57 Quotes by N. Scott Momaday

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.

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

Sill. Their horses and weapons were confiscated, and they were imprisoned. In a field just.

We perceive existence by means of words and names. To this or that vague, potential thing I will give a name, and it will exist thereafter, and its existence will be clearly perceived. The name enables me to see it. I can call it by its name, and I can see it for what it is.

She was not listening at the level of language but beneath it, in the deep recesses of the imagination.

And the simple act of listening is crucial to the concept of language, more crucial even than reading and writing, and language in turn is crucial to human society.

How many lifeless things are placed each day between us and the living earth? A friend in Brooklyn told me that his little son had gone out to watch workmen breaking up a sidewalk. He was fascinated to see earth under the cement. He had never seen it before.

There is no love without loss. I hear the drums that vibrate to the heartbeat of the earth. They set me dancing. I see the clouds that wreathe the summits. They set me dreaming. I know the wonder of waves that shake the headlands. They awaken my soul. I hear the screams of eagles on the wind. And I ponder, what are these things to me who loves and does not reckon loss? Do I not keep the earth?