Leslie Marmon Silko

[He] 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. (p24)

The breaking and crushing were gone, and the love pushed inside his chest, and when he cried now, it was because she loved him so much. (p211)

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. (p154)

...how easy it was to stay alive now that he didn't care about being alive anymore. (p36)

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. (p35)

...feeling the instant of the dawn was an event which in a single moment gathered all things together—the last stars, the mountaintops, the clouds, and the winds—celebrating this coming. The power of each day spilled over the hills in great silence. Sunrise. (p169)

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. (p108)

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. (p240)

Being alive was all right then: he had not breathed like that for a long time. (p168)

...as I tell the story

it will begin to happen...

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. (p178)

"...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." (p215)