N. Scott Momaday Quotes

This belongs to an eagle, he says. And the eagle belongs to the earth and sky. The feather, by itself, may seem a small thing, but the creature of which it is a part is very powerful. That power resides in this feather. It is a power tha tbinds all thing stogether. When I fold this feather, its power flows into me.

A hawk sailed past the sun, its shadow slithering in the grass.

Oh my brother, I hear your footsteps
In the forest. They are strong and even;
They sound the rhythm of your great heart.

When we dance the earth trembles. When our steps fall on the earth we feel the shudder of life beneath us, and the earth feels the beating of our hearts, and we become one with the earth. We shall not sever ourselves from the earth. We must chant our being, and we must dance in time with the rhythms of the earth. We must keep the earth.

The imaginative experience and the historical express equally the traditions of man's reality.

Bear is an impractical visionary. His eyesight is weak, but he sees beyond the edge of the world, beyond time...

In the dense growth of the bottomland a dark drift moves on the . A spider enters a small pool of light on Rainy Mountain Creek, and downstream, at the convergence, a Channel catfish turns around in the current and slithers to the surface, where a dragonfly hovers and darts. Away on the high ground grasshoppers and bees set up a crackle and roar in the fields, and the s and scissortails whistle and wheel about. Somewhere in the maze of gullies a calf shivers and balls in a tangle of chinaberry trees. And high in the distance a hawk turns in the sun and sails.

Riding is an exercise of the mind. I dreamed a good deal on the back of my horse, going out into the hills alone.

Now and then in winter, great angles of geese fly through the valley, and then the sky and the geese are the same color and the air is hard and damp and smoke rises from the houses of the town.

Division

There is a depth of darkness
In the wild country, days of evening
And the silence of the moon.
I have crept upon the bare ground
Where animals have left their tracks,
And faint cries carry on the summits,
Or sink to silence in the muffled leaves.
Here is the world of wolves and bears
And of old, instinctive being,
So noble and indifferent as to be remote
To human knowing. The scales upon which
We seek a balance measure only a divide.

I wonder if in the dark night of the sea, the octopus dreams of me.

A word has power in and of itself. It comes from nothing into sound and meaning; it gives origin to all things. By means of words can a man deal with the world on equal terms. And the word is sacred. A man's name is his own; he can keep it or give it away as he likes.

The canyon is a ladder to the plain. The valley is pale in the end of July, when the corn and melons come of age and slowly the fields are made ready for the yield, and a faint, false air of autumn — an illusion still in the land — rises somewhere away in the high north country, a vague suspicion of red and yellow on the farthest summits. And the town lies out like a scattering of bones in the heart of the land, low in the valley, where the earth is a kiln and the soil is carried here and there in the wind and all harvests are a poor survival of the seed. It is a remote place, and divided from the rest of the world by a great forked range of mountains on the north and west; by wasteland on the south and east, a region of dunes and thorns and burning columns of air; and more than these by time and silence.

The crippled old man in leggings and white ceremonial trousers shuffled out into the late afternoon. He dried his eyes on his sleeve and whimpered one last time in his throat. He was grown too old, he thought. He could not understand what had happened. But even his sorrow was feeble now; it had withered, like his leg, over the years, and only once in a while, when something unusual happened to remind him of it, did it take on the edge and point of pain.

He was alone and running on. . . . He could see. . . . He was running, and under his breath he began to sing. . . . He had only the words of a song. And he went running on the rise of the song.