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

I wonder if, in the dark night of the sea, the octopus dreams of me.

In the beginning was the word, and it was spoken.

Anything is bearable if you can make a story out of it.

If you believe in the power of words, you can bring about physical changes in the universe.

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.

I sometimes think the contemporary white American is more culturally deprived than the Indian.

Indians are marvelous storytellers. In some ways, that oral tradition is stronger than the written tradition.

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.

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

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

An ignorant person is one who doesn't know what you have just found out.

Life is a character-building opportunity that we all volunteered for.

When fishermen cannot go to sea, they repair nets.

Most search committees use me.

Satan never wastes a fiery dart by aiming at a spot covered by armor. The bull's eye is located dead center in our inconsistency. That's where the enemy plans to bring us down.

Only because uplifted in song, was I able to endure the blaze of the dawn.

Throughout Finnegans Wake Joyce specifies the Tower of Babel as the tower of Sleep, that is, the tower of the witless assumption, or what Bacon calls the reign of the Idols.

Hate is too heavy a burden to bear.

Every time before a collection, I say, "I don't want it to come out. I want to cancel it. It's not good. I haven't achieved anything."

We ought to encourage our children to know their relatives. We need to talk of them, make effort to correspond with them, visit them, join family organizations, etc.