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N. Scott Momaday

" We are what we imagine. Our very existence consists in our imagination of ourselves. Our best destiny is to imagine, at least, completely, who and what, and that we are. The greatest tragedy that can befall us is to go unimagined. "

N. Scott Momaday

Imagination , Destiny , American , Native

related quotes

" We are what we imagine. Our very existence consists in our imagination of ourselves. Our best destiny is to imagine, at least, completely, who and what, and that we are. The greatest tragedy that can befall us is to go unimagined. "

N. Scott Momaday

Imagination , Destiny , American , Native

" There is a great good in returning to a landscape that has had extraordinary meaning in one's life. It happens that we return to such places in our minds irresistibly. There are certain villages and towns, mountains and plains that, having seen them walked in them lived in them even for a day, we keep forever in the mind's eye. They become indispensable to our well-being; they define us, and we say, I am who I am because I have been there, or there. "

N. Scott Momaday

Eye , Memories , Travel

" Once in his life, a man ought to concentrate his mind upon the 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

Men , Believe , Hands

" Anything is bearable if you can make a story out of it. "

N. Scott Momaday

History , Stories

" If you believe in the power of words, you can bring about physical changes in the universe. "

N. Scott Momaday

Power , Believe , Words

" To encounter the sacred is to be alive at the deepest center of human existence. Sacred places are the truest definitions of the earth; they stand for the earth immediately and forever; they are its flags and shields. If you would know the earth for what it really is, learn it through its sacred places. At Devil’s Tower or Canyon de Chelly or the Cahokia Mounds, you touch the pulse of the living planet; you feel its breath upon you. You become one with a spirit that pervades geologic time and space. "

N. Scott Momaday

Space , Devil , Forever

" I am interested in the way that we look at a given landscape and take possession of it in our blood and brain. None of us lives apart from the land entirely; such an isolation is unimaginable. If we are to realize and maintain our humanity, we must come to a moral comprehension of earth and air as it is perceived in the long turn of seasons and of years. "

N. Scott Momaday

Blood , Years , Air

" 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

Giving , Sound , All , Things

" 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. "

N. Scott Momaday

Sound , Magic , Medicine

" I wonder if, in the dark night of the sea, the octopus dreams of me. "

N. Scott Momaday

Dream , Night , Dark

" The highest human purpose is always to reinvent and celebrate the sacred. "

N. Scott Momaday

Religion , Purpose

" It's a landscape that has to be seen to be believed. And, as I say on occasion, it may have to be believed in order to be seen. "

N. Scott Momaday

History , Order

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