# Paula Gunn Allen - Quotes: 99 - Author page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/paula-gunn-allen ## Books - [Grandmothers of The Light](https://www.leafyquotes.com/paula-gunn-allen/grandmothers-of-the-light.md) — 3 quotes - [Off the Reservation](https://www.leafyquotes.com/paula-gunn-allen/off-the-reservation.md) — 3 quotes - [The Sacred Hoop](https://www.leafyquotes.com/paula-gunn-allen/the-sacred-hoop.md) — 93 quotes ## Recently added quotes > Our heart is in the sky. We understand that woman is the sun and the earth: she is grandmother; she is mother; she is Thought, Wisdom, Dream, Reason, Tradition, Memory, Deity, and Life itself. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/paula-gunn-allen/the-sacred-hoop/our-heart-is-in-the.md) > Violating taboos is very dangerous to all life, and while most Americans can blithely avoid the immediate consequences of disrespect, the human community over most of the world pays a very high price for our violations. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/paula-gunn-allen/grandmothers-of-the-light/violating-taboos-is-very.md) > In the universe of power, all transactions proceed in more directions than one. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/paula-gunn-allen/grandmothers-of-the-light/in-the-universe.md) > It is the loss of harmony, an inner-world imbalance, that reveals itself in physical or psychological ailment. It also plays itself out in social ailments, war, dictatorship, elitism, classism, sexism, and homophobia. This chain of action-consequence ensues because balance and harmony are fundamental laws of the cosmos. Disorder brings about a series of adjustments whose purpose is to reestablish harmony. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/paula-gunn-allen/grandmothers-of-the-light/it-is-the.md) > It might be said that the basic purpose of any culture is to maintain the ideal status quo. What creates differences among cultures and literatures is the way in which the people go about this task, and this in turn depends on, and simultaneously maintains, basic assumptions about the nature of life and humanity’s place in it. The ideal status quo is generally expressed in terms of peace, prosperity, good health, and stability. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/paula-gunn-allen/the-sacred-hoop/it-might-be-said.md) > In the myth, and especially the mythopoeic vision that gives it birth, past, present, and future are one, and the human counterparts of these—ancestors, contemporaries, and descendents—are also one. Conscious and unconscious are united through the magic of symbolic progression so that the symbols can convey direct, rational meanings and stir indirect memories and insights that have not been raised to conscious articulation. In mythopoeic vision and its literary counterparts, the near and the far must come together, for in its grasp we stand in a transcendent landscape that incorporates both. Lastly, the mythic heals, it makes us whole. For in relating our separate experiences to one another, in weaving them into coherence and therefore significance, a sense of wholeness arises, a totality which, by virtue of our active participation, constitutes direct and immediate comprehension of ourselves and the universe of which we are integral parts. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/paula-gunn-allen/the-sacred-hoop/in-the-myth.md) > From invasion, which stretches from 1492 in the Caribbean to the 1880s in the United States (and is still occurring in parts of Central and South America), onward as far as the colonizers, particularly Americans, were concerned, Native Americans were faced with a choice between assimilation and extinction. This choice, forced on them through wars and policies that made other options such as resistance appear untenable, was eventually accepted as inevitable by many Native Americans. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/paula-gunn-allen/the-sacred-hoop/from-invasion-which.md) > Myth functions as an affirmation of self that transcends the temporal. It guides our attention toward a view of ourselves, a possibility, that we might not otherwise encounter. It shows us our own ability to accept and allow the eternal to be part of our selves. It allows us to image a marriage between our conscious and unconscious, fusing the twin dimensions of mind and society into a coherent, meaningful whole. It allows us to adventure in distant, unfamiliar landscapes while remaining close to home. Thus myth shows us that it is possible to relate ourselves to the grand and mysterious universe that surrounds and informs our being; it makes us aware of other orders of reality and experience and in that awareness makes the universe our home. It is a magic: it is the area of relationship between all those parts of experience that commonly divide us from ourselves, our universe, and our fellows. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/paula-gunn-allen/the-sacred-hoop/myth-functions-as-an-affirmation.md) > Symbols in American Indian systems are not symbolic in the usual sense of the word. The words articulate reality—not “psychological” or imagined reality, not emotive reality captured metaphorically in an attempt to fuse thought and feeling, but that reality where thought and feeling are one, where objective and subjective are one, where speaker and listener are one, where sound and sense are one. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/paula-gunn-allen/the-sacred-hoop/symbols-in-american.md) > The earth is the source and the being of the people, and we are equally the being of the earth. The land is not really a place, separate from ourselves, where we act out the drama of our isolate destinies; the witchery makes us believe that false idea. The earth is not a mere source of survival, distant from the creatures it nurtures and from the spirit that breathes in us, nor is it to be considered an inert resource on which we draw in order to keep our ideological self functioning, whether we perceive that self in sociological or personal terms. We must not conceive of the earth as an ever-dead other that supplies us with a sense of ego identity by virtue of our contrast to its perceived nonbeing. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/paula-gunn-allen/the-sacred-hoop/the-earth-is-the.md) > We are busily stealing the thunder back, so it can empower the fires of life we tend, have always tended, as it was ever meant to. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/paula-gunn-allen/the-sacred-hoop/we-are-busily.md) > The true nature of being is magical and that the proper duty of the creatures, the land, and human beings is to live in harmony with what is. [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/paula-gunn-allen/the-sacred-hoop/the-true-nature.md)