By writing I can live in ways that I could not survive.

He had a thousand-year-old stare.

It kills your writing if you try to manipulate it with crude politics.

Our tribe unraveled like a coarse rope, frayed at either end as the old and new among us were taken.

All of our actions have in their doing the seed of their undoing. ... That in her creation of her children there should be the unspeakable promise of their death, for by their birth she had created mortal beings.

It's impossible to write about Native life without humor-that's how people maintain sanity.

Your life feels different on you, once you greet death and understand your heart's position.