N. Scott Momaday Quotes

Yahweh to Urset

I pray that you are kept safe throughout this day, that
you live as wholly as you can, that you see things that
you have not seen before and that more of them are
beautiful than not, more of them delightful than not.
I pray that you hold easily in your hands the balance
of the earth and sky, that you laugh and cry, know
freedom and restraint, some joy and some sorrow,
pleasure and pain, much of life and a little of death.
I pray that you are grateful for the gift of your being,
and I pray that you celebrate your life in the proper
way, with grace and humility, wonder and contentment,
in the strong, deep current of your spirit’s voice. I pray
that you are happily in love with the dawn and that you
are more deeply in love in the dusk.

I could tell of the splintered sun. I could
Articulate the night sky, had I words.

Song of Longing
Will you come to me now
Thee white moon shines on the cornfields
Evening falls among the melon rows
The orange sun sets on the mountains
The river runs sparkling on blue stones
And the long reeds bend and sway
I will welcome you with sweetgrass and sage
Will you come to me now
I sing in my heart of your coming
I sing in my soul of your coming

There are things in nature which engender an awful quiet in the heart of man; Devils Tower is one of them. Man must account for it. He must never fail to explain such a thing to himself, or else he is estranged forever from the universe.

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

When the wild herds were destroyed, so too was the will of the Kiowa people; there was nothing to sustain them in spirit.

I did not always understand her prayers; I believe they were made of an older language than that of ordinary speech. There was something inherently sad in the sound, some slight hesitation upon the syllables of sorrow. She began in a high and descending pitch, exhausting her breath to silence; then again and again — and always the same intensity of effort, of something that is, and is not, like urgency in the human voice. Transported so in the dim and dancing light among the shadows of her room, she seemed beyond the reach of time, as if age could not lay hold of her.

Wreckage'
Had my bones, like the sun,
been splintered on this canyon wall
and burned among these buckled plates,
this bright debris; had it been so,
I should not have lingered so long
among my losses. I should have come
loudly, like a warrior, to my time.

This happened a long time ago. I was not there. My father was there when he was a boy. He told me of it. And I was there.

It is in human nature to pray. It is appropriate that we lay our words upon the earth. And so: Great Mystery, you who dwell in the endless beyond, you who spoke the first word and made of your breath the mountains and the waters, the trees and the grasses, the man and the woman and the child, hear me in my small voice. I am your thankful creature.

Look! Look! There are blue and purple horses . . . a house made of dawn. . . .

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.

These things he told to his grandsons carefully, slowly and at length, because they were old and true, and they could be lost forever as easily as one generation is lost to the next, as easily as one old man might lose his voice, having spoken not enough or not at all.

A Story of Light

When the leaves turn
And the light of the forest deepens,
I will remember a thousand words between us.
Those that enclosed us, as in the pattern
Of shadows that shiver with the turning leaves,
Recount a story that was told about us by those
Who told stories in the caves. We danced
To the music of the words. On our tongues
Were shaped the names of our original being.
This is what the storyteller said: The leaves turn,
And in the light that emanates from the leaves
There is enchantment. There is wonder.

The Essence of Belonging:
…You persist,
And a clean wind measures your persistence.

Along a cleavage in space the day becomes,
And you conspire in the invention of belonging,
Radiant, jealously imagined, estranged from time,

And to the crowded habitation of the mind
You bring a solitude, a mere and sensual silence
In which the essence of belonging belongs.