Native Quotes - Page 17

• Queequeg was a native of Kokovoko, an island far away to the West and South. It is not down in any map; true places never are.

  Herman Melville

  Islands, Maps, West

  Herman Melville (1892). “Moby Dick”, p.57

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• Why don’t you purchase an Italian dictionary? I will assume the expense.” “I have one,” she said, “but I don’t think it’s very good. Half the words are missing.” “Half?” “Well, some,” she amended. “But truly, that’s not the problem.” He blinked, waiting for her to continue. She did. Of course. “I don’t think Italian is the author’s native tongue,” she said. “The author of the dictionary?” he queried. “Yes. It’s not terribly idiomatic.

  Julia Quinn

  Thinking, Italian, Waiting

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• Our defeat was always implicit in the victory of others; our wealth has always generated our poverty by nourishing the prosperity of others - the empires and their native overseers. In the colonial and neocolonial alchemy, gold changes into scrap metal and food into poison.

  Eduardo Galeano

  Victory, Gold, Poison

  Eduardo Galeano (1997). “Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent”, p.2, NYU Press

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• I don't understand why people never say what they mean. It's like the immigrants who come to a country and learn the language but are completely baffled by idioms. (Seriously, how could anyone who isn't a native English speaker 'get the picture,' so to speak, and not assume it has something to do with a photo or a painting?)

  Jodi Picoult

  Country, Mean, People

  Jodi Picoult (2012). “The Jodi Picoult Collection #4: Change of Heart, Handle with Care, and House Rules”, p.941, Simon and Schuster

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• It is a strange world," I murmered, more to myself than to the native soul. "The strangest," he agreed.

  Stephenie Meyer

  Soul, World, Strange

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• At noon I observed a bevy of nude young native women bathing in the sea, and I went and sat down on their clothes to keep them from being stolen.

  Mark Twain

  Sea, Clothes, Noon

  Mark Twain (2008). “Roughing It: Easyread Large Bold Edition”, p.249, ReadHowYouWant.com

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• She had spent all her life in feeling miserable; this misery was her native element; its fluctuations, its varying depths, alone save her the impression of moving and living. What bothers me is that a sense of misery, and nothing else, is not enough to make a permanent soul. My enormous and morose Mademoiselle is all right on earth but impossible in eternity.

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Moving, Soul, Feelings

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• I wonder what it felt to move to a country where you didn't grow up. I had thought about that often since my sister got married. Do you become a character in a story native to that land, or do you, somewhere in your heart, want to return to your homeland.

  Banana Yoshimoto

  Country, Growing Up, Moving

  Banana Yoshimoto (1995). “N.P.: A Novel”, p.87, Simon and Schuster

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• One cannot be pessimistic about the West. This is the native home of hope. When it fully learns that cooperation, not rugged individualism, is the quality that most characterizes and preserves it, then it will have achieved itself and outlived its origins. Then it has a chance to create a society to match its scenery.

  Wallace Stegner

  Home, Optimistic, Quality

  "Wallace Stegner, the Rural West, and Me" by John McChesney, web.stanford.edu. July 05, 2011.

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• One of our people in the Native community said the difference between white people and Indians is that Indian people know they are oppressed but don’t feel powerless. White people don’t feel oppressed, but feel powerless. Deconstruct that disempowerment. Part of the mythology that they’ve been teaching you is that you have no power. Power is not brute force and money; power is in your spirit. Power is in your soul. It is what your ancestors, your old people gave you. Power is in the earth; it is in your relationship to the earth.

  Winona LaDuke

  Teaching, White, Differences

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• And in "Elbow Room" the cast sings the glories of westward expansion in the United States, which involved the murder of native peoples and the violent conquest of half of Mexico. Among the lines in the song is one that intones, "There were plenty of fights / To win land right / But the West was meant to be / It was our Manifest Destiny?" Let it suffice to say that happily belting out a tune in which one merrily praises genocide is always easier for those whose ancestors weren't on the receiving end of the deal.

  Tim Wise

  Song, Fighting, Winning

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• The best prophet is common sense, our native wit.

  Euripides

  Common Sense, Prophet, Wit

  Euripides (1968). “Euripides: The Cyclops, translated by W. Arrowsmith. Heracles, translated by W. Arrowsmith. Iphigenia in Tauris, translated by W. Bynner. Helen translated by R. Lattimore”

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• If European symbols and traditions have grown tired, perfunctory and oppressively banal in Australia, or been drained of spirit and meaning by the dreary dictates of materialism and secularity, then the raw spirit truth of our native land is alive and radiant by comparison. For joy and meaning we might well turn to our natural country and witness miracles of vitality and new life, of inspiration and profound beauty; all in some humble, quiet and improbable place.

  Michael Leunig

  Wisdom, Country, Nature

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• We do not own the freshness of the air or the sparkle of the water. How can you buy them from us?

  Chief Seattle

  Native American, Air, Water

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• We were taught to believe that the Great Spirit sees and hears everything, and that he never forgets; that hereafter he will give every man a spirit-home according to his deserts: if he has been a good man, he will have a good home; if he has been a bad man, he will have a bad home. This I believe, and all my people believe the same.

  Chief Joseph

  Believe, Home, Native American

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• I am tired of talk that comes to nothing It makes my heart sick when I remember all the good words and all the broken promises. There has been too much talking by men who had no right to talk. It does not require many words to speak the truth.

  Chief Joseph

  Tired, Native American, Heart

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• The song and the drumming were like this: Behold, a sacred voice is calling you; All over the sky a sacred voice is calling.

  Black Elk

  Song, Native American, Sky

  Black Elk (2000). “Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux”, Bison Books

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• Everywhere is the center of the world. Everything is sacred.

  Black Elk

  Native American, World, Sacred

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• All I try to do is portray Indians as we are, in creative ways. With imagination and poetry. I think a lot of Native American literature is stuck in one idea: sort of spiritual, environmentalist Indians. And I want to portray everyday lives. I think by doing that, by portraying the ordinary lives of Indians, perhaps people learn something new.

  Sherman Alexie

  Spiritual, Native American, Thinking

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• What we did in the 1960s and early 1970s was raise the consciousness of white America that this government has a responsibility to Indian people. That there are treaties; that textbooks in every school in America have a responsibility to tell the truth. An awareness reached across America that if Native American people had to resort to arms at Wounded Knee, there must really be something wrong. And Americans realized that native people are still here, that they have a moral standing, a legal standing. From that, our own people began to sense the pride.

  Dennis Banks

  School, Responsibility, Native American

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• I certainly don't object to [writers] trying to imagine the lives of other societies, but you have to do it with a certain amount of humility and respect. If it were not for the ethnographic material that had been collected by missionaries and anthropologists and so forth, much of past Native American society would no longer be accessible. What I object to is making kitsch of things that are very serious.

  Michael Dorris

  Humility, Native American, Past

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• It's impossible to write about Native life without humor-that's how people maintain sanity.

  Louise Erdrich

  Writing, People, Impossible

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• It is my land, my home, my father's land, to which I now ask to be allowed to return. I want to spend my last days there, and be buried among those mountains. If this could be I might die in peace, feeling that my people, placed in their native homes, would increase in numbers, rather than diminish as at present, and that our name would not become extinct.

  Geronimo

  Father, Home, Land

  Geronimo, S. M. Barrett (2016). “Geronimo's Story of His Life: As Told to S. M. Barrett”, p.105, Open Road Media

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• Every part of the earth is sacred to my people.

  Chief Seattle

  Native American, People, Dark Woods

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• Base men being in love have then a nobility in their natures more than is native to them.

  William Shakespeare

  Love, Men, Nobility

  William Shakespeare, James Boswell, Samuel Johnson, Alexander Pope, George Steevens (1821). “The Plays and Poems of William Shakspeare”, p.311

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