Linda Hogan Quotes

Working at a university I've made the observation that many student writers write for the sake of writing. They are really writing for other writers, not to tell a necessary story, not out of urgency and need. I have keenly felt that writing must be more than that, that it must have a power to enter the world, to begin to change the stories people live by, to open that story into something larger, into something that helps us know how to live. This means that we have to expand not only our work but our ideas about audience. It wouldn't bother me to have academics reject my work if somebody read it and it changed their attitude about deforestation, for example. I think I began to write out of a desire to make change in the world, searching for language that would help me speak my innermost hopes and ways. Writing was something of a foreign language I learned to be fluent in so that I could communicate emotions and what I knew was important-an ethical way of thinking about the world-communicate what racism is and what it does to people.

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)

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.

When I sit down at the desk, there are other women who are hungry, homeless. I don't want to forget that, that the world of matter is still there to be reckoned with. This writing is a form of freedom most other people do not have. So, when I write, I feel a responsibility, a commitment to other humans and to the animal and plant communities as well.

"Why don't you go out more?" her mother always wanted to know. But she was out, just in another way. Out in the world. Out in the spray of ocean, the garden of heaven. Perhaps she was timid, but she preferred the world this way. There were times when the light of the moon had gone out and she felt a great loneliness. It wasn't for herself. It was for what had hap¬ pened in the grasses of their land, their waters, not just the massacre there, the slavery, but the killing of the ocean. (p65)

The literature contemporary Indian women write is a necessity. It is existence and survival given shape in written language. It is more than poetry and prose. It is an expression of entire cultures and their perceptions of the world and universe. It is often a transmission, through written language, of the oral traditions that were, and still are, passed on by word of mouth.

My characters actually create me instead of the other way around.

There is always, to everything, a before and after. (p 201)

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.

In tribal culture every person has their place and one who speaks more clearly with spirits than others is not a better person or is not in a higher position but simply performs one of many functions for the people. You and I have friends who do this daily and they make nothing of it. The woman who builds the fire is as important as the woman who guides the soul.

We live in a world of many intelligences. Human language isn't all that is spoken in the world around our lives. Other documented and studied languages exist in the animal world. They surround us, also, in the plant world, where trees have the ability to call helpful underground bacteria toward them from distances, to communicate with one another through hormonal and chemical means. Cedars and junipers even store moisture to release for hardwoods during times of drought. We are surrounded by voices intelligent and in need of respect.

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

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.

For me, and maybe I am wrong, fight has more than one way to exist. Change has to happen. Maybe a book does make a difference, I hope. Maybe words can make change. They have in the past. So I search for the right ones. Maybe it is not of use, but sometimes it is.

I feel like I owe the future to my children and grandchildren, that the work I do, I hope, will help sustain them in the future...My family’s important to me. I think you feel that even more when you’re an American Indian. You see your children, and you want them to know the tradition, to know the language to follow in some way, and yet, you still have to live in America. I think that’s my priority in my life. My work is all dedicated to those babies and children.