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

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.

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

It's a landscape that has to be seen to be believed. And, as I say on occasion, it may have to be believed in order to be seen.

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

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.

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