Top 100 Tommy Orange Quotes (2026 Update)
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51. “In the late 1990s, Saddam Hussein commissioned a Quran to be written in his own blood. Now Muslim leaders aren’t sure what to do with it. To have written the Quran in blood was a sin, but to destroy it would also be a sin.”

— Tommy Orange

52. “The Drome first came to me in the mirror when I was six.”

— Tommy Orange

53. “Yes, things look bad these days. Everyone talks like it’s getting better and that just makes it all the worse that it’s still so bad.”

— Tommy Orange

54. “That’s what she loves about Motown, the way it asks you to carry sadness and heartbreak but dance while doing so.”

— Tommy Orange

55. “There’s almost too much information out there. The internet is like a brain trying to figure out a brain. I depend on the internet for recall now. There’s no reason to remember when it’s always just right there, like the way everyone used to know phone numbers by heart and now can’t even remember their own. Remembering itself is becoming old-fashioned.”

— Tommy Orange

56. “This is how time skips. Links just lead to links that can lead you all the way back to the twelfth century.”

— Tommy Orange

57. “But we spent almost all our free time together – when we weren’t’ in school – and it turns out that who you spend time with ends up mattering more than what you do with that time.”

— Tommy Orange

58. “I’m as Native as Obama is black. It’s different though.”

— Tommy Orange

59. “Opal, you have to know that we should never not tell our stories, and that no one is too young to hear.”

— Tommy Orange

60. “All the way from the top of Canada, the top of Alaska, down to the bottom of South America, Indians were removed, then reduced to a feathered image. Our greats are on flags, jerseys, and coins.”

— Tommy Orange

61. “We don’t have time, Nephew, time has us. It holds us in its mouth like an owl holds a field mouse.”

— Tommy Orange

62. “I grew up in Moraga, which is a suburb just on the other side of the Oakland hills – which makes me even more Oakland hills than the Oakland hills kids. So I grew up with money, a pool in the backyard, an overbearing mother, an absent father. I brought home outdated racist insults from school like it was the 1950s. All Mexican slurs, of course, since people where I grew up don’t know Natives still exist. That’s how much those Oakland hills separate us from Oakland. Those hills bend time.”

— Tommy Orange

63. “Everything is new and doomed.”

— Tommy Orange

64. “Sometimes she can’t move. Sometimes it feels impossible to do anything. But that’s okay because she’s become quite good at getting lost in the doing of things. More than one thing at a time preferably... the trick is to stay busy, distract then distract the distraction. Get twice removed. It’s about layers. It’s about disappearing in the whir of noise and doing.”

— Tommy Orange

65. “Old songs that sang to the old sadness you always kept as close as skin without meaning to. The word triumph blipped in your head then. What was it doing there? You never used that word. This was what it sounded like to make it through theses hundreds of American years, to sing through them. This was the sound of pain forgetting itself in song.”

— Tommy Orange

66. “They’d told us to fly the American flag. We flew that and a white flag too. Surrender, the white flag waved. We stood under both flags as they came at us. They did more than kill us. They tore us up. Mutilated us.”

— Tommy Orange

67. “Numbers are consistent. You can count on them.”

— Tommy Orange

68. “They took everything and ground it down to dust as fine as gunpowder, they fired their guns into the air in victory and the strays flew out into the nothingness of histories written wrong and meant to be forgotten. Stray bullets and consequences are landing on our unsuspecting bodies even now.”

— Tommy Orange

69. “The process that brings anything to its current form – chemical, synthetic, technological, or otherwise – doesn’t make the product not a product of the living earth.”

— Tommy Orange

70. “Most of all travel is about leaving and coming home.”

— Tommy Orange

71. “You’d wake up with blood underneath your fingernails – a sharp sting wherever the wound moved, because it moved everywhere, all over your body – and blood ended up on your sheets, and you’d wake up feeling like you’d dreamed something as important and devastating as it was forgotten. But there was no dream. There was only the open, living wound, and it itched somewhere on your body at all times.”

— Tommy Orange

72. “Some of us came to the cities to escape the reservation. We stayed after fighting in the Second World War. After Vietnam, too. We stayed because the city sounds like a war, and you can’t leave a war once you’ve been you can only keep it at bay – which is easier when you can see and hear it near you, that fast metal, that constant firing around you, cars up and down the streets and freeways like bullets.”

— Tommy Orange

73. “Remembering itself is becoming old-fashioned.”

— Tommy Orange

74. “Time only seems to have skipped, or to have sped by without you when you looked the other way.”

— Tommy Orange

75. “The narrator said the word planet, which is the same word in German, comes from the Greek meaning wandering star. He said we don’t live on a planet, we are the planet, it made us.”

— Tommy Orange

76. “You want to run them down. Scream something at them. Scare them back to wherever they came from. Scare them out of Oakland. Scare the Oakland they made their own out of them.”

— Tommy Orange

77. “Birds see the best of any creature with a spine, are sacred because they soar the heavens, and with just one of their feathers, and some smoke, prayers make it to God.”

— Tommy Orange

78. “Hope could feel heavy too.”

— Tommy Orange

79. “He would stay though. He told himself he would stay and not give up and just have patience. Life was long if you didn’t get killed accidentally or get some disease. Things changed. He could wait and see what would happen. In his worst moments that’s what he would tell himself. Just wait.”

— Tommy Orange

80. “Opal likes numbers. Numbers are consistent. You can count on them. But for Opal, certain numbers are good and others are bad. Even numbers are generally better than odd ones, and numbers that have some kind of mathematical relationship are good too.”

— Tommy Orange

81. “I believed what my father told me. Stories do more than comfort. They take you away and bring you back better made.”

— Tommy Orange

82. “Selfish is the most likely thing to become if you’ve been abandoned, I think. Being abandoned means you don’t think anyone else is really there for you when it comes down to it. So it’s just you. Yourself. Being how you would be if there was no one else there.”

— Tommy Orange

83. “She believes we all do precisely what we think we can get away with.”

— Tommy Orange

84. “And in the year 1924 Indian citizenship will have been granted, even though they will mean to dissolve tribes by giving citizenship, dissolve being another word for disappearance, a kind of chemical word for a gradual death of tribes and Indians, a clinical killing, designed by psychopaths calling themselves politicians.”

— Tommy Orange

85. “I was doing what you do when you’re hurting and can’t say it. Digging another hole for myself. –.”

— Tommy Orange

86. “Everything about your life will feel impossible. And you being or becoming an Indian will feel the same. Nevertheless you will be an Indian and an American and a woman and a human wanting to belong to what being human means.”

— Tommy Orange

87. “Everything that happens to a tribe happens to everyone in the tribe. Good and bad. Their mom said that once. But then she said now that we’re so spread out, lost to each other, it’s not the same, except that it’s the same in our families, everything that happens to you once you make a family, it happens to all of you, because of love, and so love was a kind of curse.”

— Tommy Orange

88. “But surviving wasn’t enough. To endure or pass through endurance test after endurance test only ever gave you endurance test passing abilities. Simply lasting was great for a wall, for a fortress, but not for a person.”

— Tommy Orange

89. “I plucked my soul out of its secret place.”

— Tommy Orange

90. “Urban Indians feel at home walking in the shadow of a downtown building. We came to know the downtown Oakland skyline better than we did any sacred mountain range, the redwoods in the Oakland hills better than any other deep wild forest.”

— Tommy Orange

91. “Such Indian children were made to carry more than they were made to carry.”

— Tommy Orange

92. “Dr. Hoffman told me the word kumbaya was originally an African American spiritual, a song that was also a prayer asking for divine intervention, asking for help in dire times, and that then the hippies in the sixties took it and sang it to mean unity amid protest, and then it got played out and became a stand-in for corniness about togetherness.”

— Tommy Orange

93. “Wake up. It is morning. Have a cup of coffee. Watch the sun come up. Feel as if you are the only person in the whole world seeing it. Know that it was always true that you were the only one seeing the world the way you were seeing the world. Give thanks to the rising sun. Give thanks to the day that was every day, was the sun itself making everything seen and was called the day as a nickname for the big light the sun was sending the world before it took it away.”

— Tommy Orange

94. “Every day is a loop. Life tries the same as we try with music. Every day is the sun rising, and the sun going down, and the sleep we must sleep. I even like sleep and dreaming now. Every day is life convincing us it’s not a loop. Addiction is that way too.”

— Tommy Orange

95. “Normal has for too long meant average white.”

— Tommy Orange

96. “Some would call it spite, for women it will be called spite and being vindictive; while injured men receive their justice and pass out their vengeance, women will be called petty and catty, won’t get to feel the honor a word like revenge endows upon men.”

— Tommy Orange

97. “I had a family now and the drinking was behind me. I’d lived enough life, almost died enough times to know when a good thing came along, a thing you didn’t know could fill you right up, which only when it filled you let you know there’d been a hole in you before.”

— Tommy Orange

98. “The point was that maybe humans thought they were exceptional but they were maybe never anything more than animals, doing anything more than animaling.”

— Tommy Orange

99. “And that being made to take a name like they’d wanted, being made to become the kind of person that they wanted us to be, it was just like that woman’s monster, was just like what she had Dr. Victor Frankenstein make in the book, that was why he chose the name Victor, he was the man making the monster by agreeing to take their kind of name and living life the way white men like Pratt demanded.”

— Tommy Orange

100. “Maybe we’ll be running our whole lives. Just keep moving. That would be okay. We’ll have strong legs, keen awareness, and big hearts, keeping ourselves and each other going like we belong to that one-day distant future, when we can look back and say this is how we made it, despite everything.”

— Tommy Orange