People of the Whale Quotes

“Like the water, the earth, the universe, a story is forever unfolding. It floods and erupts. It births new worlds. It is circular as our planet and fluid as the words of the first people who came out from the ocean or out of the cave or down from the sky. Or those who came from a garden where rivers meet and whose god was a tempter to their fall, planning it into their creation along with all the rest.”
― Linda Hogan, People of the Whale

“All the stories live in our bodies, he thinks. Every last one.”
― Linda Hogan, People of the Whale

“There were times when the light of the moon had gone out and she felt a great loneliness. It wasn't for herself. It was for what had happened to the grasses of their land, their waters, not just the massacre there, the slavery, but the killing of the ocean.”
― Linda Hogan, People of the Whale

“Oblivion, she thought. That was the world she lived in. It was what they should name some countries, towns, and places.”
― Linda Hogan, People of the Whale

“Now they were merely trying to fill themselves up but not with the heart, not the soul. They'd lost both those along the way...”
― Linda Hogan, People of the Whale

“She didn’t forgive him, not then. Not really until years later when she realized how men were so influenced by their peers and governments. This was something Ruth, a woman who could stand alone in the world, would never understand.”
― Linda Hogan, People of the Whale

“Remembering, in Spanish, means to pass something through the heart again, and now all the years are going through his heart again as he tries to turn away from the ocean. But he hears it and he knows it is out there. Some sleepless nights he goes out. But this night in his sleep he says, "Oh, look at all those beautiful life rafts.”
― Linda Hogan, People of the Whale

“She was an anchor but at least now she knew it had an end, a stopping place. It hit bottom. She could fall no deeper.”
― Linda Hogan, People of the Whale

“The people her own age had not ever recovered from the war. The older people are still in the pain of history. Some say it is over, the A’atsika way. It isn’t, Ruth wanted to tell the world that she hangs by her strength. Alone. Don’t be fooled. This is just America happening to us again. She would like to keep them from ruining themselves altogether.”
― Linda Hogan, People of the Whale

“He wakes up and he is not a halfhearted man and he can’t remember why he wakes this way, except that he hears the sound of birds and it is as if behind the human world something else is taking place. The”
― Linda Hogan, People of the Whale

“Those who loved Ruth--so many--touched her hand, her shoulder, held her lightly, but no one could read the world inside other human bones. They could touch the skin and not feel the grief and pain it held only a skin's-width away.”
― Linda Hogan, People of the Whale

“Something grows from eyes, taking root as if a potato sends to earth what it can see, and yet the seeing part is what they say is poisonous about the potato. That first sprout is what can grow, planted, moving upward, seeing in light.”
― Linda Hogan, People of the Whale

“When men decide in their secretly dark or hungry hearts to work their own will, there is little that can stop them. They have inner weather, sometimes unpredictable.”
― Linda Hogan, People of the Whale