relationships. That's all there really is. There's your relationship with the dust that just blew in your face, or with the person who just kicked you end over end. ... You have to come to terms, to some kind of equilibrium, with those people around you, those people who care for you, your environment.

Leslie Marmon Silko

Categorized in : People Dust Care

I will tell you something about stories . . . They aren't just entertainment. Don't be fooled. They are all we have, you see, all we have to fight off illness and death.

Leslie Marmon Silko

health reading death

The only way to get change is not through the courts or - heaven forbid - the politicians, but through a change of human consciousness and through a change of heart. Only through the arts - music, poetry, dance, painting, writing - "can we really reach each other.

Leslie Marmon Silko

writing heaven art

Then they grow away from the earth then they grow away from the sun then they grow away from the plants and the animals. They see no life. When they look they see only objects. The world is a dead thing for them the trees and the rivers are not alive. the mountains and stones are not alive. The deer and bear are objects. They see no life. They fear. They fear the world. They destroy what they fear. They fear themselves.

Leslie Marmon Silko

rivers tree animal

But as long as you remember what you have seen, then nothing is gone. As long as you remember, it is part of this story we have together.

Leslie Marmon Silko

gone together long

Because if you weren't born white, you were forced to see differences; or if you weren't born what they called normal, or if you got injured, then you were left to explore the world of the different.

Leslie Marmon Silko

differences different white

Distances and days existed in themselves then; they all had a story. They were not barriers. If a person wanted to get to the moon, there is a way; it all depended on whether you knew the directions, on whether you knew the story of how others before you had gone. He had believed in the stories for a long time, until the teachers at Indian school taught him not to believe in that kind of "nonsense". But they had been wrong.

Leslie Marmon Silko

distance teacher believe

The American public has difficulty believing ... [that] injustice continues to be inflicted upon Indian people because Americans assume that the sympathy and tolerance they feel toward Indians is somehow 'felt' or transferred to the government policy that deals with Indians. This is not the case.

Leslie Marmon Silko

government believe people

When someone dies, you don't get over it by forgetting; you get over it by remembering, and you are aware that no person is ever truly lost or gone once they have been in our life and loved us, as we have loved them.

Leslie Marmon Silko

forget-you gone remember

But sometimes what we call 'memory' and what we call 'imagination' are not so easily distinguished.

Leslie Marmon Silko

imagination sometimes memories

the ancient people perceived the world and themselves within that world as part of an ancient continuous story composed of innumerable bundles of other stories.

Leslie Marmon Silko

stories people world

Night. Heavenly delicious sweet night of the desert that calls all of us to love her. The night is our comfort with her coolness and darkness. On wings, on feet, on our bellies, out we all come to glory in the night.

Leslie Marmon Silko

wings sweet night

You don't have anything if you don't have the stories.

Leslie Marmon Silko

ifs stories

I write in order to find out what I truly know and how I really feel about certain things. Writing requires me to go much deeper into my thoughts and memories than conversation does. Writing provides the solitude necessary to reflect on being in this world.

Leslie Marmon Silko

writing memories order

What is it about us human beings that we can’t let go of lost things?

Leslie Marmon Silko

cant-let-go lost-things letting-go

Anybody can act violently - there is nothing to it; but not every person is able to destroy his enemy with words.

Leslie Marmon Silko

able persons enemy

Writing cant change the world overnight, but writing may have an enormous effect over time, over the long haul.

Leslie Marmon Silko

writing may long

As long as the hummingbird had not abandoned the land, somewhere there were still flowers, and they could all go on.

Leslie Marmon Silko

land flower long

The Indian wars have never ended in the Americas.

Leslie Marmon Silko

indian war

The story was the important thing and little changes here and there were really part of the story. There were even stories about the different versions of stories and how they imagined the differing versions came to be.

Leslie Marmon Silko

here-and-there different important

Time limits are fictional. Losing all sense of time is actually the way to reality. We use clocks and calendars for convenience sake, not because that kind of time is real.

Leslie Marmon Silko

limits real use