Linda Hogan Quotes & Sayings

All the stories live in our bodies, he thinks. Every last one. — Linda Hogan

We are full of bread and gas, getting fat on the outside while inside we grow thin — Linda Hogan

I went inside and sat down on a wooden chair beside her, remembering a story Tulik had once told me about men, the human people, who wanted what all the other creatures had. They went to the large bird and said they wanted to fly. They were granted this wish. They went to the mole and said they wanted to tunnel, and this they were able to do. Last, they went to the water and said, We must have this unbound manner of living. The water said, You have asked for too much, and then all of it was taken away from them. With all their wishes, they had forgotten to ask to become human beings. — Linda Hogan

There were times when the light of the moon had gone out and she felt a great loneliness. It wasn't for herself. It was for what had happened to the grasses of their land, their waters, not just the massacre there, the slavery, but the killing of the ocean. — Linda Hogan

The real ceremony begins where the formal one ends, when we take up a new way, our minds and hearts filled with the vision of earth that holds us within it, in compassionate relationship to and with our world. — Linda Hogan

There is a geography of the human spirit, common to all peoples. — Linda Hogan

I resented my mother for guessing my innermost secrets. She was like God, everywhere at once knowing everything. — Linda Hogan

Caretaking is the utmost spiritual and physical responsibility of our time, and perhaps that stewardship is finally our place in the web of life, our work, the solution to the mystery that we are. There are already so many holes in the universe that will never again be filled, and each of them forces us to question why we permitted such loss, such tearing away at the fabric of life, and how we will live with our planet in the future. — Linda Hogan

A woman once described a friend of hers as being such a keen listener that even the trees leaned toward her, as if they were speaking their innermost secrets into her listening ears. Over the years I've envisioned that woman's silence, a hearing full and open enough that the world told her its stories. The green leaves turned toward her, whispering tales of soft breezes and the murmurs of leaf against leaf. — Linda Hogan

Walking, I can almost hear the redwoods beating. And the oceans are above me here, rolling clouds, heavy and dark. It is winter and there is smoke from the fires. It is a world of elemental attention, of all things working together, listening to what speaks in the blood. Whichever road I follow, I walk in the land of many gods, and they love and eat one another. Suddenly all my ancestors are behind me. Be still, they say. Watch and listen. You are the result of the love of thousands. — Linda Hogan

Now they were merely trying to fill themselves up but not with the heart, not the soul. They'd lost both those along the way ... — Linda Hogan

Not only are there before and after, but there are also beginnings and returns. Not only is there the creation of the humans, formed of corn or clay, with a breath of wind or a god, but there are mythic destinies. Sometimes myth is formed by the body and what happens to it, especially in the realm of pain, depth, and birth. Phantoms of generations past are in our bodies. These explain us to ourselves. — Linda Hogan

Once a century, all of a certain kind of bamboo flower on the same day. Whether they are in Malaysia or in a greenhouse in Minnesota makes no difference, nor does the age or size of the plant. They flower. Some current of an inner language passes between them, through space and separation, in ways we cannot explain in our language. They are all, somehow, one plant, each with a share of communal knowledge. — Linda Hogan

Remembering, in Spanish, means to pass something through the heart again, and now all the years are going through his heart again as he tries to turn away from the ocean. But he hears it and he knows it is out there. Some sleepless nights he goes out. But this night in his sleep he says, Oh, look at all those beautiful life rafts. — Linda Hogan

It has seemed so strange to me that the larger culture, with its own absence of spirit and lack of attachment for the land, respects these very things about Indian traditions, without adopting those respected ways themselves. — Linda Hogan

Telling about our lives is important for those who come after as, for those who will see our experience as part of their own historical struggle. — Linda Hogan

Can we love what will swallow us when we are gone? I do. — Linda Hogan

I think of that word, power, and what it means. It means you feed your people, you help the world. I never understood what else there was to it — Linda Hogan

Poetry has its own laws speaking for the life of the planet. It is a language that wants to bring back together what the other words have torn apart. — Linda Hogan

There is a way that nature speaks, that land speaks. Most of the time we are simply not patient enough, quiet enough, to pay attention to the story. — Linda Hogan

For every inch of skin, there is memory. Devils are so made. Saints, too, if you believe in them. His humanity has been broken as an old walking stick that once held up a crippled man named Thomas. He realizes the stick and the man are one thing and he can fall. He has violated the laws beneath the laws of men and countries, something deeper, the earth and the sea, the explosions of trees. He has to care again. He has to be water again, rock, earth with its new spring wildflowers and its beautiful, complex mosses. — Linda Hogan

I've been good at this world, the one that hits you when you are born and makes you cry right from the start, so that crying is your first language. I've learned what I was supposed to learn, bu now it comes to me that in doing so I've unlearned other things. I've lost my sense; I cannot sense things. Yes, we are a shambles. And maybe Ama found the way; she found it when all the paths were washed away by rivers from the sky, when all the buildings were blown down by the breath of a God. For just one day, that one day, she found a way out of that shambles, a way around it. And it's this I want to find. But now she has no path back, no way to return even if she wanted to be here in this America. She will always live away from this world, in something of a twilight that is not one thing or the other, one time or the next. She lives in a point, a small point, between two weighted things and it is always rocking this scale, back and forth. — Linda Hogan

To be a hero you always have to betray something or someone. — Linda Hogan

Mystery is part of each life, and maybe it is healthier to uphold it than to spend a lifetime in search of half-made answers. — Linda Hogan

There is no real aloneness. There is solitude and the nurturing silence that is relationship with ourselves, but even then we are part of something larger. — Linda Hogan

Once when I was younger I went out and sat under the sky and looked up and asked it to take me back. What I should have done was gone to the swamp and bog and ask them to bring me back because, if anything is, mud and marsh are the origins of life. Now i think of the storm that made chaos, that the storm opened a door. It tried to make over a world the way it wanted it to be. At school I learned that storms create life, that lightning, with its nitrogen, is a beginning; bacteria and enzymes grow new life from decay out of darkness and water. It's into this that I want to fall, into swamp and mud and sludge and it seems like falling is the natural way of things; gravity needs no fuel, no wings. It needs only stillness and waiting and time. — Linda Hogan

Between earth and earth's atmosphere, the amount of water remains constant; there is never a drop more, never a drop less. This is a story of circular infinity, of a planet birthing itself. — Linda Hogan

Stories are for people what water is for plants. — Linda Hogan

I longed to be a flowering branch,
the sea in its rocking, an unguessed world.
Even now it seems so much as if the body was only
the desire of the planet,
as if it could turn itself into the universe
both together, the same, — Linda Hogan

Some people see scars, and it is wounding they remember. To me they are proof of the fact that there is healing. — Linda Hogan

It is a paradox in the contemporary world that in our desire for peace we must willingly give ourselves to struggle. — Linda Hogan

Perhaps it was the word "God" that was inviting to me, a word I thought I knew too much about. The one who had tortured Job, who had Abraham lift the ax to his son, who, disguised as a whale, had swallowed Jonah. I know now that the name does not refer to any deity, but means simply to call out and pray, to summon. — Linda Hogan

Oblivion, she thought. That was the world she lived in. It was what they should name some countries, towns, and places. — Linda Hogan

Even if the older mind lives by remembering, the young mind lives by forgetting. — Linda Hogan

As for me, I have a choice between honoring that dark life I've seen so many years moving in the junipers, or of walking away and going on with my own human busyness. There is always that choice for humans. — Linda Hogan

Humans colonizing and conquering others have a propensity for this, for burning behind them what they cannot possess or control, as if their conflicts are not with themselves and their own way of being, but with the land itself. — Linda Hogan

She was an anchor but at least now she knew it had an end, a stopping place. It hit bottom. She could fall no deeper. — Linda Hogan

When men decide in their secretly dark or hungry hearts to work their own will, there is little that can stop them. They have inner weather, sometimes unpredictable. — Linda Hogan

We are looking for a tongue that speaks with reverence for life, searching for an ecology of mind. Without it, we have no home, no place of our own within the creation. It is not only the vocabulary of science we desire. We want a language of that different yield. A yield rich as the harvests of the earth, a yield that returns us to our own sacredness, to a self-love and resort that will carry out to others. — Linda Hogan

A spoken story is larger than one unheard, unsaid. In nearly all creation accounts, words or songs are how the world was created, the animals sung into existence. — Linda Hogan

Poetry is a string of words that parades without a permit. — Linda Hogan

What a strange alchemy we have worked, turning earth around to destroy itself, using earth's own elements to wound it. — Linda Hogan

There is a place where the human enters dream and myth, and becomes a part of it, or maybe it is the other way around when the story grows from the body and spirit of humankind. In any case, we are a story, each of us, a bundle of stories, some as false as phantom islands but believed in nevertheless. Some might be true. — Linda Hogan

Death is dancing me ragged. — Linda Hogan

Sometimes there is a wellspring or river of something beautiful and possible in the tenderest sense that comes to and from the most broken of children, and I was one of these, and whatever is was, I can't name, I can only thank. Perhaps it is the water of life that saves us, after all. — Linda Hogan

We make art out of our loss. — Linda Hogan

The crocodile doesn't harm the bird that cleans his teeth for him. He eats the others but not that one. — Linda Hogan

Tears have a purpose. they are what we carry of the ocean, and perhaps we must become the sea, give ourselves to it, if we are to be transformed. — Linda Hogan

Let's kneel down through all the worlds of the body like lovers. I know I am a tree and full of life and I know you, you are the flying one and will leave. But can't we swallow the sweetness and can't you sing in my arms and sleep in the human light of the sun and moon I have been drinking alone. — Linda Hogan

There are ways in, journeys to the center of life, through time; through air, matter, dream and thought. The ways are not always mapped or charted, but sometimes being lost, if there is such a thing, is the sweetest place to be. And always, in this search, a person might find that she is already there, at the center of the world. It may be a broken world, but it is glorious nonetheless. — Linda Hogan