It was enough just to sit there without words.

Here I am, where I ought to be. A writer must have a place where he or she feels this, a place to love and be irritated with.

Love won't be tampered with, love won't go away. Push it to one side and it creeps to the other.

Columbus only discovered that he was in some new place. He didn't discover America.

It was enough just to sit there without words.

I was in love with the whole world and all that lived in its rainy arms.

I got well by talking. Death could not get a word in edgewise, grew discouraged, and traveled on.

You know, some people fall right through the hole in their lives. It's invisible, but they come to it after time, never knowing where.

I grew up in North Dakota around Dakota and Ojibwe people, and also small-town people in Wahpeton. Writers make few choices, really, about their material. We have to write about what comes naturally and what interests us - so I do.

I grew up in Wahpeton, N.D., and I didn't leave until I was 18, and I've kept going back.

I have never fully exorcised shames that struck me to the heart as a child except through written violence, shadowy caricature, and dark jokes.

I rarely step on sidewalk cracks. I don't wear a watch. I touch my favorite tree before going on long trips.

I write first drafts by hand. Never do I open an umbrella inside the house. I don't predict wins or losses. I used to stand on a certain piece of rug if my brothers and husband were watching football and their team got in trouble - but now the luck went out of that rug. If a circle is involved, I try to go clockwise.

I'd love to meet my ancestors. I'd love to be able to speak to them.

Most writers have been influenced by Faulkner.

My father is my biggest literary influence. Recently, I've been looking through his letters. He was in the National Guard when I was a child, and whenever he left, he would write to me. He wrote letters to me all through college, and we still correspond. His letters, and my mother's, are one of my life's treasures.

My grandfather was a persuasive man who made friends with people at every level of influence. In order to fight against our tribe's termination, he went to newspapers and politicians and urged them to advocate for our tribe in Washington. He also supported his family through the Depression as a truck farmer.

My mother is Turtle Mountain Chippewa, and she lived on her home reservation. My father taught there. He had just been discharged from the Air Force. He went to school on the GI Bill and got his teaching credentials. He is adventurous - he worked his way through Alaska at age seventeen and paid for his living expenses by winning at the poker table.

My parents' marriage is a gift to everyone around them - 60 years of making their kids laugh. How many parents are actually funny?

Nothing I force myself to write about ever turns out well, and so I've learned to wait for the voice, the incident, the image that reverberates.

Nothing I write ever has a moral. If it seems to a reader that there is one, that is unintentional.

On any state elections map, the reservations are blue places. Native people are most often progressives, Democrats, and by no means gun-toting vigilantes.

Revenge is a sorrow for the person who has to take it on. And the person who is rash enough to think it's going to help a situation is always wrong.

Talking about how I might write the next book is like talking about whether or not to have sex. Any dithering ruins it.

There are several kinds of land on reservations. And all of these pieces of land have different entities who are in charge of enforcing laws on this land.

What I see in the book is an exquisite form of technology: one that doesn't require a power source and can be passed from hand to hand and lasts a lot longer than an electronic reader.

When I moved to Minnesota, I found there was a thriving and determined movement, a grassroots movement, to revitalize the Ojibwe language. And I've never come to be a competent speaker. I have to say that right now. But even learning the amount of Ojibwe that one can at my age is a life-altering experience.

Very little is needed to make a happy life he said.

Hunger steals the memory.

What is this life but the sound of an appalling love.

When small towns find they cannot harm the strangest of their members, when eccentrics show resilience, they are eventually embraced and even cherished.

There will never come a time when I will be able to resist my emotions.

I can remember the frustration of not being able to talk. I knew what I wanted to say, but I could not get the words out, so I would just scream.

In other words, I have no truck for anyone who goes out and does an eclectic building.

Kind thoughts are rarer than either kind words or deeds. They imply a great deal of thinking about others. This in itself is rare. But they also imply a great deal of thinking about others without the thoughts being criticisms. This is rarer still.

Style is as much under the words as in the words. It is as much the soul as it is the flesh of a work.

I want to promote poetry to the point where you got all the baldhead kids running around doing poetry, getting the music out of the way and having only words, the spoken word, and then see what happens.

Words - so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.

But in the finished art of the song the use of words has no connection with the use of words in poetry.

Duty, Honor, Country. Those three hallowed words reverently dictate what you ought to be, what you can be, what you will be.

So, in other words, how you respond to a sculpture, how a viewer sees the sculpture, is vital.

I think one's feelings waste themselves in words; they ought all to be distilled into actions which bring results.

Nature is a temple in which living columns sometimes emit confused words. Man approaches it through forests of symbols, which observe him with familiar glances.

Words are the children of reason and, therefore, can't explain it. They really can't translate feeling because they're not part of it. That's why it bugs me when people try to analyze jazz as an intellectual theorem. It's not. It's feeling.

Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves; vanity, to what we would have others think of us.

The President had every reason to believe that the text presented to him was sound... These 16 words should never have been included in the text written for the president.

They call it golf because all the other four-letter words were taken.

In fact, words are well adapted for description and the arousing of emotion, but for many kinds of precise thought other symbols are much better.

Eating words has never given me indigestion.