I was in love with the whole world and all that lived in its rainy arms.
To think about love and passion and political correctness all together, it doesn’t work. Art has to go way past the political to be effective.
Columbus only discovered that he was in some new place. He didn’t discover America.
Women are strong, strong, terribly strong. We don’t know how strong until we’re pushing out our babies.
In order to purify yourself, you have to understand yourself, Father Trais went on. Everything out in the world is also in you. Good, bad, evil, perfection, death, everything. So we study our souls.
When every inch of the world is known, sleep may be the only wilderness that we have left.
Society is like this card game here, cousin. We got dealt our hand before we were even born, and as we grow we have to play as best as we can.
When we are young, the words are scattered all around us. As they are assembled by experience, so also are we, sentence by sentence, until the story takes shape.
We started dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall.
There is a legacy of violence against native women that has gotten worse and worse over time.
There are people who are always, I think, going to remain people of the book, to use another author’s title, but people of the book, who really must be around.
When women age into their power, no wind can upset them, no hand turn aside their knowledge, no fact can deflect their point of view.
The greatest wisdom doesn’t know itself. The richest plan is not to have one.
To be of mixed blood is a great gift for a writer. I have one foot on tribal lands and one foot in middle-class life.
It’s impossible to write about Native life without humor-that’s how people maintain sanity.
We passed over in a sweep of sorrow that would persist into our small forever. We just keep going.
They were so strong in their beliefs that there came a time when it hardly mattered what exactly those beliefs were; they all fused into a single stubbornness.
We all got holes in our lives. Nobody dies in a perfect garment.
The world tips away when we look into our children’s faces.
The music was more than music – at least what we are used to hearing. The music was feeling itself. The sound connected instantly with something deep and joyous.