N. Scott Momaday Quotes

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

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“To encounter the sacred is to be alive at the deepest center of human existence. Sacred places are the truest definitions of the earth; they stand for the earth immediately and forever; they are its flags and shields. If you would know the earth for what it really is, learn it through its sacred places. At Devil’s Tower or Canyon de Chelly or the Cahokia Mounds, you touch the pulse of the living planet; you feel its breath upon you. You become one with a spirit that pervades geologic time and space.”

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

“Art is affirmation.”

“I prayed. He was going home, and I wanted to pray. Look out for me, I said; look out each day and listen for me. And we were going together on horses to the hills. We were going to ride out in the first light to the hills. We were going to see how it was, and always was, how the sun came up with a little wind and the light ran out upon the land. We were going to get drunk, I said. We were going to be all alone, and we were going to get drunk and sing. We were going to sing about the way it always was. And it was going to be right and beautiful. It was going to be the last time. And he was going home.”