N. Scott Momaday Quotes

10 Sourced Quotes

Loneliness is an aspect of the land. All things in the plain are isolate; there is no confusion of objects in the eye, but one hill or one tree or one man. To look upon that landscape in the early morning, with the sun at your back, is to lose the sense of proportion. Your imagination comes to life, and this, you think, is where Creation was begun.

N. Scott Momaday
We are what we imagine. Our very existence consists in our imagination of ourselves. Our best destiny is to imagine, at least, completely, who and what, and that we are. The greatest tragedy that can befall us is to go unimagined.

N. Scott Momaday
They have assumed the names and gestures of their enemies, but have held on to their own, secret souls; and in this there is a resistance and an overcoming, a long outwaiting.

N. Scott Momaday
Once in his life a man ought to concentrate his mind upon the remembered earth. He ought to give himself up to a particular landscape in his experience; to look at it from as many angles as he can, to wonder upon it, and dwell upon it.

N. Scott Momaday
Words were medicine; they were magic and invisible. They came from nothing into sound and meaning. They were beyond price; they could neither be bought nor sold.

N. Scott Momaday
A word has power in and of itself. It comes from nothing into sound and meaning; it gives origin to all things.

N. Scott Momaday
The Kiowas reckoned their stature by the distance they could see.

N. Scott Momaday
The first word gives origin to the second, the first and second to the third, and the third to the fourth, and so on. You cannot begin with the second word...

N. Scott Momaday
Although my grandmother lived out her long life in the shadow of Rainy Mountian, the immense landscape of the continental interior lay like memory in her blood

N. Scott Momaday
My line of vision was such that the creature filled the moon like a fossil. It had gone there, I thought, to live and die, for there, of all places, was its small definition made whole and eternal

N. Scott Momaday