N. Scott Momaday Quotes

Writing engenders in us certain attitudes toward language. It encourages us to take words for granted. Writing has enabled us to store vast quantities of words indefinitely. This is advantageous on the one hand but dangerous on the other. The result is that we have developed a kind of false security where language is concerned, and our sensitivity to language has deteriorated. And we have become in proportion insensitive to silence.

In western I was shown articles of the bear fest... In the presence of these things I felt their power. In their presence I understood something about Bear's transcendent spirit, how... Bear dances on the edge of life and death, crossing over and back again.

Those who came before me did not take for granted the world in which they lived. They blessed the air with smoke and pollen. They touched the ground, the trees, the stones with respect and reverence. I believe that they imagined me before I was born, that they prepared the way for me, that they placed their faith and hope in me and in the generations that followed and will follow them. Will I give my children an inheritance of the earth? Or will I give them less than I was given?

On one side of time there are herds of buffalo and antelope. Redbud trees and chokecherries splash color on the plain. The waters are clear, and there is a glitter on the early morning grass. You breathe in the fresh fragrances of rain and wind on which are borne silence and serenity. It is good to be alive in this world. But on the immediate side there is the exhaust of countless machines, toxic and unavoidable.
The planet is warming, and the northern ice is melting. Fires and floods wreak irresistible havoc. The forests are diminished and waste piles upon us. Thousands of species have been destroyed. Our own is at imminent risk. The earth and its inhabitants are in crisis, and at the center it is a moral crisis. Man stands to repudiate his humanity.

I make a prayer for words. Let me say my heart

Just before Mammedaty's time the s had been brought to their knees in the infamous winter campaigns of the Seventh Cavalry, and their Plains culture... virtually destroyed.

I had a horse named Pecos... Pecos could outrun all the other horses in the village, and he always wanted to prove it. ...My ancestors, who were s, should have been proud ...

In the beginning was the word, and it was spoken.

Such vastness makes for illusion, a kind of illusion that comprehends reality, and where it exists there is always wonder and exhilaration.

There have been times when I thought I understood how it was that a man might be moved to preserve the bones of a horse—and another to steal them away.

Prairie Hymn:

On the tongue a hymnal of American names,
And the silence of falling snow — Glacier,
Bearpaw, Bitterroot, Wind River, Yellowstone.
I dreamed among the ice caps long ago,
Ranging with the sun on the inward slope,
Down the wheel of seasons and the solstices
To the tilted moon and cradle of the stars.
There was the prairie, always reaching.
Time was sundered, and the light bore wonder.
The earth broke open and I held my breath.
In the far range of vision the prairie shone bright
As brit on the sea, crescive and undulant…

The range of dawn and dusk; the continent lay out
In prairie shades, in a vast carpet of color and light.
In the Sun Dance I was entranced, I drew in the smoke
Of ancient ice and sang of the wide ancestral land.
Rain-laden clouds ringed the horizon, and the hump-backed
Shape sauntered and turned. Mythic deity!
It became the animal representation of the sun, an
In the prairie wind there was summer in the spring.

There is no earth without the sun and moon. There is no earth without the stars. When we die, Dragonfly says, we go to the farther camps. Death is not the end of life. There is life in the farther camps. The stars are fires in the farther camps.

A word has power in and of itself. It comes from nothing into sound and meaning; it gives origin to all things.

There is no love without loss. I hear the drums that vibrate to the heartbeat of the earth. THey set me dancing. I see the clouds that wreathe the summits. They set me dreaming. I know the wonder of waves that shake the headlands. They awaken my soul.

I was embarked upon the greatest adventure of all; I had come to the place of my growing up.

The sun cast a golden light upon the adobe walls and the cornfields; it set fire to the leaves of willows and cottonwoods along the river; and a fresh cold wind ran down from the canyons and carried the good scents of pine and cedar smoke, of bread baking in the beehive ovens, and of rain in the mountains.

Now when I hear spoken—mostly by the older people who are passing away—it is to me very good. ...the sound is like a warm wind that arises from my childhood. It is the music of memory. ...much of the power and magic and music of words consist not in the meaning but in sound. Storytellers, actors, and children know this too.