The Way to Rainy Mountain Quotes

“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, The Way to Rainy Mountain

“In the beginning was the word, and it was spoken.”
― N. Scott Momaday, The Way to Rainy Mountain

“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, The Way to Rainy Mountain

“It was not an exclamation so much, I think, as it was a warding off, an exertion of language upon ignorance and disorder.”
― N. Scott Momaday, The Way to Rainy Mountain

“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, The Way to Rainy Mountain

“East of my grandmother's house the sun rises out of the plain. Once in his life a man ought to concentrate his mind upon remembered earth, I believe. 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 about it, to dwell upon it. He ought to imagine that he touches it with his hands at every season and listens to the sounds that are made upon it. He ought to imagine the creatures there and all the faintest motions of the wind. He ought to recollect the glare of noon and all the colors of the dawn and dusk.”
― N. Scott Momaday, The Way to Rainy Mountain

“Sill. Their horses and weapons were confiscated, and they were imprisoned. In a field just”
― N. Scott Momaday, The Way to Rainy Mountain

“A word has power in and of itself. It comes from nothing into sound and meaning; it gives origin to all things. By means of words can a man deal with the world on equal terms. And the word is sacred. A man's name is his own; he can keep it or give it away as he likes.”
― N. Scott Momaday, The Way to Rainy Mountain

“And the journey is an evocation of three things in particular: a landscape that is incomparable, a time that is gone forever, and the human spirit, which endures.”
― N. Scott Momaday, The Way to Rainy Mountain

“In the autumn of 1874, the Kiowas were driven southward towards the Staked Plains. Columns of troops were converging upon them from all sides, and they were bone-weary and afraid.”
― N. Scott Momaday, The Way to Rainy Mountain

“I have walked in a mountain meadow bright with Indian paintbrush, lupine, and wild buckwheat, and I have seen high in the branches of a lodgepole pine the male pine grosbeak, round and rose-colored, its dark, striped wings nearly invisible in the soft, mottled light. And the uppermost branches of the tree seemed very slowly to ride across the blue sky.”
― N. Scott Momaday, The Way to Rainy Mountain

“There was a woman whose body was swollen up with child, and she got stuck in the log. After that, no one could get through, and that is why the Kiowas are a small tribe in number.”
― N. Scott Momaday, The Way to Rainy Mountain

“I do not speak Kiowa, and I never understood her prayers, but there was something inherently sad in the sound, some merest hesitation upon the syllables of sorrow.”
― N. Scott Momaday, The Way to Rainy Mountain

“Loneliness is an aspect of the land. All things in the plain are isolated; there is no confusion of objects in the eye, but one hill or one tree or one man. To look upon that landscape in the early morning, with the sun at your back, is to lose the sense of proportion. Your imagination comes to life, and this, you think, is where Creation was begun.”
― N. Scott Momaday, The Way to Rainy Mountain

“When the wild herds were destroyed, so too was the will of the Kiowa people; there was nothing to sustain them in spirit.”
― N. Scott Momaday, The Way to Rainy Mountain