Leslie Marmon Silko Quotes

If you really want to know yourself, start by writing a book.

I write to make sense of things that don't make sense to me.

I always write to understand my place in the world. I can see myself and my life unfold on the page, and I can understand my strengths, my weaknesses - I can see where I need to step up a bit.

The more I talk about things, the more I understand myself.

Writing is how I find out what I believe and what I care most deeply about. It's how I sort through the mess of daily experience and try to make sense of it - by stepping out of it for a while. Writing is how I train a searchlight into the darker corners of my self and the world, as I'm sure I'd never do otherwise.

I write to express my thoughts, my feelings. I want people to think.

One advantage in keeping a diary is that you become aware with reassuring clarity of the changes which you constantly suffer.

At the typewriter you find out who you are.

Not until we are lost do we begin to understand ourselves.

Books can only reveal us to ourselves, and as often as they do us this service we lay them aside.

I write to make some sense of things that confuse me. The mechanics of my own heart are the most confusing I know about - and don't know about - and other people's are a bit confusing, too.

My only way of processing anything for me is by writing.

Writing is the only way I have to explain my own life to myself.

I write to discover what I think.

You're always thinking, "What does that add up to?" You can't really get a handle on it. I was curious. I felt like it would be an interesting challenge for me to write down what I'd seen and done and learned - all the convolutions captured in one item that I could look at and get some grip on what the hell happened.

I love the dark hours of my being. My mind deepens into them. There I can find, as in old letters, the days of my life, already lived, and held like a legend, and understood.

After all, without understanding yourself, what basis have you for right thinking?

You may think me crude, and probably I am crude, but I am not so crude as I was, for I am clever enough to see that the girl of nineteen who thought herself a genius was only an unusual girl writing her heart out.

When the traveler goes alone he gets acquainted with himself.

I love books, and all the best ones are people analysing their own emotions. You can learn from that.

One travels more usefully when alone, because he reflects more.

I have always written only for myself - to clarify things, to clarify things with myself, to understand in an inner way what is actually happening.

When I go back and read my journals or fiction, I am always surprised. I may not remember having those thoughts, but they still exist and I know they are mine, and it's all part of making sense of who I am.

Writing is a really good first step toward that goal of knowing yourself.

What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we are not able to cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves? This is the most important of all voyages of discovery, and without it, all the rest are not only useless, but disastrous.