Linda Hogan Quotes

The planet is so much smaller than we ever thought in the past I think of the whole planet as home, a whole ecosystem that seems important to our growth as people and our survival.

Sometimes now I hear the voice of my great-grandmother, Agnes. It floats toward me like a soft breeze through an open window. (beginning of Prologue)

(about humor) It's a survival technique, too. People who are in poverty, people who are in very difficult situations and in pain, have to develop humor or die of despair.

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)

community lies beyond family within the surrounding, enfolding environment. We are co-creators in the universe, the world, within all the rest, all fluid, shifting movement, and without the emphasis on measurement. The world is there in its entirety, not in segments. And we inhabit it. This is what makes us human.

The infant Thomas W. Just was born on July 2, 1947, to much happiness and many pictures of his mother smiling down at him. It was the day just before the octopus left the water, walked on all eight legs across land and into Seal Cave. Sometimes young people made love in that cave. Sometimes boys escaped school and smoked cigarettes there.
But on this day, the day after Thomas was born, the octopus walked out of the sea and they watched it...

I’m very concerned with human, animal, and plant survival, traditions that are ecologically sound, and indigenous knowledge systems, and how to convey these understandings of the world to a wide readership.

I see my everyday life in a historical context. We are living in the midst of history; it's important that somebody keeps records.

it has always been Ama’s skill to live with the world and not against it. (p47)

resurrection ferns that wait for a rain like dead things and then open up new and green and beautiful like they are doing right now out on the hurricane felled trees, like they didn’t know it was catastrophe that gave them life. Maybe, I think, I am like those ferns. Ama’s like the rain. (p101)

for me writing is like - I follow it, it comes first and then I follow it. I mean it's really saved my life, my soul. It's been my leader and my helper and my mate in life really, in a way. So it has been my map because it's been the pathway I've followed and it's been my direction out of a certain way of living and being. I don't know how to describe it - it's like the thread out of the labyrinth.

the land, is the oldest part of me and the wisest. The part that can survive. All of us Indian writers are historically a part of the whole body of our nations' histories and places, wherever we may do our writing, in New York City or at Rosebud.

I pick these events and make them stories because only then will people listen. If I carry a sign, I am ignored. So I do it in the work.

But I could see right away that this lost him points in the white men's book. Tenderness was not a quality of strength to them. It was unmanly, an act they considered soft and unworthy. (p281)

We are moving so quickly in today's world that our experiences are blurred. We need to slow down so that our senses will awaken and our hearts will open. When we learn this and reconnect to nature we are able to receive her energy and the many gifts she has for us.