41 Quotes by Tony Hillerman

I’m getting to be like a white man,” she said. “I’m getting in a hurry for you to tell me what this is all about.

The highest praise a writer can give another is to say he wishes he had written his book. I wish I had written Forty Words for Sorrow. Giles Blunt has a tremendous talent. If you miss Forty Words for Sorrow, you’ll miss one of best novels of 2001.

A Yellow Raft on Blue Water. He’d left it opened to page 158. A hard place to stop.

Thoughts, and words that spring from them, bend the individual’s reality. To speak of death is to invite it. To think of sorrow is to produce it.

Leaphorn didn’t comment. It was the decision he would have made. Handle it on Navajo time. No reason to rush in there.

Terrible drought, crops dead, sheep dying. Spring dried up. No water. The Hopi, and the Christian, maybe the Moslem, they pray for rain. The Navajo has the proper ceremony done to restore himself to harmony with the drought. You see what I mean. The system is designed to recognize what’s beyond human power to change, and then to change the human’s attitude to be content with the inevitable.” – Tony Hillerman, Sacred Clowns, 1993.

I hear you’re a medicine man. I heard you are a singer of the Blessing Way. Is that right?” Chee looked slightly stubborn. “Yes sir,” he said. “I would like to ask you to sing one for me,” Leaphorn said.

Having grown up in Oklahoma when it was one of the last states which prohibited liquor, I grew up with War On Drugs, where every teenager knew who the bootleggers were.

Don’t think a man don’t care about one goat because he’s got a thousand of ’em,” Hosteen Nakai would say. “He’s got a thousand because he cares more about goats than he cares about his relatives.