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Ceremony QUOTES

Ceremony QUOTES

1 " 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. "

― Leslie Marmon Silko , Ceremony

2 " 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. "

― Leslie Marmon Silko , Ceremony

3 " 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. "

― Leslie Marmon Silko , Ceremony

4 " 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. "

― Leslie Marmon Silko , Ceremony

5 " 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. "

― Leslie Marmon Silko , Ceremony

6 " 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. "

― Leslie Marmon Silko , Ceremony

7 " 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. "

― Leslie Marmon Silko , Ceremony

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

― Leslie Marmon Silko , Ceremony

9 " 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. "

― Leslie Marmon Silko , Ceremony

10 " 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. "

― Leslie Marmon Silko , Ceremony

11 " 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. "

― Leslie Marmon Silko , Ceremony

12 " 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. "

― Leslie Marmon Silko , Ceremony

13 " 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. "

― Leslie Marmon Silko , Ceremony

14 " 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. "

― Leslie Marmon Silko , Ceremony

15 " 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. "

― Leslie Marmon Silko , Ceremony

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

― Leslie Marmon Silko , Ceremony

17 " 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, "

― Leslie Marmon Silko , Ceremony

18 " You damn your own soul better than I ever could. "

― Leslie Marmon Silko , Ceremony

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

― Leslie Marmon Silko , Ceremony

20 " 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. "

― Leslie Marmon Silko , Ceremony