N. Scott Momaday Quotes

This Great God, Like a mammy bending over her baby, Kneeled down in the dust Toiling over a lump of clay Till He shaped it in His own image.

Now I really make the little idea from clay, and I hold it in my hand. I can turn it, look at it from underneath, see it from one view, hold it against the sky, imagine it any size I like, and really be in control almost like God creating something.

And out of darkness came the hands that reach thro' nature, moulding men.

None merits the name of Creator but God and the poet.

Nature is the art of God.

When a man undertakes to create something, he establishes a new heaven, as it were, and from it the work that he desires to create flows into him... For such is the immensity of man that he is greater than heaven and earth.

I don't know where my songs come from... If I knew, I'd know too much, more than we are allowed on this plane.

God is really only another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant and the cat. He has no real style, He just goes on trying other things.

Nature is full of genius, full of the divinity; so that not a snowflake escapes its fashioning hand.

Copy nature and you infringe on the work of our Lord. Interpret nature and you are an artist.

The hand of God creates; it does not conceal.

God created the world out of nothing, and so long as we are nothing, He can make something out of us.

Fear in sooth holds so in check all mortals, becasue thay see many operations go on in earth and heaven, the causes of which they can in no way understand, believing them therefore to be done by power divine. for these reasons when we shall have seen that nothing can be produced from nothing, we shall then more correctly ascertain that which we are seeking, both the elements out of which every thing can be produced and the manner in which every thing can be produced in which all things are done without the hands of the gods.

The core of creation is to summon an image and the power to work with the image.

To create is divine, to reproduce is human.

Everything I do is a direct creation of my hands, whether it is made in wood, plaster or clay.

Writing anything, it sorta starts the way you'd build a castle at the beach. You're just taking your hands and you're mounting up sand.

[He] looked up and imagined the hand of God flinging stars like shining dust across the heavens. No. He was wrong to think such pagan thoughts, for God had only to utter a word and it was done. Only man had He shaped with His hands, using the dust He created to form His most precious and amazing creation. Only man was molded and loved into being, the breath of life in his lungs given by God.

Creation is an act of love and it is perpetual.

We are God's productions, His compositions.

Continuous creation is to be thought of not only as a series of successive acts of creation, but also as the eternal presence of the one creative act.

The Biblical story of the creation is an excellent parable of movement. The work of art, too, is above all a process of creation, it is never experienced as a mere product.

Writers feel like a middleman, standing with pen in hand over the page. A force greater than me stands above telling me what to write. That may sound romantic, but that's how it feels.

They all have tired mouths and bright seamless souls. And a longing (as for sin) sometimes haunts their dreams. They are almost all alike; in God's gardens they keep still, like many, many intervals in his might and melody. Only when they spread their wings are they wakers of a wind: as if God with his broad sculptor- hands leafed through the pages in the dark book of the beginning.