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Leslie Marmon Silko
75 quotes
“We are told we should love only the good and the beautiful, and these are defined for us so narrowly. Monday I will be 31. Maybe it has taken me this long to discover that we are liable to love anything-like characters in old Greek stories who set eyes on an oak tree or a bucket and fall in love hopelessly, there are no limits to our love.”
Leslie Marmon Silko (born 1948) first seen 1979 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: from 1979 letter collected in The Delicacy and Strength of Lace edited by Anne Wright (1985)
“Sister Salt called her to come outside. The rain smelled heavenly. All over the sand dunes, datura blossoms round and white as moons breathed their fragrance of magic. (beginning of Part One)”
Leslie Marmon Silko (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Money! You couldn't drink it or eat it, but people went crazy over it. (Part 9, p398)”
Leslie Marmon Silko (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“the material world and the flesh are only temporary - there are no sins of the flesh, spirit is everything! (page 450)”
Leslie Marmon Silko (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The white man had violated the Mother Earth, and he had been stricken with the sensation of a gaping emptiness between his throat and his heart. (Part One, Book Five: The Border)”
Leslie Marmon Silko (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Sacred time is always in the Present. (Part One, Book Five: The Border)”
Leslie Marmon Silko (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The ancestors had called Europeans “the orphan people” and had noted that as with orphans taken in by selfish or coldhearted clanspeople, few Europeans had remained whole. They failed to recognize the earth was their mother. Europeans were like their first parents, Adam and Eve, wandering aimlessly because the insane God who had sired them had abandoned them. (Part Two, Book One: Reign of Death-Eye Dog)”
Leslie Marmon Silko (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In the Americas the white man never referred to the past but only to the future. The white man didn’t seem to understand he had no future here because he had no past, no spirits of ancestors here. (Part Two, Book Two: Reign of Fire-Eye Macaw)”
Leslie Marmon Silko (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The powers who controlled the United States didn't want the people to know their history. If the people knew their history, they would realize they must rise up. (Part Three, Book Two: Arizona)”
Leslie Marmon Silko (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Earth was their mother, but her land and water could never be desecrated; blasted open and polluted by man, but never desecrated. Man only desecrated himself in such acts; puny humans could not affect the integrity of Earth. Earth always was and would ever be sacred. Mother Earth might be ravaged by the Destroyers, but she still loved the people. (Part Five, Book One: The Foes)”
Leslie Marmon Silko (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This book is dedicated to the storytellers as far back as memory goes and to the telling which continues and through which they all live and we with them.”
Leslie Marmon Silko (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“She was an old woman now, and her life had become memories. (beginning of "Lullaby")”
Leslie Marmon Silko (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Anybody can act violently - there is nothing to it; but not every person is able to destroy his enemy with words." (p222)”
Leslie Marmon Silko (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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. (p227)”
Leslie Marmon Silko (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He could feel it inside his skull—the tension of little threads being pulled and how it was with tangled things, things tied together, and as he tried to pull them apart and rewind them into their places, they snagged and tangled even more. (p6)”
Leslie Marmon Silko (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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, to keep his knees from buckling, to keep his hands from letting go of the blanket. (p10)”
Leslie Marmon Silko (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 was a way; it all depended on whether you knew the directions-exactly which way to go and what to do to get there; it depended on whether you knew the story of how others before you had gone. (p17)”
Leslie Marmon Silko (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[He] 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. (p24)”
Leslie Marmon Silko (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“That was the responsibility that went with being human, old Ku’oosh said, the story behind each word must be told so there could be no mistake in the meaning of what had been said; and this demanded great patience and love. (p33)”
Leslie Marmon Silko (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It took only one person to tear away the delicate strands of the web, spilling the rays of sun into the sand, and the fragile world would be injured. (p35)”
Leslie Marmon Silko (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“...how easy it was to stay alive now that he didn't care about being alive anymore. (p36)”
Leslie Marmon Silko (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“...an old white woman rolled down the window and said, ‘God bless you, God bless you,’ but it was the uniform, not them, she blessed. (p38)”
Leslie Marmon Silko (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.” (p92)”
Leslie Marmon Silko (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There was something about the way the old man said the word "comfortable." It had a different meaning--not the comfort of big houses or rich food or even clean streets, but the comfort of belonging with the land, and the peace of being with these hills. (p108)”
Leslie Marmon Silko (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“...But he had known the answer all along, even while the white doctors were telling him he could get well and he was trying to believe them: medicine didn't work that way, because the world didn't work that way. His sickness was only part of something larger, and his cure would be found only in something great and inclusive of everything. (p116)”
Leslie Marmon Silko (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“She taught me this above all else: things which don't shift and grow are dead things. They are things the witchery people want. Witchery works to scare people, to make them fear growth. But it has always been necessary, and more than ever now, it is. Otherwise we won't make it. We won't survive..." (p116)”
Leslie Marmon Silko (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It’s a matter of transitions, you see; the changing, the becoming must be cared for closely. You would do as much for the seedlings as they become plants in the field. (p120)”
Leslie Marmon Silko (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“...as I tell the story it will begin to happen...”
Leslie Marmon Silko (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“...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 (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He crawled deeper into the black gauzy web where he could rest in the silence, where his coming and going through this world was no more than a star falling across the night sky. He left behind the pain and buzzing in his head; they were shut out by the wide dark distance. (p154)”
Leslie Marmon Silko (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Being alive was all right then: he had not breathed like that for a long time. (p168)”
Leslie Marmon Silko (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“...feeling the instant of the dawn was an event which in a single moment gathered all things together—the last stars, the mountaintops, the clouds, and the winds—celebrating this coming. The power of each day spilled over the hills in great silence. Sunrise. (p169)”
Leslie Marmon Silko (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But the effects were hidden, evident only in the sterility of their art, which continued to feed off the vitality of other cultures, and in the dissolution of their consciousness into dead objects: the plastic and neon, the concrete and steel. Hollow and lifeless as a witchery clay figure. And what little still remained to white people was shriveled like a seed hoarded too long, shrunken past its time, and split open now, to expose a fragile, pale leaf stem, perfectly formed and dead. (p190)”
Leslie Marmon Silko (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The breaking and crushing were gone, and the love pushed inside his chest, and when he cried now, it was because she loved him so much. (p211)”
Leslie Marmon Silko (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Only destruction is capable of arousing a sensation, the remains of something alive in them; and each time they do it, the scar thickens, and they feel less and less, yet still hungering for more. (p213)”
Leslie Marmon Silko (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“...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." (p215)”
Leslie Marmon Silko (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He cried the relief he felt at finally seeing the pattern, the way all the stories fit together—the old stories, the war stories, their stories—to become the story that was still being told. He was not crazy; he had never been crazy. He had only seen and heard the world as it always was: no boundaries, only transitions through all distances and time. (p229)”
Leslie Marmon Silko (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The morning of the funeral an honor guard from Albuquerque fired the salute; two big flags covered the coffins completely, and it looked as if the people from the village had gathered only to bury the flags. (p240)”
Leslie Marmon Silko (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What I would tell young writers is to put the focus on the work. You have to live doing it. You can't think that it's going to make you money; you can't think that it's even going to support you. You can't think like that because what you'll end up having to do is sacrifice your own ideas to fall in line with what they want you to do. (2015)”
Leslie Marmon Silko (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“the fact that people get twisted cuts across lines of skin color and culture. It has to do with who buys that authoritarianism.”
Leslie Marmon Silko (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“...humor is sacred. Laughing is sacred. The world would become sterile and cold and die if there wasn't the clowning and the joking and the laughter. And that in order to have a perfect balance or harmony you have to have humor.”
Leslie Marmon Silko (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This is my 763-page indictment for five hundred years of theft, murder, pillage, and rape. So is Almanac long? Sure, but federal indictments are long...And mine is a little more interesting reading than a straight-on legal indictment.”
Leslie Marmon Silko (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When you grow up and look around you every day and say, "Oh, there is stolen property. It was ours and it was stolen," you're not nearly as quick to swallow the kinds of rationales that everybody else accepts. That's one of the tragedies of the United States - a sort of collective amnesia about the past”
Leslie Marmon Silko (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What can you do when you're writing about five hundred years and it just happens to be five hundred years of slaughter, slaughter, slaughter? What do you do when that's your task, and all these other people before you have cleaned it up, and you're the one that has to come and say, "No, the priests didn't come for God, glory, and then gold. The Church came here for money"?”
Leslie Marmon Silko (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“At some point when you're writing a novel, the characters really are more interesting and exciting than living people. That's one of the reasons people read novels. It's almost like you become seduced by your own making, except that I know damn well that even though I imagine so much, especially in Almanac, that it's not something completely separate from all of the past and all past stories and things I've heard.”
Leslie Marmon Silko (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I was really fortunate because I was surrounded by generations of women. I never thought that women weren't as strong as men, as able as men or as valid as men. I was pretty old before I really started running into mainstream culture's attitudes about women. And because I never internalized the oppressor's attitude, I never behaved in a passive, helpless way. Instead of being crushed by sexism, I was sort of amused or enraged, but never cowed.”
Leslie Marmon Silko (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“all young writers should understand that even those things that we throw in the trash can are necessary to get us to where we want to be. (1994)”
Leslie Marmon Silko (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I am never far away from oral narrative, storytelling and narration, and the use of narrative to order experience. The people at home believe that there is one big story going on and made up of many little stories, and the story goes on and on. The stories are alive and they outlive us, and storytellers are only caretakers of the story. Storytellers can be anonymous. Their names don't matter because the stories live on. I think that's what people mean when they say that there are no new stories under the sun. It's true - the old stories live on, but with new caretakers. (1994)”
Leslie Marmon Silko (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The most radical kinds of politics are not in harangues given at stupid rallies. I mean the most earth-shaking kinds of shifts occur when language is plain truth. (1987)”
Leslie Marmon Silko (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The attitude of the white shaman is that he knows more about Indians than the Indians know. (1976)”
Leslie Marmon Silko (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source