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.
He despised his body for its boring hungers, reflex anger; its petty, obliterating rage. But now he’d become detached. He regarded his body with a tender regret. It was the thing his spirit had to haul.
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.
To sew is to pray. Men don’t understand this. They see the whole but they don’t see the stitches. They don’t see the speech of the creator in the work of the needle.
Each life is one short word slowly uttered.
It was just enough to sit there without words.
Hunger steals the memory.
Life is made up of three kinds of people – those who live it, those afraid to, those in between.
Here I am, where I ought to be. A writer must have a place where he or she feels this, the place to love and be irritated with.
Right and wrong were shades of meaning, not sides of a coin.
There will never come a time when I will be able to resist my emotions.
When small towns find they cannot harm the strangest of their members, when eccentrics show resilience, they are eventually embraced and even cherished.
Veils of love which was only hate petrified by longing – that was me.
We are never so poor that we cannot bless another human being, are we? So it is that every evil, whether moral or material, results in good. You’ll see.
He had a thousand-year-old stare.
I think she is confused by the way I want her, which is like nobody else. I know this deep down. I want her in a new way, a way she’s never been told about.