Linda Hogan Quotes

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)

I feel watched. By nature. I think now. It’s what I felt watching me, all along. It knows us. It watches us. The animals have eyes that see us. The birds, the trees, everything knows what we do. (p59)

We can’t control the earth’s response to our actions, only our own behaviors.

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.

(The childishness of that attitude - that insistence on "mine" and "my way only" - is rather frightening.) Right. Torture and genocide are based on such small words as those.

bacteria and enzymes grow new life from decay out of darkness and water. It’s into this that I want to fall, into swamp and mud and sludge, and it seems like falling is the natural way of things; gravity needs no fuel, no wings. It needs only stillness and waiting and time. (p95)

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

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...

Between earth and earth's atmosphere, the amount of water remains constant; there is never a drop more, never a drop less. This is a story of circular infinity, of a planet birthing itself. ("Stories of Water" p106)

She was an anchor but at least now she knew it had an end, a stopping place. It hit bottom. She could fall no deeper. (p76)

It took men quite a while to have the courage to look at things differently.

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.

Most of the things that I did as a child and even as an older growing person were outdoors and were alone. Outside was my church, my place of vision and dreaming.

[He] wanted to plant the seed. It was hope. It was a future. He wanted a future to grow in this place made so nearly desolate by bombs, craters and burned woods. (p165)

It's been in the western history of science that the abstract has been idealized over matter. Until recently. As spirit has been preferred over body in the religious systems.