Ceremony Silko Quotes

But as long as you remember what you have seen, then nothing is gone. As long as you remember, it is part of this story we have together.

You don't have anything if you don't have the stories.

I will tell you something about stories . . . They aren't just entertainment. Don't be fooled. They are all we have, you see, all we have to fight off illness and death.

The only way to get change is not through the courts or — heaven forbid — the politicians, but through a change of human consciousness and through a change of heart. Only through the arts — music, poetry, dance, painting, writing — "can we really reach each other,

You damn your own soul better than I ever could.

Being alive was all right then: he had not breathed like that for a long time.

He had to keep busy; he had to keep moving so that the sinews connected behind his eyes did not slip loose and spin his eyes to the interior of his skull where the scenes waited for him.

He could get no rest as long as the memories were tangled with the present

For a long time he had been white smoke. He did not realize that until he left the hospital, because white smoke had no consciousness of itself. It faded into the white world of their bed sheets and walls; it was sucked away by the words of doctors who tried to talk to the invisible scattered smoke... They saw his outline but they did not realize it was hollow inside.

Distances and days existed in themselves then; they all had a story. They were not barriers. If a person wanted to get to the moon, there is a way; it all depended on whether you knew the directions... on whether you knew the story of how others before you had gone. He had believed in the stories for a long time, until the teachers at Indian school taught him not to believe in that kind of "nonsense". But they had been wrong.

He liked the way she talked. There was something in her eyes too. He saw it the first time when she had said, 'I've seen you before many times, and I always remembered you.' Josiah could not remember ever seeing her before, but there was something in her hazel brown eyes that made him believe her.

He cried the relief he felt at finally seeing the pattern, the way all the stories fit together—the old stories, the war stories, their stories—to become the story that was still being told. He was not crazy; he had never been crazy. He had only seen and heard the world as it always was: no boundaries, only transitions through all distances and time.

That was the responsibility that went with being human, old Ku’oosh said, the story behind each word must be told so there could be no mistake in the meaning of what had been said; and this demanded great patience and love.

He made a story for all of them, a story to give them strength. The words of the story poured out of his mouth as if they had substance, pebbles and stone extending to hold the corporal up...knees from buckling...hands from letting go of the blanket.

I will tell you something about stories, [he said] They aren’t just entertainment. Don’t be fooled. They are all we have, you see, all we have to fight off illness and death.   You don’t have anything if you don’t have the stories.   Their evil is mighty but it can’t stand up to our stories. So they try to destroy the stories let the stories be confused or forgotten. They would like that They would be happy Because we would be defenseless then.

Josiah said that only humans had to endure anything, because only humans resisted what they saw outside themselves. Animals did not resist. But they persisted, because they became part of the wind. (...) So they moved with the snow, became part of the snowstorm which drifted up against the trees and fences. And when they died, frozen solid against a fence, with the snow drifted around their heads? "Ah, Tayo," Josiah said, "the wind convinced them they were the ice.

As long as the hummingbird had not abandoned the land, somewhere there were still flowers, and they could all go on.

It took a great deal of energy to be a human being, and the more the wind blew and the sun moved southwest, the less energy Tayo had.

The word he chose to express “fragile” was filled with the intricacies of a continuing process, and with a strength inherent in spider webs woven across paths through sand hills where early in the morning the sun becomes entangled in each filament of web.

They are afraid, Tayo. They feel something happening, they can see something happening around them, and it scares them. Indians or Mexicans or whites—most people are afraid of change. They think that if their children have the same color of skin, the same color of eyes, that nothing is changing.” She laughed softly. “They are fools. They blame us, the ones who look different. That way they don’t have to think about what has happened inside themselves.

In that hospital they don't bury the dead, they keep them in rooms and talk to them.

This feeling was their life, vitality locked deep in blood memory, and the people were strong, and the fifth world endured, and nothing was ever lost as long as the love remained.

He inhabited a gray winter fog on a distant elk mountain where hunters are lost indefinitely and their own bones mark the boundaries.

We all have been waiting for help a long time. But it never has been easy. The people must do it. You must do it.

He wanted to walk until he recognized himself again.

Jungle rain had no beginning or end; it grew like foliage from the sky, branching and arching to the earth, sometimes in solid thickets entangling the islands, and other times, in tendrils of blue mist curling out of coastal clouds. The jungle breathed an eternal green that fevered men until they dripped sweat the way rubbery jungle leaves dripped the monsoon rain.

I will tell you something about stories, [he said] They aren't just entertainment. Don't be fooled. They are all we have, you see, all we have to fight off illness and death. You don't have anything if you don't have the stories.

Memory is tricky-memory for certain facts and or details is probably more imaginative than anything, but the important thing is to keep the feeling the story has. I never forget that: the feeling one has of the story is what you must strive to bring forth faithfully.

He lay there and hated them. Not for what they wanted to do with him, but for what they did to the earth with their machines, and to the animals with their packs of dogs and their guns. It happened again and again, and the people had to watch, unable to save or to protect any of the things that were so important to them. He ground his teeth together; there must be something he could do to still the vague, constant fear unraveling inside him: the earth and the animals might not know; they might not understand that he was not one of them; he was not one of the destroyers.

The people had been taught to despise themselves because they were left with barren land and dry rivers. But they were wrong. It was the white people who had nothing; it was the white people who were suffering as thieves do, never able to forget that their pride was wrapped in something stolen, something that had never been, and could never be, theirs. The destroyers had tricked the white people as completely as they had fooled the Indians, and now only a few people understood how the filthy deception worked; only a few people knew that the lie was destroying the white people faster than it was destroying Indian people. But the effects were hidden, evident only in the sterility of their art, which continued to feed off the vitality of other cultures, and in the dissolution of their consciousness into dead objects: the plastic and neon, the concrete and steel. Hollow and lifeless as a witchery clay figure. And what little still remained to white people was shriveled like a seed hoarded too long, shrunken past its time, and split open now, to expose a fragile, pale leaf stem, perfectly formed and dead.

If the white people never looked beyond the lie, to see that theirs was a nation built on stolen land, then they would never be able to understand how they had been used by the witchery; they would never know that they were still being manipulated by those who knew how to stir the ingredients together: white thievery and injustice boiling up the anger and hatred that would finally destroy the world: the starving against the fat, the colored against the white. The destroyers had only to set it into motion, and sit back to count the casualties. But it was more than a body count; the lies devoured white hearts, and for more than two hundred years white people had worked to fill their emptiness; they tried to glut the hollowness with patriotic wars and with great technology and the wealth it brought. And always they had been fooling themselves, and they knew it.

She taught me this above all else: things which don't shift and grow are dead things. They are things the witchery people want. Witchery works to scare people, to make them fear growth. But it has always been necessary, and more than ever now, it is. Otherwise we won't make it. We won't survive. That's what the witchery is counting on: that we will cling to the ceremonies the way they were, and then their power will triumph, and the people will be no more.

But the effects were hidden, evident only in the sterility of their art, which continued to feed off the vitality of other cultures, and in the dissolution of their consciousness into dead objects: the plastic and neon, the concrete and steel. Hollow and lifeless as a witchery clay figure. And what little still remained to white people was shriveled like a seed hoarded too long, shrunken past its time, and split open now, to expose a fragile, pale leaf stem, perfectly formed and dead.

We all have been waiting for help a long time. But it never has been easy. The people must do it. You must do it." Betonie sounded as if he were explaining something simple but important to a small child. But Tayo's stomach clenched around the words like knives stuck into his guts. There was something large and terrifying in the old man's words. He wanted to yell at the medicine man, to yell the things the white doctors had yelled to him - that he had to think only of himself, and not about others, that he would never get well as long as he used words like "we" and "us." But he had known the answer all along, even while the white doctors were telling him he could get well and he was trying to believe them: medicine didn't work that way, because the world didn't work that way. His sickness was onnly part of something larger, and his cure would be found only in something great and inclusive of everything.

Sailboat Table (table by Quint Hankle) The Voyage of the Narwhal, by Andrea Barrett Complete Stories, by Clarice Lispector Boy Kings of Texas, by Domingo Martinez The Marrow Thieves, by Cherie Dimaline A Brief History of Seven Killings, by Marlon James There There, by Tommy Orange Citizen: An American Lyric, by Claudia Rankine Underland, by Robert Macfarlane The Undocumented Americans, by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio Deacon King Kong, by James McBride The Dutch House, by Ann Patchett Will and Testament, by Vigdis Hjorth Every Man Dies Alone, by Hans Fallada The Door, by Magda Svabo The Plot Against America, by Philip Roth Fates and Furies, by Lauren Groff The Overstory, by Richard Power Night Train, by Lise Erdrich Her Body and Other Parties, by Carmen Maria Machado The Penguin Book of the Modern American Short Story, edited by John Freeman Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates Birds of America, by Lorrie Moore Mongrels, by Stephen Graham Jones The Office of Historical Corrections, by Danielle Evans Tenth of December, by George Saunders Murder on the Red River, by Marcie R. Rendon Leave the World Behind, by Rumaan Alam Ceremony, by Leslie Marmon Silko On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, by Ocean Vuong The Unwomanly Face of War, by Svetlana Alexievich Standard Deviation, by Katherine Heiny All My Puny Sorrows, by Miriam Toews The Death of the Heart, by Elizabeth Bowen Mean Spirit, by Linda Hogan NW, by Zadie Smith Being Mortal, by Atul Gawande Americanah, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Firekeeper’s Daughter, by Angeline Boulley Erasure, by Percival Everett Sharks in the Time of Saviors, by Kawai Strong Washburn Heaven, by Mieko Kawakami Books for Banned Love Sea of Poppies, by Amitav Ghosh The English Patient, by Michael Ondaatje Euphoria, by Lily King The Red and the Black, by Stendahl Luster, by Raven Leilani Asymmetry, by Lisa Halliday All the Pretty Horses, by Cormac McCarthy Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides The Vixen, by Francine Prose Legends of the Fall, by Jim Harrison The Winter Soldier, by Daniel Mason

at that time she had not yet seen that the horizon was an illusion and

They are afraid, Tayo. They feel something happening, they can see something happening around them, and it scares them. Indians or Mexicans or whites—most people are afraid of change. They think that if their children have the same color of skin, the same color of eyes, that nothing is changing.” She laughed softly. "They are fools. They blame us, the ones who look different. That way they don't have to think about what has happened inside themselves.

Some people act like witchery is responsible for everything that happens, when actually witchery only manipulates a small portion.

The morning of the funeral an honor guard from Albuquerque fired the salute; two big flags covered the coffins completely, and it looked as if the people from the village had gathered only to bury the flags.

What are we to do with the knowledge that Tayo was once a woman? That Ceremony held but abandoned considerable investments in Chicana identity, in urban life, and shades of acculturation? By outlining the trajectory of a composition process, drafts can be indicative of important variables in a finished work. The Angie drafts show that (despite Silko’s efforts to deflect it) considerable pressure can be brought to bear upon the choice of a male protagonist for the novel and upon the shallowness of its representation of human women, as well as upon the choice of a 1940s setting, and even on the rural setting and the novel’s form. Ceremony

Fire on the Mountain, by Anita Desai Sailboat Table (table by Quint Hankle) The Voyage of the Narwhal, by Andrea Barrett Complete Stories, by Clarice Lispector Boy Kings of Texas, by Domingo Martinez The Marrow Thieves, by Cherie Dimaline A Brief History of Seven Killings, by Marlon James There There, by Tommy Orange Citizen: An American Lyric, by Claudia Rankine Underland, by Robert Macfarlane The Undocumented Americans, by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio Deacon King Kong, by James McBride The Dutch House, by Ann Patchett Will and Testament, by Vigdis Hjorth Every Man Dies Alone, by Hans Fallada The Door, by Magda Szabó The Plot Against America, by Philip Roth Fates and Furies, by Lauren Groff The Overstory, by Richard Power Night Train, by Lise Erdrich Her Body and Other Parties, by Carmen Maria Machado The Penguin Book of the Modern American Short Story, edited by John Freeman Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates Birds of America, by Lorrie Moore Mongrels, by Stephen Graham Jones The Office of Historical Corrections, by Danielle Evans Tenth of December, by George Saunders Murder on the Red River, by Marcie R. Rendon Leave the World Behind, by Rumaan Alam Ceremony, by Leslie Marmon Silko On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, by Ocean Vuong The Unwomanly Face of War, by Svetlana Alexievich Standard Deviation, by Katherine Heiny All My Puny Sorrows, by Miriam Toews The Death of the Heart, by Elizabeth Bowen Mean Spirit, by Linda Hogan NW, by Zadie Smith Being Mortal, by Atul Gawande Americanah, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Firekeeper’s Daughter, by Angeline Boulley Erasure, by Percival Everett Sharks in the Time of Saviors, by Kawai Strong Washburn Heaven, by Mieko Kawakami

He crawled deeper into the black gauzy web where he could rest in the silence, where his coming and going through this world was no more than a star falling across the night sky. He left behind the pain and buzzing in his head; they were shut out by the wide dark distance.

That was the first time Tayo had realized that the man's skin was not much different from his own. The skin. He saw the skin of the corpses again and again, in ditches on either side of the long muddy road - skin that was stretched shiny and dark over bloated hands; even white men were darker after death. There was no difference when they were swollen and covered with flies. That had become the worst thing for Tayo: they looked too familiar even when they were alive.

Tayo looked at the long white hairs growing out of the lips like antennas, he got the choking in his throat again, and he cried for all of them, for what he had done.

The way I heard it was in the old days long time ago they had this Scalp Society for warriors who killed or touched dead enemies. They had things they must do otherwise K'oo'ko wouldn't haunt their dreams with her great fangs and everything would be endangered. Maybe the rain wouldn't come or the deer would go away. That's why they had things they must do The flute and dancing blue cornmeal and hair-washing. All these things they had to do.

The old man only made him certain of something he had feared all along, something in the old stories. It took only one person to tear away the delicate strands of the web, spilling the rays of sun into the sand, and the fragile world would be injured. Once there had been a man who cursed the rain clouds, a man of monstrous dreams. Tayo screamed, and curled his body against the pain.

He had been thinking about how easy it was to stay alive now that he didn't care about being alive anymore.

He had heard Auntie talk about the veterans - drunk all the time, she said. But he knew why. it was something the old people could not understand. Liquor was medicine for the anger that made them hurt, for the pain of the loss, medicine for tight bellies and choked-up throats.

He pointed his chin at the springs and around at the narrow canyon. "This is where we come from, see. The sand, this stone, these trees, the vines, all the wildflowers. this earth keeps us going." He took off his hat and wiped his forehead on his shirt. "These dry years you hear some people complaining, you know, about the dust and the wind, and how dry it is. But the wind and the dust, they are part of life too, like the sun and the sky. You don't swear at them. It's people, see. They're the ones. The old people used to say that droughts happen when people forget, when people misbehave.

He had only seen and heard the world as it always was: no boundaries, only transitions through all distances and time.

The room pulsed with feeling,

I will tell you something about stories, [he said] They aren’t just entertainment. Don’t be fooled. They are all we have, you see, all we have to fight off illness and death.   You don’t have anything if you don’t have the stories.   Their evil is mighty but it can’t stand up to our stories. So they try to destroy the stories let the stories be confused or forgotten. They would like that They would be happy Because we would be defenseless then.   He

Marc Reisner’s Cadillac Desert, Rick Bass’s The Watch, Terry Tempest Williams’s Refuge, Charles Bowden’s Red Line, Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony, Doug Peacock’s Grizzly Years, and Pam Houston’s Cowboys Are My Weakness.

They only fool themselves when they think it is theirs. The deeds and papers don’t mean anything. It is the people who belong to the mountain.

The word he chose to express “fragile” was filled with the intricacies of a continuing process, and with a strength inherent in spider webs woven across paths through sand hills where early in the morning the sun becomes entangled in each filament of web. It took a long time to explain the fragility and intricacy because no word exists alone, and the reason for choosing each word had to be explained with a story about why it must be said this certain way. That was the responsibility that went with being human, old Ku’oosh said, the story behind each word must be told so there could be no mistake in the meaning of what had been said; and

How much longer would they last? How long before one of them got stabbed in a bar fight, not just knocked out? How long before this old truck swerved off the road or head-on into a bus? Bit it didn't make much difference anyway. The drinking and hell raising were just things they did, as he had done sitting at the ranch all afternoon, watching the yellow cat bite the air for flies; passing the time away, waiting for it to end.

Sailboat Table (table by Quint Hankle) The Voyage of the Narwhal, by Andrea Barrett Complete Stories, by Clarice Lispector Boy Kings of Texas, by Domingo Martinez The Marrow Thieves, by Cherie Dimaline A Brief History of Seven Killings, by Marlon James There There, by Tommy Orange Citizen: An American Lyric, by Claudia Rankine Underland, by Robert Macfarlane The Undocumented Americans, by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio Deacon King Kong, by James McBride The Dutch House, by Ann Patchett Will and Testament, by Vigdis Hjorth Every Man Dies Alone, by Hans Fallada The Door, by Magda Svabo The Plot Against America, by Philip Roth Fates and Furies, by Lauren Groff The Overstory, by Richard Power Night Train, by Lise Erdrich Her Body and Other Parties, by Carmen Maria Machado The Penguin Book of the Modern American Short Story, edited by John Freeman Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates Birds of America, by Lorrie Moore Mongrels, by Stephen Graham Jones The Office of Historical Corrections, by Danielle Evans Tenth of December, by George Saunders Murder on the Red River, by Marcie R. Rendon Leave the World Behind, by Rumaan Alam Ceremony, by Leslie Marmon Silko On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, by Ocean Vuong The Unwomanly Face of War, by Svetlana Alexievich Standard Deviation, by Katherine Heiny All My Puny Sorrows, by Miriam Toews The Death of the Heart, by Elizabeth Bowen Mean Spirit, by Linda Hogan NW, by Zadie Smith Being Mortal, by Atul Gawande Americanah, by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Firekeeper’s Daughter, by Angeline Boulley Erasure, by Percival Everett Sharks in the Time of Saviors, by Kawai Strong Washburn Heaven, by Mieko Kawakami

I will tell you something about stories. They aren't just entertainment. They are all we have to fight off illness and death. You don't have anything if you don't have stories.

He laughed. "They don't understand. We know these hills, and we are comfortable here." There was something about the way the old man said the word "comfortable." It had a different meaning--not the comfort of big houses or rich food or even clean streets, but the comfort of belonging with the land, and the peace of being with these hills. But the special meaning the old man had given to the English word was burned away the glare of the sun on tin cans and broken glass, blinding reflections off the mirrors and chrome of the wrecked cars in the dump below.

He was standing with the wind at his back, like that mule, and he felt he could stand there indefinitely, maybe forever, like a fence post or a tree. It took a great deal of energy to be a human being, and the more the wind blew and the sun moved southwest, the less energy Tayo had.

There are much worse things, you know. The destroyers: they work to see how much can be lost, how much can be forgotten. They destroy the feeling people have for each other." He took a deep breath; it hurt his chest. He thought of Josiah then, and Rocky "Their highest ambition is to gut human beings while they are still breathing, to hold the heart still beating so the victim will never feel anything again. When they finish, you watch yourself from a distance and you can't even cry - not even for yourself." He recognized it then: the thick white skin that had enclosed him, silencing the sensations of living, the live as well as the grief; and he had been left with only the hum of the tissues that enclosed him. He never knew how long he had been lost there, in that hospital in Los Angeles. "They are all around now. Only destruction is capable of arousing a sensation, the remains of something alive in them; and each time they do it, the scar thickens, and they feel less and less, yet still hungering for more.

You damn your own soul better than I ever could

Caves across the ocean in caves of dark hills white skin people like the belly of a fish covered with hair. Then they grow away from the earth then they grow away from the sun then they grow away from the plants and animals. They see no life When they look they see only objects. The world is a dead thing for them the trees and rivers are not alive the mountains and stones are not alive. The deer and bear are objects They see no life. They fear They fear the world. They destroy what they fear. They fear themselves. The wind will blow them across the ocean thousands of them in giant boats swarming like larva out of a crushed ant hill. They will carry objects which can shoot death faster than the eye can see. They will kill the things they fear all the animals the people will starve. They will poison the water they will spin the water away and there will be drought the people will starve. They will fear what they find They will fear the people They kill what they fear. Entire villages will be wiped out They will slaughter whole tribes. Corpses for us Blood for us Killing killing killing killing. And those they do not kill will die anyway at the destruction they see at the loss at the loss of the children the loss will destroy the rest. Stolen rivers and mountains the stolen land will eat their hearts and jerk their mouths from the Mother. The people will starve. They will bring terrible diseases the people have never known. Entire tribes will die out covered with festered sores shitting blood vomiting blood. Corpses for our work Set in motion now set in motion by our witchery set in motion to work for us. They will take this world from ocean to ocean they will turn on each other they will destroy each other Up here in these hills they will find the rocks, rocks with veins of green and yellow and black. They will lay the final pattern with these rocks they will lay it across the world and explode everything. Set in motion now set in motion To destroy To kill Objects to work for us objects to act for us Performing the witchery for suffering for torment for the still-born the deformed the sterile the dead. Whirling whirling whirling whirling set into motion now set into motion. So the other witches said

White people selling Indians junk cars and trucks reminded Tayo of the Army captain in the 1860s who made a gift of wool blankets to the Apaches: the entire stack of blankets was infected with smallpox

The juke box was playing a Mexican polka

They drank until they couldn’t walk without holding on to her. She asked them for money then, money to send back to Emma at Towac: for the little girls. Then they stumbled up the steps to the Hudson Hotel. If she took long enough in the toilet, they usually passed out on the bed.

Their mouths were wet and soured with beer, and when they pushed themselves down on her, they felt small and soft between her thighs. She stared at the stains on the ceiling, and waited until they gave up or fell asleep, and then she rolled out from under them.

She didn’t like the looks of the Indian women she saw in Gallup, dancing at Eddie’s club with the drunks that stumbled around the floor with them. Their hair was dirty and straight. They’d shaved off their eyebrows, but the hairs were growing back and they didn’t bother to pencil them any more. Their blouses had buttons missing and were fastened with safety pins. Their western pants were splitting out at the seams; there were stains around the crotch.

At twilight the earth was darker than the sky, and it was difficult to see if any of Romero’s sheep or goats were grazing along the edge of the pavement. The tourist traffic on Highway 66 was gone now, and Tayo imagined white people eating their mashed potatoes and gravy in some steamy Grants café.

But there was something else now, as Betonie said: it was everything they had seen—the cities, the tall buildings, the noise and the lights, the power of their weapons and machines. They were never the same after that: they had seen what the white people had made from the stolen land.

The steer had to stay down for ten seconds before the roper’s time could be recorded. The jackpot had been three hundred dollars that day, and the red-faced white man who took it turned in a record time: six seconds; but when the men loosened the rope on the steer’s neck, it did not move. They dragged it away behind two horses, one of the forelegs dangling in the hide, shattered. The anger made him lightheaded, but he did not talk about this other dimension of their perversion which, like the hunting of the mountain lion, was their idea of “sport” and fun.

Then they grow away from the earth then they grow away from the sun then they grow away from the plants and animals. They see no life When they look they see only objects. The world is a dead thing for them the trees and rivers are not alive

Whirling darkness has come back on itself. It keeps all its witchery to itself.

The word he chose to express “fragile” was filled with the intricacies of a continuing process, and with a strength inherent in spider webs woven across paths through sand hills where early in the morning the sun becomes entangled in each filament of web. It took a long time to explain the fragility and intricacy because no word exists alone, and the reason for choosing each word had to be explained with a story about why it must be said this certain way. That was the responsibility that went with being human.