N. Scott Momaday Quotes

I wonder if, in the dark night of the sea, the octopus dreams of me.

In the beginning was the word, and it was spoken.

Anything is bearable if you can make a story out of it.

A word has power in and of itself. It comes from nothing into sound and meaning; it gives origin to all things.

If you believe in the power of words, you can bring about physical changes in the universe.

I sometimes think the contemporary white American is more culturally deprived than the Indian.

Words were medicine; they were magic and invisible. They came from nothing into sound and meaning. They were beyond price; they could neither be bought nor sold.

Indians are marvelous storytellers. In some ways, that oral tradition is stronger than the written tradition.

It's a landscape that has to be seen to be believed. And, as I say on occasion, it may have to be believed in order to be seen.

For the storyteller, for the arrowmaker, language does indeed represent the only chance for survival.

The highest human purpose is always to reinvent and celebrate the sacred.

The first word gives origin to the second, the first and second to the third, and the third to the fourth, and so on. You cannot begin with the second word.

They have assumed the names and gestures of their enemies, but have held on to their own, secret souls; and in this there is a resistance and an overcoming, a long outwaiting.

Your imagination comes to life, and this, you think, is where Creation was begun.

My father was a painter and he taught art. He once said to me, 'I never knew an Indian child who could not draw.'

He used both hands when he made the bear. Imagine a bear proceeding from the hands of God.

The Kiowas reckoned their stature by the distance they could see.

I have a pretty good knowledge of the Indian world by virtue of living on several different reservations and being exposed to several different cultures and languages.

Her name is Ago, and she belonged to the last culture to evolve in North America.

The landscape of the American West has to be seen to believed and has to be believed to be seen.

To look upon that landscape in the early morning, with the sun at your back, is to lose the sense of proportion.

My line of vision was such that the creature filled the moon like a fossil. It had gone there, I thought, to live and die, for there, of all places, was its small definition made whole and eternal

Although my grandmother lived out her long life in the shadow of Rainy Mountian, the immense landscape of the continental interior lay like memory in her blood

Loneliness is an aspect of the land.

As far as I am concerned, poetry is a statement concerning the human condition, composed in verse.

Anything is bearable as long as you can make a story out of it...

Art is affirmation.