Top 44 N. Scott Momaday Quotes
#1. Indians are marvelous storytellers. In some ways, that oral tradition is stronger than the written tradition.
N. Scott Momaday
#2. If you believe in the power of words, you can bring about physical changes in the universe.
N. Scott Momaday
#3. I am a member of the Kiowa Gourd Dance Society; I visit sacred places such as Devil's Tower and the Medicine Wheel. These places are important to me, because they've been made sacred by sacrifice, by the investment of blood and experience and story.
N. Scott Momaday
#4. Sometimes, I think the best kind of poem is one in which there is an acute balance between what is humorous and that which is very serious. That balance is very hard to strike. But it can be done.
N. Scott Momaday
#5. The events of one's life take place, take place. How often have I used this expression, and how often have I stopped to think about what it means? Events do indeed take place, they have meaning in relation to things around them.
N. Scott Momaday
#6. Once in his life a man ought to concentrate his mind upon the remembered earth, I believe. 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 about it, to dwell upon it.
N. Scott Momaday
#7. Her name is Ago, and she belonged to the last culture to evolve in North America.
N. Scott Momaday
#8. It's a matter of honor, death. It's your white page, do you see? Or your shame. Either you're worthy of it or you ain't. To accept it, to face it with honor and respect and goodwill, to earn it, that is to be brave.
N. Scott Momaday
#9. I sometimes think the contemporary white American is more culturally deprived than the Indian.
N. Scott Momaday
#10. Writing is not a matter of choice. Writers have to write. It is somehow in their temperament, in the blood, in tradition.
N. Scott Momaday
#11. 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.
N. Scott Momaday
#12. I wonder if, in the dark night of the sea, the octopus dreams of me.
N. Scott Momaday
#14. Sill. Their horses and weapons were confiscated, and they were imprisoned. In a field just
N. Scott Momaday
#15. The highest human purpose is always to reinvent and celebrate the sacred.
N. Scott Momaday
#16. He used both hands when he made the bear. Imagine a bear proceeding from the hands of God.
N. Scott Momaday
#18. We are what we imagine. Our very existence consists in our imagination of ourselves. Our best destiny is to imagine, at least, completely, who and what, and that we are. The greatest tragedy that can befall us is to go unimagined.
N. Scott Momaday
#19. It is here that I can concentrate my mind upon the Remembered Earth. It is here that I am most conscious of being, here that wonder comes upon my blood, here I want to live forever; and it is no matter that I must die.
N. Scott Momaday
#20. The spiritual reality of the Indian world is very evident, very highly developed. I think it affects the life of every Indian person in one way or another.
N. Scott Momaday
#21. A word has power in and of itself. It comes from nothing into sound and meaning; it gives origin to all things.
N. Scott Momaday
#22. 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.
N. Scott Momaday
#24. The Kiowas reckoned their stature by the distance they could see.
N. Scott Momaday
#27. 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
N. Scott Momaday
#28. 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.
N. Scott Momaday
#29. 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.
N. Scott Momaday
#30. You see, I am alive, I am alive
I stand in good relation to the earth
I stand in good relation to the gods
I stand in good relation to all that is beautiful
I stand in good relation to the daughter of Tsen-tainte
You see, I am alive, I am alive
N. Scott Momaday
#31. 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
N. Scott Momaday
#32. I have deep roots in this Oklahoma soil. It makes me proud.
N. Scott Momaday
#33. There was only the dark infinity in which nothing was. And something happened. At the distance of a star something happened, and everything began. The Word did not come into being, but it was. It did not break upon the silence, but it was older than the silence and the silence was made of it.
N. Scott Momaday
#34. As far as I am concerned, poetry is a statement concerning the human condition, composed in verse.
N. Scott Momaday
#35. To look upon that landscape in the early morning, with the sun at your back, is to lose the sense of proportion.
N. Scott Momaday
#36. 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 ...
N. Scott Momaday
#37. For the storyteller, for the arrowmaker, language does indeed represent the only chance for survival.
N. Scott Momaday
#38. Your imagination comes to life, and this, you think, is where Creation was begun.
N. Scott Momaday
#39. 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.
N. Scott Momaday
#40. I am interested in the way that we look at a given landscape and take possession of it in our blood and brain. None of us lives apart from the land entirely; such an isolation is unimaginable.
N. Scott Momaday
#41. If coupling should but make us whole / And of the selfsame mind and soul, / Then couple let's in celebration; / We have contained the population.
N. Scott Momaday
#42. My father was a painter and he taught art. He once said to me, 'I never knew an Indian child who could not draw.'
N. Scott Momaday
#43. There was a man who killed a buffalo bull to no purpose, only he wanted the blood on his hands.
N. Scott Momaday
#44. It was not an exclamation so much, I think, as it was a warding off, an exertion of language upon ignorance and disorder.
N. Scott Momaday
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