mould."

"What the devil does the plot signify, except to bring in fine things?"

"Ah, ye knights of the pen! May honour be your shield, and truth tip your lances ! Be gentle to all gentle people. Be modest to women. Be tender to children. And as for the Ogre Humbug, out sword, and have at him!"

"The great and good do not die even in this world. Embalmed in books, their spirits walk abroad. The book is a living voice. It is an intellect to which one still listens."

"Look in thy heart and write."

"Of all those arts in which the wise excel, Nature's chief masterpiece is writing well."

"Write till your ink be dry, and with your tears Moist it again, and frame some feeling line That may discover such integrity."

"Devise, wit; write, pen; for I am for whole volumes in folio."

"Lis ont les textes pour eux, mais j'en suis fache pour les textes."

"As though I lived to write, and wrote to live."

"'Tis not how well an author says, But 'tis how much, that gathers praise."

"Let him be kept from paper, pen, and ink; So may he cease to write, and learn to think."

"Whether the darken'd room to muse invite, Or whiten'd wall provoke the skew'r to write; In durance, exile, Bedlam, or the Mint, Like Lee or Budgel I will rhyme and print."

"E'en copious Dryden wanted, or forgot, The last and greatest art—the art to blot."

"Why did I write? what sin to me unknown Dipt me in ink, my parents', or my own? As yet a child, nor yet a fool to fame, I lisp'd in numbers, for the numbers came."

"Scriptaferuntannos; scriptis Agamemnona nosti, Et quisquis contra vel simul arma tulit."

"Prsebet mihi littera linguam: Et, si non liceat scribere, mutus ero."

"To write upon all is an author's sole chance For attaining, at last, the least knowledge of any."

"The ink of the scholar is more sacred than the blood of the martyr."