Top 40 Leslie Marmon Silko Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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

2. “You don’t have anything if you don’t have the stories.”

— Leslie Marmon Silko

3. “Things which don’t shift and grow are dead things.”

— Leslie Marmon Silko

4. “They are afraid, Tayo. They feel something happening, they can see something happening around them, and it scares them. Indians or Mexicans or whites – most people are afraid of change. They think that if their children have the same color of skin, the same color of eyes, that nothing is changing.” She laughed softly. “They are fools. They blame us, the ones who look different. That way they don’t have to think about what has happened inside themselves.”

— Leslie Marmon Silko

5. “But sometimes what we call ‘memory’ and what we call ‘imagination’ are not so easily distinguished.”

— Leslie Marmon Silko

6. “To be able to make up stories has been a great gift to me from my ancestors and from the storytellers who were so numerous at Laguna Pueblo when I was growing up. I learned to read as soon as I could because I wanted stories without having to depend on adults to tell or read stories to me.”

— Leslie Marmon Silko

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

— Leslie Marmon Silko

8. “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

9. “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

10. “The Indian wars have never ended in the Americas.”

— Leslie Marmon Silko

11. “Memory is tricky-memory for certain facts and or details is probably more imaginative than anything, but the important thing is to keep the feeling the story has. I never forget that: the feeling one has of the story is what you must strive to bring forth faithfully.”

— Leslie Marmon Silko

12. “I am overwhelmed sometimes and feel a great deal of wonder at words, just simple words and how deeply we can touch each other with them, though I know that most of the time language is the most abused of all human abilities or traits.”

— Leslie Marmon Silko

13. “Sacred time is always in the Present.”

— Leslie Marmon Silko

14. “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

15. “The word he chose to express “fragile” was filled with the intricacies of a continuing process, and with a strength inherent in spider webs woven across paths through sand hills where early in the morning the sun becomes entangled in each filament of web.”

— Leslie Marmon Silko

16. “He cried the relief he felt at finally seeing the pattern, the way all the stories fit together – the old stories, the war stories, their stories – to become the story that was still being told. He was not crazy; he had never been crazy. He had only seen and heard the world as it always was: no boundaries, only transitions through all distances and time.”

— Leslie Marmon Silko

17. “It took a great deal of energy to be a human being, and the more the wind blew and the sun moved southwest, the less energy Tayo had.”

— Leslie Marmon Silko

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

— Leslie Marmon Silko

19. “Jungle rain had no beginning or end; it grew like foliage from the sky, branching and arching to the earth, sometimes in solid thickets entangling the islands, and other times, in tendrils of blue mist curling out of coastal clouds. The jungle breathed an eternal green that fevered men until they dripped sweat the way rubbery jungle leaves dripped the monsoon rain.”

— Leslie Marmon Silko

20. “You damn your own soul better than I ever could.”

— Leslie Marmon Silko

21. “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

22. “Being alive was all right then: he had not breathed like that for a long time.”

— Leslie Marmon Silko

23. “In that hospital they don’t bury the dead, they keep them in rooms and talk to them.”

— Leslie Marmon Silko

24. “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

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

— Leslie Marmon Silko

26. “Janice Gould is one of our best poets. The music of her poetry will delight you, and her gentle courageous accounts of tribal, family, and personal history make this book unforgettable. Doubters and Dreamers is a master-piece.”

— Leslie Marmon Silko

27. “That was the responsibility that went with being human, old Ku’oosh said, the story behind each word must be told so there could be no mistake in the meaning of what had been said; and this demanded great patience and love.”

— Leslie Marmon Silko

28. “He liked the way she talked. There was something in her eyes too. He saw it the first time when she had said, ‘I’ve seen you before many times, and I always remembered you.’ Josiah could not remember ever seeing her before, but there was something in her hazel brown eyes that made him believe her.”

— Leslie Marmon Silko

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

— Leslie Marmon Silko

30. “There was not, and there never had been, a legal government by Europeans anywhere in the Americas. Not by any definition, not even by the Europeans’ own definitions and laws. Because no legal government could be established on stolen land.”

— Leslie Marmon Silko

31. “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

32. “Moonflowers blossom in the sand hills before dawn, just as I followed him.”

— Leslie Marmon Silko

33. “I don’t make outlines or plans because whenever I do, they turn out to be useless. It is as if I am compelled to violate the scope of any outline or plan; it is as if the writing does not want me to know what is about to happen.”

— Leslie Marmon Silko

34. “Old stories and new stories are essential: They tell us who we are, and they enable us to survive. We thank all the ancestors, and we thank all those people who keep on telling stories generation after generation, because if you don’t have the stories, you don’t have anything.”

— Leslie Marmon Silko

35. “The truth of course was otherwise, but Lecha had never felt she owed anyone the truth, unless it was truth about their own lives, and then they had to pay her to tell them.”

— Leslie Marmon Silko

36. “This feeling was their life, vitality locked deep in blood memory, and the people were strong, and the fifth world endured, and nothing was ever lost as long as the love remained.”

— Leslie Marmon Silko

37. “Fortunately, her year of graduate classes prepared her for obnoxious conduct.”

— Leslie Marmon Silko

38. “He inhabited a gray winter fog on a distant elk mountain where hunters are lost indefinitely and their own bones mark the boundaries.”

— Leslie Marmon Silko

39. “But the effects were hidden, evident only in the sterility of their art, which continued to feed off the vitality of other cultures, and in the dissolution of their consciousness into dead objects: the plastic and neon, the concrete and steel. Hollow and lifeless as a witchery clay figure. And what little still remained to white people was shriveled like a seed hoarded too long, shrunken past its time, and split open now, to expose a fragile, pale leaf stem, perfectly formed and dead.”

— Leslie Marmon Silko

40. “Earth was their mother, but her land and water could never be desecrated; blasted open and polluted by man, but never desecrated. Man only desecrated himself in such acts; puny humans could not affect the integrity of Earth. Earth always was and would ever be sacred. Mother Earth might be ravaged by the Destroyers, but she still loved the people.”

— Leslie Marmon Silko

41. “The humans would not be a great loss to the earth. The energy or “electricity” of a being’s spirit was not extinguished by death; it was set free from the flesh. Dust to dust or as a meal for pack rats, the energy of the spirit was never lost. Out of the dust grew the plants; the plants were consumed and became muscle and bone; and all the time, the energy had only been changing form, nothing had been lost or destroyed.”

— Leslie Marmon Silko

42. “Even idiots can understand a church that tortures and kills is a church that can no longer heal.”

— Leslie Marmon Silko

43. “The white man had violated the Mother Earth, and he had been stricken with the sensation of a gaping emptiness between his throat and his heart.”

— Leslie Marmon Silko

44. “The powers who controlled the United States didn’t want the people to know their history. If the people knew their history, they would realize they must rise up.”

— Leslie Marmon Silko