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Leslie Marmon Silko

75 quotes

“Certainly for me the most effective political statement I could make is in my art work. I believe in subversion rather than straight-out confrontation. I believe in the sands of time, so to speak.”
Leslie Marmon Silko (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“as a writer and as a person, I like to think of myself in a more old-fashioned sense, the way the old folks felt, which was, first of all you're a human being; secondly you originate from somewhere, and from a family, and a culture. But first of all, human beings.”
Leslie Marmon Silko (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“my process is mostly, not totally, subconscious, not conscious. The reason I write is to find out what I mean. I know some of the things I mean. I couldn't tell you the best things I know. And I can't know the best things I know until I write.”
Leslie Marmon Silko (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“in order to realize the wonder and power of what we share, we must understand how different we are too, how different things are. I'm really intrigued with finding out similarities in conditions, and yet divergences in responses, of human beings. I'm really interested in that. Without forgetting that first of all, before we can ever appreciate what's the same, we have really to love and respect and be able to internalize freedom of expression.”
Leslie Marmon Silko (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“...the best thing you can have in life is to have someone tell you a story; they are physically with you, but in lieu of that, since at age five or six you get separated from all of those people who hold you and talk to you, I learned at an early age to find comfort in a book, that a book would talk to me when no one else would. Or a book would say things that would soothe in a way that no person could.”
Leslie Marmon Silko (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“with a good story there is no end to the possibilities”
Leslie Marmon Silko (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I think what writers, storytellers, and poets have to say necessarily goes beyond such trivial boundaries as origin.”
Leslie Marmon Silko (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“(Why did you entitle the novel Ceremony?) S: That's what it is. Writing a novel was a ceremony for me to stay sane.”
Leslie Marmon Silko (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It's generally double-edged. It seems with humor, there's always something beyond just the laughing that when you're laughing, you have to think beyond to greater considerations.”
Leslie Marmon Silko (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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 (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Whatever just happened, it would be related to other things that had happened, and finally the function of the stories would be to keep you from feeling that God had just dropped a rock on your head had been singled out in some way, which is really dangerous, because the stories remind you that this isn't the first time.”
Leslie Marmon Silko (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“good literature has to be accessible. It's incredibly narcissistic to be otherwise. Artists can't work with a chip on their shoulders, and that's what has happened to a lot of feminists. Politics can ruin anything. It will ruin a picnic. Politics in the most crass sense - rally around the banner kind. I'm political, but I'm political in my stories. That's different. I think the work should be accessible, and that's always the challenge and task of the teller - to make accessible perceptions that the people need.”
Leslie Marmon Silko (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“(Do you think there are any contemporary myths emerging?) S: I don't see that there has ever been any end to the stories. They just keep going on and on. So far, I haven't seen that there are any new ones. There's a need to have a multiplicity of perspectives and tellers. I tell some stories. Simon Ortiz tells others. We need certain tellers to look after certain myths. The ones I'm looking after have always been around. It's part of a continuum. I see it more as a matter that certain people come along and work with the myths that have always been there.”
Leslie Marmon Silko (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When I go to the Laguna Acoma High School to talk to Native American kids, I tell them that storytelling for Indians is like a natural resource. Some places have oil, some have a lot of water or timber or gold, but around here, it's the ear that has developed. You have it. In a sense, it's accidental just like uranium is accidental in a given region. But I want them to know that this potential exists. There's the possibility for telling stories. I think it has to do with community, with growing up in certain kinds of communities as opposed to others.”
Leslie Marmon Silko (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Yoeme said even idiots can understand a church that tortures and kills is a church that can no longer heal; thus the Europeans had arrived in the New World in precarious spiritual health. Christianity might work on other continents and with other human beings; Yoeme did not dispute those possibilities. But from the beginning in the Americas, the outsiders had sensed their Christianity was somehow inadequate in the face of the immensely powerful and splendid spirit beings who inhabited the vastness of the Americas. The Europeans had not been able to sleep soundly on the American continents, not even with a full military guard. (Part Six, Book One: Prophecy)”
Leslie Marmon Silko (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Ceremony I will tell you something about stories, [he said] 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. You don’t have anything if you don’t have the stories. Their evil is mighty but it can’t stand up to our stories. So they try to destroy the stories let the stories be confused or forgotten. They would like that They would be happy Because we would be defenseless then. He rubbed his belly. I keep it in here [he said] Here, put your hand on it See, It is moving. There is life here for the people. And in the belly of this story the rituals and the ceremony are still growing.”
Leslie Marmon Silko (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If the white people never looked beyond the lie, to see that theirs was a nation built on stolen land, then they would never be able to understand how they had been used by the witchery; they would never know that they were still being manipulated by those who knew how to stir the ingredients together: white thievery and injustice boiling up the anger and hatred that would finally destroy the world: the starving against the fat, the colored against the white. The destroyers had only to set it into motion, and sit back to count the casualties. But it was more than a body count; the lies devoured white hearts, and for more than two hundred years white people had worked to fill their emptiness; they tried to glut the hollowness with patriotic wars and with great technology and the wealth it brought. And always they had been fooling themselves, and they knew it. (p178)”
Leslie Marmon Silko (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The people had been taught to despise themselves because they were left with barren land and dry rivers. But they were wrong. It was the white people who had nothing; it was the white people who were suffering as thieves do, never able to forget that their pride was wrapped in something stolen, something that had never been, and could never be, theirs. The destroyers had tricked the white people as completely as they had fooled the Indians, and now only a few people understood how the filthy deception worked; only a few people knew that the lie was destroying the white people faster than it was destroying Indian people. 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. (p189)”
Leslie Marmon Silko (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The writer's life is a constant battle to balance your responsibility to your writing with your responsibilities to the everyday world, meaning people, your pets, your landlord, whatever. There's that constant pull of the world, which is opposed to the need to clear out a kind of psychic space with plenty of time and no interruptions. Time to think and gradually to descend into the area where you have to work. In a way it's like working underground. It's not easy to get down there and it's not easy to get back. You can never reach that perfect balance. You always feel that one part or the other is not getting enough time. (2015)”
Leslie Marmon Silko (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“(Q: Why do you stay in Arizona?) A: Turn tail and run and go to some little Shangri-la? Ha! I am a part of this. You don't just run off and leave your land and your people and the animals and the trees. You stay here. Laguna has its problems-the reservation has unemployment, and they have suicides. But they have this wonderful culture and cohesion and history, and they have themselves. No matter how bad things are at Laguna, they're way better than here. But the truth is that somebody has to come over here and say, "Look, this is criminal. These policemen, these judges, these legislators in Arizona are criminals. The people shouldn't listen to them." I feel that way on a national level, too. When you find something like this, you have to tell about it. You just can't ignore it.”
Leslie Marmon Silko (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“the ease I have in writing?...It must come from being immersed in a community where every interaction reinforces a narrative vision of oneself and one's belonging. Narrative is the only way they keep track of all the rituals, all the hunting places, all the history, all of the chemistry. How you do this, how you make that, how you bend this. Nothing written down. All in the human memory and kept collectively. So that you'll go clear to the next village to ask some old woman how was it exactly that they used to do this. They used human brains for books. Because the information is stored in narrative, it's ordered completely differently than western European ordering of, like, technical botany or biology, by taking things apart. It puts things together and reinforces stories. So that one deer hunting story can contain valuable information in a number of different areas that you'd have to cross-catalogue.”
Leslie Marmon Silko (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“(Q: What's missing in contemporary writers?) A: They're disconnected. The sense of not being a part of anything. The anomie. It's the great malaise of the twentieth century. The autonomous, lonely little character-what Harold Brodkey wrote about. But language is so connected to other times and people. Words are so alive with other connections. It's almost as if some of the postmodern fiction, some of the experimental fiction, is trying to start a fire by dumping ice water on the wood. Something's a bit off because the medium, language, is connected historically. And yet the feeling of that poor individual, that disconnection. The only time you are connected is when you're writing and using language. (Q: So for you that connection is crucial-the connection with the external world and the connection with the whole history.) A: Absolutely. Otherwise you fall into this abyss where everything that's Other is completely irrelevant. It's almost a kind of death.”
Leslie Marmon Silko (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“(Q: When you saw that it was going to be an almanac, what difference did that make?) A: Then I started to think about the notion of time reckoned not with numerals and numbers, but what if you just talk about time as narratives, day by day. What happened that day is the identity of the day. More in the direction of what the Mayans thought. Once we did that, the editing went differently, and it became a whole different book. (Q: Your sense of time in the book is very non-Western.) A: The way time is computed in western European cultures is completely political. Colonialists always want time and history not to go back very far...Here [among Native American people], five hundred years is nothing. This is something that the Anglo-Americans, the invaders, the colonials, never want to face-in China or India or Africa-especially when there are native people who have an incredible spiritual connection to the very earth. Time is totally political-especially when they are on that mother ground and especially when it's such a short period of time, where somebody living today could have talked to somebody who had talked to somebody who actually was at the scene of some of these events. Then you completely miscalculate how well things are going.”
Leslie Marmon Silko (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“(How do you feel about the Bicentennial-do you have feelings about it?) LMS: Oh, I do, definitely, I have all kinds of things to say-I think it's one reason I'm very anxious to try to get the novel out during 1976. I just want to make sure that during this year when all of this sort of celebrating is going on, that Americans can be reminded that there are different ways to look at the past 200 years. I just want to make sure that beside all of the rhapsodizing about Paul Revere and George Washington and Benjamin Franklin that Americans are reminded that this great land, this powerful nation they are celebrating was established on stolen land. It was the resources, the metals, the minerals, it was the water, it was the coal, that enabled those people who came to America to build this nation. In this Bicentennial year we should remember, we should remember that it was on this stolen land that this country was settled and begun. In Anglo-Saxon law, in common law, when something is stolen, no matter how many times the stolen property changes hands, in common law, that piece of property still belongs to the original owner. It doesn't matter whether the people take the stolen article in good faith. The property remains stolen. As long as this fact is acknowledged, then I'll be satisfied, and they can celebrate all they have done with this stolen land and the stolen resources and they can pat themselves on the back for the achievement. (1976)”
Leslie Marmon Silko (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“(How do you relate to the women's movement?) S: I feel I've benefited by it just generally in the sense that anything that undermines the stereotypes perpetrated on all of us by white men is helpful. What it does is take some of the pressure off those of us who have never lived very close to the stereotypes. I've always been the way I was. Here at Laguna, a lot more is expected of women; women are expected to be strong, to manage the property. Children belong to women and to their families. Women do the plastering. It's a relief to have the stereotypes knocked down. It's just made it easier for me to do what I want to do.”
Leslie Marmon Silko (born 1948) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source