Quotes by N. Scott Momaday

About N. Scott Momaday:

Navarre Scott Momaday is a Native American author of Kiowa descent. His work House Made of Dawn was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1969. Momaday received the National Medal of Arts in 2007 for his work that celebrated and preserved Native American oral and art tradition. He holds 20 honorary degrees from colleges and universities, and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

There was only the dark infinity in which nothing was. And something happened. At the distance of a star something happened, and everything began. The Word did not come into being, but it was. It did not break upon the silence, but it was older than ...

N. Scott Momaday

In the white man's world, language, too -- and the way which the white man thinks of it--has undergone a process of change. The white man takes such things as words and literatures for granted, as indeed he must, for nothing in his world is so common...

N. Scott Momaday

Coyotes have the gift of seldom being seen; they keep to the edge of vision and beyond, loping in and out of cover on the plains and highlands. And at night, when the whole world belongs to them, they parley at the river with the dogs, their higher, ...

N. Scott Momaday

They have assumed the names and gestures of their enemies, but have held on to their own, secret souls; and in this there is a resistance and an overcoming, a long outwaiting.

N. Scott Momaday

My father was a painter and he taught art. He once said to me, 'I never knew an Indian child who could not draw.'

N. Scott Momaday

He used both hands when he made the bear. Imagine a bear proceeding from the hands of God.

N. Scott Momaday

It's a matter of honor, death. It's your white page, do you see? Or your shame. Either you're worthy of it or you ain't. To accept it, to face it with honor and respect and goodwill, to it, that is to be brave.

N. Scott Momaday

If coupling should but make us whole / And of the selfsame mind and soul, / Then couple let's in celebration; / We have contained the population.

N. Scott Momaday

To look upon that landscape in the early morning, with the sun at your back, is to lose the sense of proportion.

N. Scott Momaday

Sometimes, I think the best kind of poem is one in which there is an acute balance between what is humorous and that which is very serious. That balance is very hard to strike. But it can be done.

N. Scott Momaday

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

N. Scott Momaday

I have deep roots in this Oklahoma soil. It makes me proud.

N. Scott Momaday

I am interested in the way that we look at a given landscape and take possession of it in our blood and brain. None of us lives apart from the land entirely; such an isolation is unimaginable.

N. Scott Momaday

Writing is not a matter of choice. Writers have to write. It is somehow in their temperament, in the blood, in tradition.

N. Scott Momaday

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

N. Scott Momaday

Writing engenders in us certain attitudes toward language. It encourages us to take words for granted. Writing has enabled us to store vast quantities of words indefinitely. This is advantageous on the one hand but dangerous on the other. The result ...

N. Scott Momaday

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.

N. Scott Momaday

To encounter the sacred is to be alive at the deepest center of human existence. Sacred places are the truest definitions of the earth; they stand for the earth immediately and forever; they are its flags and shields. If you would know the earth for ...

N. Scott Momaday

I am a member of the Kiowa Gourd Dance Society; I visit sacred places such as Devil's Tower and the Medicine Wheel. These places are important to me, because they've been made sacred by sacrifice, by the investment of blood and experience and story.

N. Scott Momaday

I have a pretty good knowledge of the Indian world by virtue of living on several different reservations and being exposed to several different cultures and languages.

N. Scott Momaday

Author Bio

  • NameN. Scott Momaday
  • DescriptionAmerican author
  • AliasesNavarre Scott Momaday
  • BornFebruary 27, 1934
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionAuthor; Novelist
  • WorksHouse Made Of Dawn
  • AwardsGuggenheim Fellowship; National Medal Of Arts