Leslie Marmon Silko Quotes & Sayings

They are afraid, Tayo. They feel something happening, they can see something happening around them, and it scares them. Indians or Mexicans or whites - most people are afraid of change. They think that if their children have the same color of skin, the same color of eyes, that nothing is changing." She laughed softly. "They are fools. They blame us, the ones who look different. That way they don't have to think about what has happened inside themselves. — Leslie Marmon Silko

He was overwhelmed by the love he felt for her; tears filled his eyes and the ache in his throat ran deep into his chest. He ran down the hill to the river, through the light rain until th pain faded like fog mist. He stood and watched the rainy dawn, and he knew he would find her again. — Leslie Marmon Silko

Josiah said that only humans had to endure anything, because only humans resisted what they saw outside themselves. Animals did not resist. But they persisted, because they became part of the wind. ( ... ) So they moved with the snow, became part of the snowstorm which drifted up against the trees and fences. And when they died, frozen solid against a fence, with the snow drifted around their heads? "Ah, Tayo," Josiah said, "the wind convinced them they were the ice. — Leslie Marmon Silko

I write in order to find out what I truly know and how I really feel about certain things. Writing requires me to go much deeper into my thoughts and memories than conversation does. Writing provides the solitude necessary to reflect on being in this world. — Leslie Marmon Silko

For a long time he had been white smoke. He did not realize that until he left the hospital, because white smoke had no consciousness of itself. It faded into the white world of their bed sheets and walls; it was sucked away by the words of doctors who tried to talk to the invisible scattered smoke ... They saw his outline but they did not realize it was hollow inside. — Leslie Marmon Silko

Janice Gould is one of our best poets. The music of her poetry will delight you, and her gentle courageous accounts of tribal, family, and personal history make this book unforgettable. Doubters and Dreamers is a master-piece. — Leslie Marmon Silko

The white man hated to hear anything about spirits because spirits were already dead and could not be tortured and butchered or shot, the only way the white man knew how to deal with the world. Spirits were immune to the white man's threat ... s and to his bribes of money and food. The white man only knew one way to control himself or others and that was with brute force. — Leslie Marmon Silko

The only way to get change is not through the courts or - heaven forbid - the politicians, but through a change of human consciousness and through a change of heart. Only through the arts - music, poetry, dance, painting, writing - can we really reach each other, — Leslie Marmon Silko

The ancient people perceived the world and themselves within that world as part of an ancient continuous story composed of innumerable bundles of other stories. — Leslie Marmon Silko

When someone dies, you don't get over it by forgetting; you get over it by remembering, and you are aware that no person is ever truly lost or gone once they have been in our life and loved us, as we have loved them. — Leslie Marmon Silko

I will tell you something about stories ... They aren't just entertainment. Don't be fooled. They are all we have, you see, all we have to fight off illness and death. — Leslie Marmon Silko

You damn your own soul better than I ever could. — Leslie Marmon Silko

Late at night, when she and Ferro had waited on the ridge or had ridden on horseback into the steep canyons to wait for a drop, she had watched the meteor showers. They would begin shortly after midnight and continue until two A. M. On those nights it seemed as if the sky had overtaken the earth and was closing over it, so that the volcanic rocks and soil themselves reflected light like the surface of the moon. At those moments she could not think of any other place on the earth that she would rather be. She thought about the old ones and Yoeme and how they watched the sky relentlessly, translating sudden bursts of light into lengthy messages concerning the future and the past. — Leslie Marmon Silko

You don't have anything if you don't have the stories. — Leslie Marmon Silko

He had to keep busy; he had to keep moving so that the sinews connected behind his eyes did not slip loose and spin his eyes to the interior of his skull where the scenes waited for him. — Leslie Marmon Silko

Because if you weren't born white, you were forced to see differences; or if you weren't born what they called normal, or if you got injured, then you were left to explore the world of the different. — Leslie Marmon Silko

The American public has difficulty believing ... [that] injustice continues to be inflicted upon Indian people because Americans assume that the sympathy and tolerance they feel toward Indians is somehow 'felt' or transferred to the government policy that deals with Indians. This is not the case. — Leslie Marmon Silko

But sometimes what we call 'memory' and what we call 'imagination' are not so easily distinguished. — Leslie Marmon Silko

Night. Heavenly delicious sweet night of the desert that calls all of us to love her. The night is our comfort with her coolness and darkness. On wings, on feet, on our bellies, out we all come to glory in the night. — Leslie Marmon Silko

The room pulsed with feeling, — Leslie Marmon Silko

The Indian wars have never ended in the Americas. — Leslie Marmon Silko

Being alive was all right then: he had not breathed like that for a long time. — Leslie Marmon Silko

The snow ... came in thick tufts like new wool - washed before the weaver spins it. — Leslie Marmon Silko

But it left something with him; as long as the hummingbird had not abandoned the land, somewhere there were still flowers, and they could all go on. — Leslie Marmon Silko

To be able to make up stories has been a great gift to me from my ancestors and from the storytellers who were so numerous at Laguna Pueblo when I was growing up. I learned to read as soon as I could because I wanted stories without having to depend on adults to tell or read stories to me. — Leslie Marmon Silko

Time limits are fictional. Losing all sense of time is actually the way to reality. We use clocks and calendars for convenience sake, not because that kind of time is real. — Leslie Marmon Silko

He liked the way she talked. There was something in her eyes too. He saw it the first time when she had said, 'I've seen you before many times, and I always remembered you.' Josiah could not remember ever seeing her before, but there was something in her hazel brown eyes that made him believe her. — Leslie Marmon Silko

Things which don't shift and grow are dead things. — Leslie Marmon Silko

Moonflowers blossom in the sand hills before dawn, just as I followed him. — Leslie Marmon Silko

He could get no rest as long as the memories were tangled with the present — Leslie Marmon Silko

Fortunately, her year of graduate classes prepared her for obnoxious conduct. — Leslie Marmon Silko

Anybody can act violently
there is nothing to it, but not every person is able to destroy his enemy with words. — Leslie Marmon Silko

But as long as you remember what you have seen, then nothing is gone. As long as you remember, it is part of this story we have together. — Leslie Marmon Silko

Relationships. That's all there really is. There's your relationship with the dust that just blew in your face, or with the person who just kicked you end over end ... You have to come to terms, to some kind of equilibrium, with those people around you, those people who care for you, your environment. — Leslie Marmon Silko

He made a story for all of them, a story to give them strength. The words of the story poured out of his mouth as if they had substance, pebbles and stone extending to hold the corporal up ... knees from buckling ... hands from letting go of the blanket. — Leslie Marmon Silko

Distances and days existed in themselves then; they all had a story. They were not barriers. If a person wanted to get to the moon, there is a way; it all depended on whether you knew the directions ... on whether you knew the story of how others before you had gone. He had believed in the stories for a long time, until the teachers at Indian school taught him not to believe in that kind of "nonsense". But they had been wrong. — Leslie Marmon Silko

Writing can't change the world overnight, but writing may have an enormous effect over time, over the long haul. — Leslie Marmon Silko

Then they grow away from the earth then they grow away from the sun then they grow away from the plants and the animals. They see no life. When they look they see only objects. The world is a dead thing for them the trees and the rivers are not alive. the mountains and stones are not alive. The deer and bear are objects. They see no life. They fear. They fear the world. They destroy what they fear. They fear themselves. — Leslie Marmon Silko

The truth of course was otherwise, but Lecha had never felt she owed anyone the truth, unless it was truth about their own lives, and then they had to pay her to tell them. — Leslie Marmon Silko

I don't make outlines or plans because whenever I do, they turn out to be useless. It is as if I am compelled to violate the scope of any outline or plan; it is as if the writing does not want me to know what is about to happen. — Leslie Marmon Silko

What is it about us human beings that we can't let go of lost things? — Leslie Marmon Silko

The material world and the flesh are only temporary - there are no sins of the flesh, spirit is everything! — Leslie Marmon Silko

The story was the important thing and little changes here and there were really part of the story. There were even stories about the different versions of stories and how they imagined the differing versions came to be. — Leslie Marmon Silko