Top 40 N. Scott Momaday Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— N. Scott Momaday

2. “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

3. “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.”

— N. Scott Momaday

4. “It is here that I can concentrate my mind upon the Remembered Earth. It is here that I am most conscious of being, here that wonder comes upon my blood, here I want to live forever; and it is no matter that I must die.”

— N. Scott Momaday

5. “The Kiowas reckoned their stature by the distance they could see.”

— N. Scott Momaday

6. “Your imagination comes to life, and this, you think, is where Creation was begun.”

— N. Scott Momaday

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

— N. Scott Momaday

8. “Once in his life a man ought to concentrate his mind upon the remembered earth. He ought to give himself up to a particular landscape in his experience; to look at it from as many angles as he can, to wonder upon it, and dwell upon it.”

— N. Scott Momaday

9. “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.”

— N. Scott Momaday

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

— N. Scott Momaday

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

— N. Scott Momaday

12. “Loneliness is an aspect of the land.”

— N. Scott Momaday

13. “In the beginning was the word, and it was spoken.”

— N. Scott Momaday

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

— N. Scott Momaday

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

— N. Scott Momaday

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

— N. Scott Momaday

17. “Art is affirmation.”

— N. Scott Momaday

18. “My line of vision was such that the creature filled the moon like a fossil. It had gone there, I thought, to live and die, for there, of all places, was its small definition made whole and eternal.”

— N. Scott Momaday

19. “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

20. “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

21. “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 the silence and the silence was made of it.”

— N. Scott Momaday

22. “Although my grandmother lived out her long life in the shadow of Rainy Mountian, the immense landscape of the continental interior lay like memory in her blood.”

— N. Scott Momaday

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

— N. Scott Momaday

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

— N. Scott Momaday

25. “As far as I am concerned, poetry is a statement concerning the human condition, composed in verse.”

— N. Scott Momaday

26. “The first word gives origin to the second, the first and second to the third, and the third to the fourth, and so on. You cannot begin with the second word...”

— N. Scott Momaday

27. “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

28. “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

29. “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 what it really is, learn it through its sacred places. At Devil’s Tower or Canyon de Chelly or the Cahokia Mounds, you touch the pulse of the living planet; you feel its breath upon you. You become one with a spirit that pervades geologic time and space.”

— N. Scott Momaday

30. “Sill. Their horses and weapons were confiscated, and they were imprisoned. In a field just.”

— N. Scott Momaday

31. “When we dance the earth trembles. When our steps fall on the earth we feel the shudder of life beneath us, and the earth feels the beating of our hearts, and we become one with the earth. We shall not sever ourselves from the earth. We must chant our being, and we must dance in time with the rhythms of the earth. We must keep the earth.”

— N. Scott Momaday

32. “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, sharper voices full of authority and rebuke. They are an old council of clowns, and they are listened to.”

— N. Scott Momaday

33. “And the simple act of listening is crucial to the concept of language, more crucial even than reading and writing, and language in turn is crucial to human society.”

— N. Scott Momaday

34. “Her name is Ago, and she belonged to the last culture to evolve in North America.”

— N. Scott Momaday

35. “We perceive existence by means of words and names. To this or that vague, potential thing I will give a name, and it will exist thereafter, and its existence will be clearly perceived. The name enables me to see it. I can call it by its name, and I can see it for what it is.”

— N. Scott Momaday

36. “She was not listening at the level of language but beneath it, in the deep recesses of the imagination.”

— N. Scott Momaday

37. “There is no love without loss. I hear the drums that vibrate to the heartbeat of the earth. They set me dancing. I see the clouds that wreathe the summits. They set me dreaming. I know the wonder of waves that shake the headlands. They awaken my soul. I hear the screams of eagles on the wind. And I ponder, what are these things to me who loves and does not reckon loss? Do I not keep the earth?”

— N. Scott Momaday

38. “There was a time when “man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent,” this New World, “commensurate to his capacity for wonder.” I would strive with all my strength to give that sense of wonder to those who will come after me.”

— N. Scott Momaday

39. “How many lifeless things are placed each day between us and the living earth? A friend in Brooklyn told me that his little son had gone out to watch workmen breaking up a sidewalk. He was fascinated to see earth under the cement. He had never seen it before.”

— N. Scott Momaday

40. “Yes, I thought, now I see the earth as it really is; never again will I see things as I saw them yesterday or the day before.”

— N. Scott Momaday

41. “His mane is made of short rainbows.”

— N. Scott Momaday