57 Quotes by N. Scott Momaday

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

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

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

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.

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

The character of the landscape changes from hour to hour, day to day, season to season. Nothing of the earth can be taken for granted; you feel that Creation is going on in your sight. You see things in the high air that you do not see farther down in the lowlands. In the high country all objects bear upon you, and you touch hard upon the earth. From my home I can see the huge, billowing clouds; they draw close upon me and merge with my life.

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.

Once in his life a man ought to concentrate his mind upon the remembered earth. He ought to give himself up to a particular landscape in his experience; to look at it from as many angles as he can, to wonder upon it, and dwell upon it.

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