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 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.

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

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

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.

He reached out and intertwined our hands. Gently urging me forward he whispered, “Have I lost you love?

The essence if hope is accepting uncertainty.

The church wanted us to give out food to malnourished children, but they didn't want us to question why they were malnourished to begin with.

I think God made a woman to be strong and not to be trampled under the feet of men. I've always felt this way because my mother was a very strong woman, without a husband.

To say it was a beautiful day would not begin to explain it. It was that day when the end of summer intersects perfectly with the start of fall .... [p.218 ff.]

Sentimentality - that's what we call the sentiment we don't share.

If there's an incursion I don't go out of the house.

Make music a service that's easy to consume, and there'll be plenty of money for everyone.

How can you have any regret when everything worked out fine? But why I think it worked out fine is due to the lessons I learned along the way. And one of those involves listening to experts.