Listening Woman Quotes

“was not a Navajo concept, this idea of adjusting nature to human needs. The Navajo adjusted himself to remain in harmony with the universe. When nature withheld the rain, the Navajo sought the pattern of this phenomenon—as he sought the pattern of all things-to find its beauty and live in harmony with it.”
― Tony Hillerman, Listening Woman

“Had a doctor tell me I ought to quit this stuff [bourbon] because it was affecting my eardrums and I told him I liked what I was drinking better'n what I was hearing.”
― Tony Hillerman, Listening Woman

“The Dinee had always respected the female equally with the male—giving her equality in property, in metaphysics and in clan—recognizing the mother’s role in the footsteps of Changing Woman as the preserver of the Navajo Way.”
― Tony Hillerman, Listening Woman

“Leaphorn took two steps toward the old hearths and stopped abruptly. The floor here was patterned with sand paintings. At least thirty of them,”
― Tony Hillerman, Listening Woman

“McGinnis didn’t want a buyer. Short Mountain had trapped him in his own stubbornness, and held him here all his life, and the for sale sign had been no more than a gesture—a declaration that he was smart enough to know he’d been screwed. And the asking price, Leaphorn had always heard, had been grotesquely high.”
― Tony Hillerman, Listening Woman

“The big man glanced at him, a friendly look. Across the hogan, Leaphorn noticed, two of the women were smiling at him. He was a stranger, a policeman who had arrested one of them, a man from another clan, perhaps even a witch, but he was accepted with the natural hospitality of the Dinee. He felt a fierce pride in his people, and in this celebration of womanhood. The Dinee had always respected the female equally with the male — giving her equality in property, in metaphysics and in clan — recognizing the mother’s role in the footsteps of Changing Woman as the preserver of the Navajo Way. Leaphorn remembered what his mother had told him when he had asked how Changing Woman could have prescribed a Kinaalda cake “a shovel handle wide” and garnished with raisins when the Dinee had neither shovels nor grapes. “When you are a man,” she had said, “you will understand that she was teaching us to stay in harmony with time.” Thus, while the Kiowas were crushed, the Utes reduced to hopeless poverty, and the Hopis withdrawn into the secret of their kivas, the eternal Navajo adapted and endured.”
― Tony Hillerman, Listening Woman

“The building was of stone, originally erected, Leaphorn had been told, by a Church of Christ missionary early in McGinnis's tenure as trader and postmaster. It had been abandoned after the preacher's optimism had been eroded by his inability to cause the Dinee to accept the idea that God had a personal and special interest in humans.”
― Tony Hillerman, Listening Woman