N. Scott Momaday Quotes

Exterior. Football field. Late afternoon. The game is over. CARLISLE 27. ARMY 6. The players of both teams—dirty, bloody, exhausted—mingle, shaking hands on their way to the locker rooms. Dwight Eisenhower, limping badly, makes a great effort to intercept . He extends his hand and seems to want to say something but doesn't. His silence is pure tribute. Thorpe takes his hand, regards him for a moment.

Glen "Pop" Warner... has distinguished himself as a model of a successful coach... an eminent leader of men. ...He can take an ordinary team and make it extraordinary. In his team he has exceptional talent... And he has in arguably the greatest athlete of the twentieth century. But... his Indians have no "killer" instinct. They care more for honor and bravery than for winning. ...[A]n old man in the corner of the room ...listens ...This is .

YAHWEH
Nothing will come of [evolution], as it has come from nothing.

YAHWEH
Poor Man, he had been trying so hard to talk, for such a long time. Then the children went out and played together. At the end of the day they had possession of language.

YAHWEH
[Poetry] is the highest of all languages... higher even than mathematics. It is on a plane with music.

YAHWEH
A story in which there is not the realization of grace is but a shadow, a shell, a thing without substance. Grace is the substance of story, albeit invisible and remote. Grace is the soul of story. ...Or perhaps a mask behind which there is no presence. ...only silence, a perfect stillness.

URSET
I dream of berries... I dream of high meadows to which my kin come in the spring and summer when the wind is fragrant with buckwheat and camas and sweet roots are thick and tangled in the loam. ...lusty sows sauntering in the fields of flowers and of their cubs at play. ...clouds gathering at the summits and of rain descending in curtains on the dawn. ...hawks casting the shadows of their flight upon sunlit steeps. I dream of the moon riding and of leaves quaking on pale, speckled limbs, and darkness rising like water to the moon.

Something in me hungers for wild mountains and rivers and plains. I love to be on Bear's ground... And Bear is welcome in my dreams, for in that cave of sleep I am at home to Bear.

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.

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

Bear and I are one... My Indian name is Tsoai-talee, which in Kiowa means "Rock-tree boy." Tsoai, "Rock-tree," is in Wyoming. That is where, long ago, a Kiowa boy turned into a bear and where his sisters were born into the sky and became the stars of the Big Dipper. Through the power of stories and names, I am the reincarnation of that boy. From the time the name Tsoai-talee was conferred onto me as an infant, I have been possessed of Bear's spirit. The Kiowas... believe that... Bear is the animal representation of the wilderness.

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

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 ...

I came to know the land by going out upon it in all seasons... until it became the very element in which I lived my daily life.

In the winter dusk I heard coyotes barking away by the river, the sound of the drums in the , and the voice of the village crier, ringing at the rooftops.