Top 35 Richard Wagamese Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Teachings come from everywhere when you open yourself to them. That’s the trick of it really, to open yourself to everything and everything opens itself to you.”

— Richard Wagamese

2. “She only nodded. “It’s all we are in the end. Our stories.”

— Richard Wagamese

3. “All that we are is story... It is what we arrive with. It is all we leave behind.”

— Richard Wagamese

4. “There is such a powerful eloquence in silence. True genius is knowing when to say nothing, to allow the experience, the moment itself, to carry the message, to say what needs to be said. Words are less important, less effective than feeling. When you can sit in perfect silence with someone, you truly know how to communicate.”

— Richard Wagamese

5. “I discovered that being someone you are not is often easier than living with the person you are.”

— Richard Wagamese

6. “To be depleted in the pursuit of a grander something is never truly exhausting. Certainly the tiredness is real and daunting but the lingering effects of perhaps helping to change and alter lives for the better and the majestic transcend all that. Today I am depleted. But I am also filled with energy and purpose.”

— Richard Wagamese

7. “Sometimes when things get taken away from you it feels like there’s a hole at your centre where you can feel the wind blow through, that’s sure.”

— Richard Wagamese

8. “We need mystery,” she said. “Creator in her wisdom knew this. Mystery fills us with awe and wonder. They are the foundations of humility, and humility, grandson, is the foundation of all learning.”

— Richard Wagamese

9. “I have come from the Land of the Spirits,” she said in a voice that was both humble and strong. “We have been watching you and we have been distressed at what we have seen. You have allowed this time of scarcity to take you away from the Teachings. Instead of sharing and living in harmony with each other, you steal and fight and plot against each other. Instead of living in gratitude for what you have, you live in anger for what you do not have. Instead of seeking to live in balance.”

— Richard Wagamese

10. “I am not here in this life to be well balanced or admired. I’m here to be an oddball, eccentric, different, wildly imaginative, creative, daring, curious, inventive and even a tad strange at times.”

— Richard Wagamese

11. “I got out without another word and stood in the snow and watched his old car disappear around the bend. His leaving was an ache that stayed with me for days. I would never see him again.”

— Richard Wagamese

12. “It seems to me sometimes that seasons leave us in the way people do, never just gone, but degree by degree, fading like the smell on a loved one’s favourite sweater, until the vanishing one day evolves into memory.”

— Richard Wagamese

13. “Watching the morning break, I realize again that darkness doesn’t kill the light – it defines it.”

— Richard Wagamese

14. “There are a thousand ways to say no – but, I can’t, it’s impossible, it’s too late – but there’s only one way to say yes: with your whole being. When you do that you chose that word, it becomes the most spiritual word in the universe and your world can change.”

— Richard Wagamese

15. “I gave them nothing back because all I knew was the vast amount they had taken from me, robbed me of, cheated me out of, all in the name of a God whose son bore the long hair none of us were allowed to wear any more.”

— Richard Wagamese

16. “Actions born of contemplation are wiser than those made in quiet desperation. If all that’s true, and I feel it is, then I have grown some in these 61 years. I have learned and become a better person. And from that maybe it’s the years ahead that will be the richest of my life. A quiet man moving forward, gladly beyond all expectation.”

— Richard Wagamese

17. “I wondered how people could live with things set in place, fixed, their places determined by the power of the recollection they contained, the memories they held. It was what made a home, I believed; the things we keep, the sum of us.”

— Richard Wagamese

18. “I understood then that when you miss a thing it leaves a hole that only the thing you miss can fill.”

— Richard Wagamese

19. “That open country is so huge you can feel lost and abandoned in it or you can work to feel a part of it, like ya belong to it and it belongs to you. Like a part of you is rock and stone and stream and all the open sky. Ya get past lonesome then... them creatures is all my family and i’m family to them as well.”

— Richard Wagamese

20. “If I am in ceremony and prayer for the right reasons, I leave all that up to Creator. When I surrender outcome, all things good and pure and peaceful come to me. My job is to choose what appears. Easy to say but hard to do, to get out of the way enough to allow the energy to flow.”

— Richard Wagamese

21. “I saw kids die of tuberculosis, influenza, pneumonia and broken hearts at St. Jerome’s.”

— Richard Wagamese

22. “I learned that I could draw the boundaries of my physical self inward, collapse the space I occupied and become a mote, a speck, an indifferent atom in its own peculiar orbit.”

— Richard Wagamese

23. “There was a feeling in him like a bruise, a purple ache that set between his ribs. He tasted a cry building at the back of his throat. It was too familiar and made him fearful.”

— Richard Wagamese

24. “I don’t want to touch you skin to skin. I want to touch you deeply, beneath the surface, where our real stories lie.”

— Richard Wagamese

25. “There was a feeling in him like waiting for a punishment.”

— Richard Wagamese

26. “Love is not about rescue, I understand now – it’s about allowing. In the Ojibway world, love is the process of you leading me back to who I am. You do that by stepping back and allowing the creative, nurturing energy of the universe to work. That’s the most courageous thing you can do when you love somebody. Deb showed me that. Both of us knew we’d found communion with one another. We’re loyal to the vision of our togetherness.”

— Richard Wagamese

27. “We were taught to be God-fearing,” my mother said. “One who loves does not brandish fear or require it.”

— Richard Wagamese

28. “They scooped out our insides, Saul. We are not responsible for that. We are not responsible for what happened to us. None of us are,” Fred said. LBut our healing – that’s up to us.”

— Richard Wagamese

29. “She’s a tale spinner,” he said. “She spins ‘em right outta the air. Tells ‘em whole so’s you’d think yer readin’ a book.”

— Richard Wagamese

30. “He held his hand up to his face and licked the wound. Blood. Old-tasting and rich like the sediment of a river. He looked at Jimmy. The blood on their faces meant they were part of the same stream now, bobbing in the current, borne forward effortlessly under the slowly twirling dome of the sky.”

— Richard Wagamese

31. “That school gave you words that do not apply to us,” my grandmother said. “Out here there is no need to keep the spirit bound to fear.” “We were taught to be God-fearing,” my mother said. “One who loves does not brandish fear or require it.” The old woman stopped her braiding to look at my mother and aunt, but they kept their heads down and continued with the ties. “Here in this old way you may rediscover that and reclaim it as your own.”

— Richard Wagamese

32. “But there were always things swimming around in me that I could neither hold on to long enough to comprehend or learn to live with. It was like the change in the air that comes before a storm. You feel the energy build but there’s nothing you can do to stop it. That’s what it was like for me. When those times came I couldn’t talk. There was no language for it. I suppose when you can’t understand something yourself it’s impossible to let anybody else in even if you’re motivated to.”

— Richard Wagamese

33. “Jimmy used to say we’re a Great Mystery. Everything. Said the things they done, those old-time indians, was all about learnin’ to live with that mystery. Not solving it, not comin’ to grips with it, not even tryin’ to guess it out. Just bein’ with it. I guess I wish I’da learned the secret to doing that.”

— Richard Wagamese

34. “I’ve come to understand that the pain of a wound or a loss is over as it happens. What follows is the pain of getting well.”

— Richard Wagamese

35. “Love is unbroken country. Every step ya take deeper into it changes you. Makes you more. Changes the geography of who you are. And if yer brave enough to enter it alone and find your place in it, ya can’t never be lonesome again on accounta ya come to live in everything love touches.”

— Richard Wagamese

36. “Their faces burned with zeal and joy and their breathing was like the expelled air of mustangs. The clomp of their blades made me think of hoofs on frozen ground. This was the game. This gathering of brothers, of kin, joined by the exuberance of effort and challenge and strain, breathing the air that rose from the glacial face of a rink under a bleak sun.”

— Richard Wagamese