Linda Hogan Quotes

I find that my process usually isn’t that I’m full of intention. It’s usually that I’m just open, and something comes to visit and tells me the story and creates it.

If I look back on my novels as a pattern, every one of them has a return to indigenous knowledge systems, a person who says "okay, I'm not going to be part of this other world, I'm going to return to the original way of thinking about the world." And so, do I think there's an answer to this crisis that we're in? I don't know what it is. If I did would I be here? [laughing]. But it's a step, because the thing is, indigenous people know the environment. Sometimes we're seen as ignorant or as knowing less than people in the Western world. But the truth is that you've lived some place for generation after generation, maybe a thousand years, maybe, like in Australia 60,000 years, some places here 20,000 years. You know everything about that environment, and you don't endanger it because you have to keep it-the new word is - "sustainable." But you do, you have to keep it sustainable.

Emptiness and estrangement are deep wounds, strongly felt in the present time. We have been split from what we could nurture, what could fill us. And we have been wounded by a dominating culture that has feared and hated the natural world, has not listened to the voice of the land, has not believed in the inner worlds of human dreaming and intuition, all things that have guided indigenous people since time stood up in the east and walked this world into existence, split from the connection between self and land. ("Creations" p82)

"Story" is significant here, the stories we tell ourselves, those we learn. So I think stories contribute to what we will continue to allow to happen in and out of our world. I've observed that when people do political work, they might go and talk to people about You need to speak out about this, or You need do that, and everyone gets excited and they're ready to do it. Then a day or two later they go back to their lives and business goes on as usual. But when there's an emotional element, a story, with characters you grow to care about, then I think it actually makes a difference in the world, and that's why I write. Because story has a power. Because I've seen it make a difference, seen it change people.

The exciting thing about writing is how it happens, how a story takes on life, begins to move in its own direction, surprises the writer with its growing. When it's working, time passes quickly, the characters speak inside your inner ear, the scenes are there just needing words. When it's working, the story shows you a new way to live, it offers a writer wisdom one would never have without it.

Believing and knowing are two lands distant from each other. (p40)

During the daylight hours he travels, without wanting to, the inside passage of his own self, a human labyrinth of memory, history, and the people that came before him.
[He] is in trouble, not with the law, not with other people, but within. What lonely creatures humans are when they thread through these passages. It is an inner world, one of disasters and whirlwinds, unknown islands, and he must journey them all alone. There are circles inside the mind of a man, circles a man can't escape because each time he comes to a conclusion, it is the same place and it begins over again. It courses hard. And [he] harbors too many secrets.

"I think the Bible is full of mistakes. I thought I would correct them. For instance, where does it say that all living things are equal?" The priest shook his head. 'It doesn't say that. It says man has dominion over the creatures of the earth.' "'Well, that's where it needs to be fixed. That's part of the trouble, don't you see?'" (270)

As an Indian woman, I come from a long history of people who have listened to the language of this continent, people who have known that corn grows with the songs and prayers of the people, that it has a story to tell, that the world is alive...This intuitive and common language is what I seek for my writing, work in touch with the mystery and force of life, work that speaks a few of the many voices around us...It is also poetry, this science, and I note how often scientific theories lead to the world of poetry and vision, theories telling us how atoms that were stars have been transformed into our living, breathing bodies. And in these theories, or maybe they should be called stories, we begin to understand how we are each many people, including the stars we once were, and how we are in essence the earth and the universe, how what we do travels clear around the earth and returns. In a single moment of our living, there is our ancestral and personal history, our future, even our deaths planted in us and already growing toward their fulfillment. The corn plants are there, and like all the rest we are forever merging our borders with theirs in the world collective. Our very lives might depend on this listening. In the Chernobyl nuclear accident, the wind told the story that was being suppressed by the people. It gave away the truth. It carried the story of danger to other countries. It was a poet, a prophet, a scientist. Sometimes, like the wind, poetry has its own laws speaking for the life of the planet. It is a language that wants to bring back together what the other words have torn apart. It is the language of life speaking through us about the sacredness of life.

How absolutely amazing all the life forms and their origins.

I looked down, embarrassed, but she said only, "Some people see scars and it is wounding they remember. To me they are proof of the fact that there is healing." (p125)

You can really change the world with a good story, you can really make a difference with a good story, or you can really touch a heart with a good poem or essay. But you can't do it sometimes just with a sign...the power of story and sharing is the power to make change, the ability to make a difference. And it's not fixed, like a belief system would be a fixed thing. So when we talk, when we share, when we hear a story, read a story, learn a new story, it has the real ability to make a difference and change the world, change a person.

It is also honest land. It doesn’t lie or hide anything. Neither does Ama. Everything she is, everything she is about to do, is clear in her face and in her movement and in her words. The way everything is open to view when sunlight comes down through the hold where all life entered this world. (p55)

My own particular circumstance guaranteed that I'd never feel normal or manage to fit into mainstream life. Until a person knows that, from the mind, they feel crazy. Now I see there's no need to fit. You know, it's not that Indians are different from the dominant culture. We are the same with the same needs and loves and heartaches. It's just that most Indians know time and space well enough from the heart to know that life is for living. Because we are short in our span here and we are not the most significant of lives on earth. We share the planet with plants and animals equal to ourselves, and we are small in the universe. So the daily strivings fall into place. I feel that poetry is a process of uncovering our real knowledge. To manipulate the language merely via the intellect takes away the strength of the poem.

Spirituality necessitates certain kinds of political action. If you believe that the earth, and all living things, and all the stones are sacred, your responsibility really is to protect those things. I do believe that's our duty, to be custodians of the planet. What has amazed me is that after the first bomb, you would have thought all war would stop forever, and that they could find a way to resolve all conflict.