House Made of Dawn
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Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between September 19 - September 23, 2019
3%
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must hear it or else I cannot appropriate it to my spirit.
4%
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They perceive him, and he is the sum of their perceptions.
6%
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“1889.”
9%
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Hannah
Agency - thru lens of him but still
10%
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Hannah
Mythic quality of land - almost larger than life (eg in his dream at the beginning)
16%
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Hannah
Female gaze
16%
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Hannah
Male as power?
17%
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Hannah
Desire in relationship to male
17%
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Hannah
Hates the body instead of being empowered by it
28%
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long outwaiting.
41%
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Now the white man deals in words, and he deals easily, with grace and sleight of hand.
41%
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“My grandmother was a storyteller; she knew her way around words.
41%
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She had learned that in words and in language, and there only, she could have whole and consummate being.
41%
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I was a child, and that old woman was asking me to come directly into the presence of her mind and spirit; she was taking hold of my imagination, giving me to share in the great fortune of her wonder and delight. She was asking me to go with her to the confrontation of something that was sacred and eternal. It was a timeless,
42%
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The white man takes such things as words and literatures for granted,
42%
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You see, for her 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. And she never threw words away.
42%
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There was a voice, a sound, a word—and everything began.
42%
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himself. It represents a very rich literature, which, because it was never written down, was always but one generation from extinction. But for the same reason it was cherished and revered.
42%
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scheme
43%
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He could not understand the sea; it was not of his world.
44%
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Fat Josie.
45%
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Word by word by word these men were disposing of him in language, their language, and they were making a bad job of it.
47%
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But Milly believed in tests, questions and answers, words
47%
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Easy laughter was wrong in a woman, dangerous and wrong.
50%
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“Look! Look! There are blue and purple horses . . . a house made of dawn. . . .”
Hannah
house made of dawn = dream world of peyote, sacrifice, divine, essentialism, home is illusory, beautiful, full of light, intangible, identity
51%
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idiot,
51%
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and all the while tears were streaming from her eyes.
Hannah
primitivism
52%
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and them goddam bullets going pop, pop,
52%
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The bird held still in the cold black water, watching him. He was afraid, but the bird made no move, no sound.
Hannah
eagle is vitality?
53%
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No one knew what she thought or felt or who she was.
Hannah
not like other girls isolated alone
54%
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and at last Daddy began to hate the land, began to think of it as some kind of enemy, his own very personal and deadly enemy.
56%
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Though she lived out her long life in the shadow of Rainy Mountain, the immense landscape of the continental interior—all of its seasons and its sounds—lay like memory in her blood.
65%
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They put us away before
65%
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But he doesn’t come from the reservation. He doesn’t know how it is when you grow up out there someplace.
83%
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the dusty journal of Fray Nicolás.
Hannah
words solace in face of loneliness
90%
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And like a fool he had taken up the bait, whole and at once, had allowed himself to be run into the ground.