Linda Hogan Quotes

The anthropologists and those studying tribal peoples too often write their own interpretation of what is said because they are unable to see larger, to think beyond their own thinking enough to come to what is really spoken, meant, and known about the world. For indigenous peoples, each place has its own intelligence, its own stories.

That balance between the spiritual and the physical and the mental-a lot of people who become interested in the spiritual tradition become very silly. They go off so far there is no balance or no footing, and our feet are very important in spiritual life touching earth. We're here on earth with our bodies. We're not meant for outer space physically or spiritually. People who go into the mental can go off too far into the mental. I don't know many people who can go off too far into the physical (I don't mean athletically or sexually, I mean awareness of body), but the physical draws down the other two, the spiritual and the mental. I suppose physical labor is real good for that reason-chopping wood and doing whatever work you have to do in the world. It seems to me that is a very important aspect of tradition, to have that balance and keep and maintain it as much as you can. I think when people lose it is when they get caught up into the other things-when they lose that balance.

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.

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.

He thought that even a prophet, even a warrior, could not survive the ways of the Americans, especially the government with rules and words that kept human life at a distance and made it live by their regulations and books. (p219)

Lies couldn't call out the way truth does. They feared discovery. They were constantly confused and had soft edges that overlapped. (p45)

thinking about plot and character development is a much more linear way of thinking than it is to be in a poem. To be in a poem means you drop deeper down into yourself and your subject. And it's more resonant. I like the experience of writing poetry a lot better than composing fiction...I love to do poetry because it's so-- the experience of it is like a whole body experience and not just an exercise that's mental.

I can hear everyone in the living room watching TV. They are together, as if to show that now I am outside this family. I am the source of their problems. I have brought them closer together, joined them in their judgement of me. (p94)

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.

Language is really connected to place. In native languages, indigenous languages, for example. One of the things people don't think about very often is that English is a very small language. It has only a tenth, sometimes less, of the vocabulary of some of the native languages and for indigenous people who come from a place, an ecosystem- the relationship to that place is actually embedded in the language itself.

I think again of breath, and how we Taiga people have that word -Oni- for breath and air and wind. It is a force. Oni is like God, it is everywhere, unseen. I think I heard this word spoken in the rush of weather. I’m sure of it. The wind said it’s own name, “Oni”. (p41)

When I discovered writing, it was...like being dropped into water and finding that you're an excellent swimmer - that you love the water and you love to swim. I think when I discovered poetry it allowed me to step into my real life, my real self- the body, heart and soul of being alive.

They still hold themselves in a beautiful manner; that’s what we used to call it, “a beautiful manner.” It’s the way of living that holds tight to memory, creation, and earth. You can see this goodness of life on their peaceful faces, on their skin. (p154)

There are such cruel tricks I have wondered about in nature, the way a whale must surface to breathe in the presence of its waiting killers, the way the white tails of deer and rabbit are so easily seen as they run from danger. There is something, too, in some human beings that wants to die, that drives us to our own destruction. There is something that makes us pretend to be less than we are, less than the other creatures with their grace and dignity. Perhaps it is this that makes us bow down to an angry god when we might better have knelt at the altar of our own love. (p344)

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.