The Ancient Child Quotes

“At first she thought the writing would be easy. She was extremely confident in her ability to dream, to imagine, and she supposed that expressing her dreams in words, in writing, would be entirely natural, like drawing breath. She had read widely from the time she was a child, and she knew how to recognize something that was well written. She admired certain lines and passages so much that she had taken complete possession of them and committed them to memory. She could recite “The Gettysburg Address” and “The Twenty-Third Psalm.” She could recite “Jabberwocky” and Emily Dickinson’s “Further in summer that the birds” and Wallace Stevens’s “Sunday Morning.” She knew by heart the final paragraph of Joyce’s “The Dead,” and if challenged she could say in whole the parts of both Romeo and Juliet. And she knew many Kiowa stories and many long prayers in Navajo. These were not feats of memory in the ordinary sense; it was simply that she attended to these things so closely that they became a part of her most personal experience. She had assumed them, appropriated them to her being.
But to write! She discovered that was something else again.”
― N. Scott Momaday, The Ancient Child

“Art is affirmation.”
― N. Scott Momaday, The Ancient Child

“It's a matter of honor, death. It's your white page, do you see? Or your shame. Either you're worthy of it or you ain't. To accept it, to face it with honor and respect and goodwill, to earn it, that is to be brave.”
― N. Scott Momaday, The Ancient Child

“He used both hands when he made the bear. Imagine a bear proceeding from the hands of God.”
― N. Scott Momaday, The Ancient Child

“I wonder if in the dark night of the sea, the octopus dreams of me.”
― N. Scott Momaday, The Ancient Child

“She was not listening at the level of language but beneath it, in the deep recesses of the imagination.”
― N. Scott Momaday, The Ancient Child

“In school Set was taught that art was resistance. . . . Water follows the line of least resistance. . . . It has shaped some of the most impressive forms on the face of the earth.”
― N. Scott Momaday, The Ancient Child

“The dream becomes a story, a myth. . . . And the story becomes a dream.”
― N. Scott Momaday, The Ancient Child

“A hawk sailed past the sun, its shadow slithering in the grass.”
― N. Scott Momaday, The Ancient Child

“He had a strange feeling there, as if some ancestral intelligence had been awakened in him for the first time. There is the wild growth and the soft glowing of the earth, in the muddy water at his feet, was something profoundly original. He could not put his finger on it, but it was there. It was itself genesis, he thought, not genesis in the public domain, not an Old Testament Tale, but his genesis. He wanted to see his father there in the shadows of the still creek, the child he once was, himself in the child and the man. But he could not. there was only something like a photograph, old and faded, a shadow within a shadow,”
― N. Scott Momaday, The Ancient Child