Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Your life feels different on you, once you greet death and understand your heart's position.
There is a legacy of violence against native women that has gotten worse and worse over time.
Don't read anything except what destroys the insulation between yourself and your experience.
Love won't be tampered with, love won't go away. Push it to one side and it creeps to the other.
I tried out the unfamiliar syllables. They fit. They cracked in my ears like a fist through ice.
I spend my time dwelling on revenge and try to deal with the monsters crawling out of the ashes.
Life is made up of three kinds of people -- those who live it, those afraid to, those in between.
I got well by talking. Death could not get a word in edgewise, grew discouraged, and traveled on.
I knew each person's delusion, the places their records had scratched, where the sounds repeated.
Every so often something shatters like ice and we are in the river of our existence. We are aware.
We passed over in a sweep of sorrow that would persist into our small forever. We just keep going.
I stood there in the shadowed doorway thinking with my tears. Yes, tears can be thoughts, why not?
I had a very free childhood and ranged around on my bicycle the way boys do. I had few restrictions.
Our tribe unraveled like a coarse rope, frayed at either end as the old and new among us were taken.
I have always kept notebooks and I go back to them over and over. They are my compost pile of ideas.
What happens when you let an unsatisfactory present go on long enough? It becomes your entire history.
Women are strong, strong, terribly strong. We don't know how strong until we're pushing out our babies.
There is no such thing as a complete lack of order, only a design so vast it appears unrepetitive up close.
I rarely step on sidewalk cracks. I don't wear a watch. I touch my favorite tree before going on long trips.
To be of mixed blood is a great gift for a writer. I have one foot on tribal lands and one foot in middle-class life.
Here is the most telling fact: you wish to possess me. Here is another fact: I loved you and let you think you could.
my mind ran over scenes of Shesheeb seducing Margaret until I was a wagon dragged by the runaway horses of my jealousy.
I am at the bookstore a lot, but let my friends, the professional Birchbark Books staff, handle the day in and day out.
Old love, middle love, the kind of love that knows itself and knows that nothing lasts, is a desperate shared wildness.
Talking about how I might write the next book is like talking about whether or not to have sex. Any dithering ruins it.
Now that I knew fear, I also knew it was not permanent. As powerful as it was, its grip on me would loosen. It would pass.
We do know that no one gets wise enough to really understand the heart of another, though it is the task of our life to try.
Here I am, where I ought to be. A writer must have a place where he or she feels this, a place to love and be irritated with.
So what is wild? What is wilderness? What are dreams but an internal wilderness and what is desire but a wildness of the soul?
Here I am, where I ought to be. A writer must have a place where he or she feels this, the place to love and be irritated with.
I did not choose solitude. Who would? It came on me like a kind of vocation, demanding an effort that married women can't picture.
I think one of the reasons to be here on earth is to finally be who we are, at all times - to know and be predictable to ourselves.
When women age into their power, no wind can upset them, no hand turn aside their knowledge, no fact can deflect their point of view.
You know, some people fall right through the hole in their lives. Its invisible, but they come to it after time, never knowing where.
You know, some people fall right through the hole in their lives. It's invisible, but they come to it after time, never knowing where.
The Internet, which seems now so embedded and personal and crucial to our lives, isn't at all - we really shouldn't think of it that way.
To love another another human in all of her splendor and imperfect perfection , it is a magnificent task...tremendous and foolish and human.
To think about love and passion and political correctness all together, it doesn't work. Art has to go way past the political to be effective.
Society is like this card game here, cousin. We got dealt our hand before we were even born, and as we grow we have to play as best as we can.
I always have some way of putting the stories together that works for the book. I've always switched points of view in my books. I'm a Gemini.
I have never fully exorcised shames that struck me to the heart as a child except through written violence, shadowy caricature, and dark jokes.
You really need to approach each book as if you have been a failure. . . . If you start to believe your flap-copy, you're finished as a writer.
Nothing I force myself to write about ever turns out well, and so I've learned to wait for the voice, the incident, the image that reverberates.
I am part of what she thinks is her illness, a symptom of which she thinks she has been cured. She, on the other hand, is what I was looking for.
I think one of the most fertile, unexplored areas for poets and fiction writers is the world of science. I become overwhelmed by the science world.
I have brothers and was a tomboy, if that's still a designation. It wasn't a stretch for me to think and write as a 13-year-old boy - it is freeing.
Revenge is a sorrow for the person who has to take it on. And the person who is rash enough to think it's going to help a situation is always wrong.
When small towns find they cannot harm the strangest of their members, when eccentrics show resilience, they are eventually embraced and even cherished.
We are never so poor that we cannot bless another human being, are we? So it is that every evil, whether moral or material, results in good. You'll see.
If only I had discipline, but alas, it is only an obsessive-compulsive trait and the beauty of habit that causes me to return again and again to my work.