Almanac of the Dead
Leslie Marmon Silko
Top 10 Best Quotes
“Because if you weren't born white, you were forced to see differences; or if you weren't born what they called normal, or if you got injured, then you were left to explore the world of the different.”
“The truth of course was otherwise, but Lecha had never felt she owed anyone the truth, unless it was truth about their own lives, and then they had to pay her to tell them.”
“There was not, and there never had been, a legal government by Europeans anywhere in the Americas. Not by any definition, not even by the Europeans’ own definitions and laws. Because no legal government could be established on stolen land.”
“We don’t believe in boundaries. Borders. Nothing like that. We are here thousands of years before the first whites. We are here before maps or quit claims. We know where we belong on this earth. We have always moved freely. North-south. East-west. We pay no attention to what isn’t real. Imaginary lines. Imaginary minutes and hours. Written law. We recognize none of that. And we carry a great many things back and forth. We don’t see any border. We have been here and this has continued thousands of years.”
“The white man had sprinkled holy water and had prayed for almost five hundred years in the Americas, and still the Christian God was absent. Now Clinton understood why European philosophers had told their people God was dead: the white man’s God had died about the time the Europeans had started sailing around the world. In the Americas the white man never referred to the past but only to the future. The white man didn’t seem to understand he had no future here because he had no past, no spirits of ancestors here.”
“Earth was their mother, but her land and water could never be desecrated; blasted open and polluted by man, but never desecrated. Man only desecrated himself in such acts; puny humans could not affect the integrity of Earth. Earth always was and would ever be sacred. Mother Earth might be ravaged by the Destroyers, but she still loved the people.”
“What was coming could not be stopped; the people might join or not […] It made no difference because what was coming was relentless and inevitable; it might require five or ten years of great violence and conflict. It might require a hundred years of spirit voices and simple population growth, but the result would be the same: tribal people would retake the Americas; tribal people would retake ancestral land all over the world. This was what earth’s spirits wanted: her indigenous children who loved her and did not harm her.”
“The white man had violated the Mother Earth, and he had been stricken with the sensation of a gaping emptiness between his throat and his heart.”
“The powers who controlled the United States didn't want the people to know their history. If the people knew their history, they would realize they must rise up.”
“The humans would not be a great loss to the earth. The energy or “electricity” of a being’s spirit was not extinguished by death; it was set free from the flesh. Dust to dust or as a meal for pack rats, the energy of the spirit was never lost. Out of the dust grew the plants; the plants were consumed and became muscle and bone; and all the time, the energy had only been changing form, nothing had been lost or destroyed.”
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Book Keywords:
revolution, america, history, truth
