There is a legacy of violence against native women that has gotten worse and worse over time.

We all got holes in our lives. Nobody dies in a perfect garment.

Money helps, though not so much as you think when you don't have it.

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.

...Grandpa's mind had left us, gone wild and wary. When I walked with him I could feel how strange it was. His thoughts swam between us, hidden under rocks, disappearing in weeds, and I was fishing for them, dangling my own words like baits and lures.

I truly think that you can't go and stalk your material, you have to leave the door open and whatever chooses you, chooses you. You can't go and wrestle it to the ground.

It didn't occur to me that my books would be widely read at all, and that enabled me to write anything I wanted to. And even once I realized that they were being read, I still wrote as if I were writing in secret. That's how one has to write anyway--in secret.