Linda Hogan

The people her own age had not ever recovered from the war. The older people are still in the pain of history. (p64)

I feel like I owe the future to my children and grandchildren, that the work I do, I hope, will help sustain them in the future...My family’s important to me. I think you feel that even more when you’re an American Indian. You see your children, and you want them to know the tradition, to know the language to follow in some way, and yet, you still have to live in America. I think that’s my priority in my life. My work is all dedicated to those babies and children.

there is a geography of the human spirit, common to all peoples. (p 16)

But in reality I know that history is nothing more than the after shock of men’s fears and rages and the wars those two feelings create. It’s a tidal wave that swallows worlds whole and leaves nothing behind. (p170)

A bird killed in the name of human power is in truth a loss of power from the world, not an addition to it. ("The Feathers" p15)

I loved poetry. I still do. I love the process of writing it, the very sort of quiet way of being in the world. I think it's more about being than it is about thinking, and I like that...I think the poetry is a basic language for writing, the most condensed, every word cared about. It's preparation for all the other shapes and kinds of writing.

I hate the smell of school, but I’ve been good at it, this world where we study war and numbers that combine to destroy life. (p105)

I think that in some ways maybe we've come to think of fiction as a lie. It's like the word “myth,” which means “lie” for many people; yet, myth is the highest form of truth. It is about the inner journey, about others before us who have gone that way and civilizations. It is about our life's task of becoming. In some ways I think fiction is like myth, but also fiction takes a fact or an event, even an imagined one, and it makes truth out of it. Prose is a process of uncovering, of getting to the bare, unstated facts of living. Maybe they are inner facts, maybe they are not historical, but they tell the highest truths.

Writing is a way to uncover and discover a new truth. It comes from, and speaks to, the deepest well-spring of the human being, the place that is the source of our inner knowledge, intuition and instinct.

It really is true that the history of your people and your land is in the human body.

I'd like to pass along some of what I've learned about what preserves and protects life. My intention is to create an energy, a life protection energy. That's everybody's job. Everybody that's living now has to work to protect life. What other options do we have? We protect life, or we're indifferent and allow it to be destroyed. We're in a position now to stop life altogether. Our energy and our living have to move towards protecting life.

Feminism is a complicated issue for Indian women because what affects the women also affects the entire community. As individual nations, we have allegiances to the members of our tribes that seldom exist for non-Indian American women. Political and economic injustices are practiced against entire tribes, and are not limited to just the women. The issue of survival affects all people and the major efforts of Indian feminists have been struggles against the dominant society.

Stories have the capacity to make change in ways that other forms of activism don’t...Sometimes I think of them as a form of activism, sometimes as an expression of love, or the meaningful humanity of our daily lives.

I was seventeen when I returned to Adam's Rib on Tinselman's Ferry. It was the north country, the place where water was broken apart by land, land split open by water so that the maps showed places both bound and, if you knew the way in, boundless. The elders said it was where land and water had joined together in an ancient pact, now broken.
The waterways on which I arrived had a history. They had been crossed by many before me...

lies are the first recognition of truth. (p45)