Linda Hogan Quotes

Two worlds exist. Maybe it’s always been this way, but I enter them both like I am two people. Above and below. Land and water. Now and then. (p97)

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)

Writing is a way to uncover and discover a new truth. It comes from, and speaks to, the deepest well-spring of the human being, the place that is the source of our inner knowledge, intuition and instinct.

All cruelty is needless. All fighting. Now do we need to build real estate in the Everglades or on migration lands or drill the earth? We have everything available to us for full, good lives, for peace. We must just simply step into it. Anyway, I just started thinking that being silent was in some way not being honest and that I did not want to be silent about the things that were very important and that our survival is very important. We've gone on-this progression is a very straight line progression into total destruction (Meridel Le Sueur says this also), and we're just on the border now. Like the earth is square again and we stand on her edge. I guess I feel, if I'm going to be killed and if my family is going to be killed, at least I don't want to go quietly. I want to feel as if I have done something and not just passively accepted it.

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.

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

I write because the poems speak what I can't say in my normal language. There's a kind of magic, an intuitive thing I feel when a poem or a story really works for me. It works on the deepest levels, all the levels of myself. Certainly, it works physically, and it also works psychologically, emotionally, and spiritually, and then the last priority for me is how it works intellectually…(you're saying that writing poetry or just creative writing is a heuristic device that brings about a different kind of understanding?) It makes me change; it makes other people change. When you read something that is really put together well, something unresolved in the heart or psyche moves toward resolution and wholeness. It's magic.

The U.S. is organized socially and politically and economically in ways to keep people without vibrance or energy. To keep them working hard, thinking they will "make it" if they work harder, all at the expense of their real lives.

Each morning when I step outside my door I walk into the Garden of Eden. "O Great Spirit, thank you for this beautiful day." There has not been one day in the past 20 years that I have not started my day this way and really meant it. When you are truly connected to Mother Earth and Spirit, you see as much beauty in a cold, gray, sleety, December morning as a warm, sunny day in June.

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.

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 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)

it is only recently, in earth time, that the severing of the connections between people and land have taken place. Something in our human blood is still searching for it, still listening, still remembering. ("Creations" p83)

By incorporating history, by remembering, Indian women continue to define themselves. It is through this remembering that we survive. It is through this speaking out that our history is preserved more whole and intact than it was in the past.

Decisions are made in a person's life by small moments of knowing, each moment opening until, like pieces of a quilt, one day everything comes together in a precise, clear knowing. It enters the present, as if it had come all of a piece. It was in this year that I began to understand who I was. Every piece of myself was together anew, a shifted pattern. For my people, the problem has always been this: that the only possibility of survival has been resistance. Not to strike back has meant certain loss and death. To strike back has also meant loss and death, only with a fighting chance. To fight has meant that we can respect ourselves, we Beautiful People. Now we believed in ourselves once again. The old songs were there, come back to us. Sometimes I think the ghost dancers were right, that we would return, that we are still returning. Even now. (p325)