It kills your writing if you try to manipulate it with crude politics.
History works itself out in the living.
Every so often something shatters like ice and we are in the river of our existence. We are aware.
I got well by talking. Death could not get a word in edgewise, grew discouraged, and traveled on.
The contents of a house can trigger all sorts of revisions to family history.
Ravens are the birds I’ll miss most when I die. If only the darkness into which we must look were composed of the black light of their limber intelligence. If only we did not have to die at all. Instead, become ravens.
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.