Linda Hogan Quotes

I see my everyday life in a historical context. We are living in the midst of history; it's important that somebody keeps records.

I think that in some ways maybe we've come to think of fiction as a lie. It's like the word “myth,” which means “lie” for many people; yet, myth is the highest form of truth. It is about the inner journey, about others before us who have gone that way and civilizations. It is about our life's task of becoming. In some ways I think fiction is like myth, but also fiction takes a fact or an event, even an imagined one, and it makes truth out of it. Prose is a process of uncovering, of getting to the bare, unstated facts of living. Maybe they are inner facts, maybe they are not historical, but they tell the highest truths.

Nature is the most profound multimedia event that you will ever experience. Why not turn off your television and go witness the greatest show on Earth. (p 152)

(asked about poetry and fiction) the two genres are very connected in some way, because they're both doing the same thing. It's a descent into something older, deeper and more powerful than our everyday being or reality.

I find that my process usually isn’t that I’m full of intention. It’s usually that I’m just open, and something comes to visit and tells me the story and creates it.

"Why are only white laws followed? This will kill the world. What is the law if not the earth's?" (p283)

I looked down, embarrassed, but she said only, "Some people see scars and it is wounding they remember. To me they are proof of the fact that there is healing." (p125)

He had a map. He looked at it, trying to figure out where he was. He'd studied the legend. Legend. It was a good word for kilometers and miles, things covering space. As if the world was merely a story, and it was, one story laid down over another. As it was in his older country, too. (p164)

the more I observe the world, the more I learn about it, the more I think that there's a vast terrestrial intelligence all around us.

The place itself seems alive. Here, the land itself seems to have a sound, the soft brush of a breeze. (p159)

But I could see right away that this lost him points in the white men's book. Tenderness was not a quality of strength to them. It was unmanly, an act they considered soft and unworthy. (p281)

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 used to tell students that whatever is inside the psyche will come to the fore in poetry and writing and not to think too much about wanting to say something, about wanting a theme. It is already there. Given the chance, words will come with their own will. A poem knows what it wants to do even without the mind of the writer intervening. Writers can’t create it on their own behalf and make it right. It is more like putting together a basket. The shape happens as the maker weaves...That is my key way of knowing; It Comes to Me.

Even when we have been sent away from that place or have not learned our own languages, we still have it; from subtle gesture and learned ways of being, it is passed down to us. This is "How It Is." The knowledge is in the manner of being, even when the words are not spoken. Our philosophies come of being from a place and a community, of knowing a place and respecting its boundaries.

I sometimes think that when we imagine we know something, that it's mostly conjecture, and that it actually diminishes the world and the animals around us when we imagine that we know what they're about. A more open mind is called for. We're very limited. We have very limited minds. Our equipment for understanding the world is not very evolved.