All through my life I never did believe in human measurement. Numbers, time, inches, feet. All are just ploys for cutting nature down to size. I know the grand scheme of the world is beyond our brains to fathom, so I don't try, just let it in.

When every inch of the world is known, sleep may be the only wilderness that we have left.

Can you stop your mother from singing to you? Who would do such a thing?

...which causes me to wonder, my own purpose on so many days as humble as the spider's, what is beautiful that I make? What is elegant? What feeds the world?

[On her and husband Michael Dorris:] We both have title collections. I think a title is like a magnet. It begins to draw these scraps of experience or conversation or memory to it. Eventually, it collects a book.

If life's a joke, then suicide's a bad punch line.

I feel myself becoming less a person than a place, inhabited, a foreign land.