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.

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

For the storyteller, for the arrowmaker, language does indeed represent the only chance for survival.

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.

He used both hands when he made the bear. Imagine a bear proceeding from the hands of God.

The highest human purpose is always to reinvent and celebrate the sacred.

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