Linda Hogan Quotes

I search for the words that will speak the feelings inside my body and hope they touch those feelings in others. At the same time it is a celebration and sacred song given back to those of whom I speak, especially the animals who are made stronger by our acknowledgment of them.

...as you grow and develop, you betray your readers and you betray your own self. At each step, you're a different person with the new work, and that old person, while still there like the foundation I mentioned, is pushed further into the background. You can't remain true to your past and true to your readers and keep growing. Hopefully they will grow along with you.

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.

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’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.

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

lies are the first recognition of truth. (p45)

Simon Ortiz says, "It's fiction and you'd better believe it." I always loved that line. Another way to say it is that fiction is a vertical descent; it's a drop into an event or into history or into the depths of some kind of meaning in order to understand humans, and to somehow decipher what history speaks, the story beneath the story.

"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)

Like the water, the earth, the universe, a story is forever unfolding. It floods and erupts. It births new worlds. It is circular as our planet and fluid as the words of the first people who came out from the ocean or out of the cave or down from the sky. Or those who came from a garden where rivers meet and whose god was a tempter to their fall, planning it into their creation along with all the rest. (p288)

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

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

First books, for many people, seem to be sort of autobiographical incursions into who they are, and what it means to be who they are.

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.

What I liked was that land refused to be shaped by the makers of maps. Land had its own will. The cartographers thought if they mapped it, everything would remain the same, but it didn't, and I respected it for that. Change was the one thing not accounted for. (p123)