Quotes by Linda Hogan

“We are full of bread and gas, getting fat on the outside while inside we grow thin”

“You cant remember Mariah Carey ? Hello! That was the highlight of the whole weekend. Shes like a princess.”

“You can see whats left, ... Not much could be saved. ”

“Not much could be saved out of this”

“We had these heavy chunks of concrete and bricks falling on us. Timbers and what-have-you, and my wife was, unfortunately, struck with flying debris,”

“It will never be the same,”

“I cant be married to another person for 30 years; I cant grow up with another person -- that just wont happen, not in this lifetime.”

“That gave me the strength to put one foot in front of another and keep going, ... And thats what were going to do.”

“Especially being selected as a national merit scholar, Im just fantastically proud of her, ... But its just real tough knowing that that her mom couldnt be there. Thats real hard.”

As for me, I have a choice between honoring that dark life Ive seen so many years moving in the junipers, or of walking away and going on with my own human busyness. There is always that choice for humans.

There is no real aloneness. There is solitude and the nurturing silence that is relationship with ourselves, but even then we are part of something larger.

We are looking for a tongue that speaks with reverence for life, searching for an ecology of mind. Without it, we have no home, no place of our own within the creation. It is not only the vocabulary of science we desire. We want a language of that different yield. A yield rich as the harvests of the earth, a yield that returns us to our own sacredness, to a self-love and resort that will carry out to others.

What a strange alchemy we have worked, turning earth around to destroy itself, using earths own elements to wound it.

Caretaking is the utmost spiritual and physical responsibility of our time, and perhaps that stewardship is finally our place in the web of life, our work, the solution to the mystery that we are. There are already so many holes in the universe that will never again be filled, and each of them forces us to question why we permitted such loss, such tearing away at the fabric of life, and how we will live with our planet in the future.

Walking, I can almost hear the redwoods beating. And the oceans are above me here, rolling clouds, heavy and dark. It is winter and there is smoke from the fires. It is a world of elemental attention, of all things working together, listening to what speaks in the blood. Whichever road I follow, I walk in the land of many gods, and they love and eat one another. Suddenly all my ancestors are behind me. Be still, they say. Watch and listen. You are the result of the love of thousands.

There is a way that nature speaks, that land speaks. Most of the time we are simply not patient enough, quiet enough, to pay attention to the story.

What finally turned me back toward the older traditions of my own [Chickasaw] and other Native peoples was the inhumanity of the Western world, the places--both inside and out--where the cultures knowledge and language dont go, and the despair, even desperation, it has spawned. We live, I see now, by different stories, the Western mind and the indigenous. In the older, more mature cultures where people still live within the kinship circles of animals and human beings there is a connection with animals, not only as food, but as powers, a word which can be taken to mean states of being, gifts, or capabilities.Ive found, too, that the ancient intellectual traditions are not merely about belief, as some would say. Belief is not a strong enough word. They are more than that: They are part of lived experience, the on-going experience of people rooted in centuries-old knowledge that is held deep and strong, knowledge about the natural laws of Earth, from the beginning of creation, and the magnificent terrestrial intelligence still at work, an intelligence now newly called ecology by the Western science that tells us what our oldest tribal stories maintain--the human animal is a relatively new creation here; animal and plant presences were here before us; and we are truly the younger sisters and brothers of the other animal species, not quite as well developed as we thought we were. It is through our relationships with animals and plants that we maintain a way of living, a cultural ethics shaped from an ancient understanding of the world, and this is remembered in stories that are the deepest reflections of our shared lives on

For every inch of skin, there is memory. Devils are so made. Saints, too, if you believe in them. His humanity has been broken as an old walking stick that once held up a crippled man named Thomas. He realizes the stick and the man are one thing and he can fall. He has violated the laws beneath the laws of men and countries, something deeper, the earth and the sea, the explosions of trees. He has to care again. He has to be water again, rock, earth with its new spring wildflowers and its beautiful, complex mosses.

Oblivion, she thought. That was the world she lived in. It was what they should name some countries, towns, and places.

There were times when the light of the moon had gone out and she felt a great loneliness. It wasnt for herself. It was for what had happened to the grasses of their land, their waters, not just the massacre there, the slavery, but the killing of the ocean.