Almanac of the Dead 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.”
― Leslie Marmon Silko, Almanac of the Dead

“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.”
― Leslie Marmon Silko, Almanac of the Dead

“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.”
― Leslie Marmon Silko, Almanac of the Dead

“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.”
― Leslie Marmon Silko, Almanac of the Dead

“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.”
― Leslie Marmon Silko, Almanac of the Dead

“Even idiots can understand a church that tortures and kills is a church that can no longer heal.”
― Leslie Marmon Silko, Almanac of the Dead

“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.”
― Leslie Marmon Silko, Almanac of the Dead

“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.”
― Leslie Marmon Silko, Almanac of the Dead

“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.”
― Leslie Marmon Silko, Almanac of the Dead

“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.”
― Leslie Marmon Silko, Almanac of the Dead

“As the human soul approached death, it got more and more restless and more and more energy for wandering, a preparation for all eternity where the old people believed no one would rest or sleep but would range over the earth and between the moon and stars, traveling on winds and clouds, in constant motion with ocean tides, migrations of birds and animals, pulsing within all life and all beings ever created,”
― Leslie Marmon Silko, Almanac of the Dead

“Sacred time is always in the Present.”
― Leslie Marmon Silko, Almanac of the Dead

“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.”
― Leslie Marmon Silko, Almanac of the Dead

“Because people everywhere had forgotten the spirits, the spirits of all their ancestors who had preceded them on these vast continents. Yes, the Americas were full of furious, bitter spirits; five hundred years of slaughter had left the continents swarming with millions of spirits that never rested and would never stop until justice had been done.”
― Leslie Marmon Silko, Almanac of the Dead

“AFTER THE NIGHT rain, a blue mist rose above the rolling green llanos from dawn until noon. A hundred miles in the distance, the high mountains were still hidden in clouds, and it had been easy for David to imagine he was Adam in the Garden. For as far as he could see to the south and the west, there were no jet vapor trails, no engine sounds, no glitter of metal or glass, no dogs barking, no human voice; only the insects whirring and the calls of birds.”
― Leslie Marmon Silko, Almanac of the Dead

“The ancestors had called Europeans “the orphan people” and had noted that as with orphans taken in by selfish or coldhearted clanspeople, few Europeans had remained whole. They failed to recognize the earth was their mother. Europeans were like their first parents, Adam and Eve, wandering aimlessly because the insane God who had sired them had abandoned them.”
― Leslie Marmon Silko, Almanac of the Dead

“Christianity might work on other continents and with other human beings; Yoeme did not dispute those possibilities. But from the beginning in the Americas, the outsiders had sensed their Christianity was somehow inadequate in the face of the immensely powerful and splendid spirit beings who inhabited the vastness of the Americas. The Europeans had not been able to sleep soundly on the American continents, not even with a full military guard.”
― Leslie Marmon Silko, Almanac of the Dead

“No wonder the blood sacrifices and the blood-spilling had stopped when the people reached this high desert plateau; every drop of moisture, every drop of blood, each tear, had been made precious by this arid land.”
― Leslie Marmon Silko, Almanac of the Dead

“All across earth there were those listening and waiting, isolated and lonely, despised outcasts of the earth. First the lights would go out— dynamite or earthquake, it did not matter. All sources of electrical power generation would be destroyed. Darkness was the ally of the poor. [...] With the return of Indian land would come the return of justice, followed by peace.”
― Leslie Marmon Silko, Almanac of the Dead

“Indians flung across the world forever separated from their tribes and from their ancestral lands—that kind of thing had been happening to human beings since the beginning of time. African tribes had been sold into slavery all over the earth.”
― Leslie Marmon Silko, Almanac of the Dead