Gerald Vizenor Quotes

The present hardly exists, after all-it becomes the past even as it happens. A tricky medium, time - and central to the concerns of fiction.

For every minute, the future is becoming the past.

'Phantom' was for me an interesting technique of telling the story. You have one voice that it is in the present telling what is happening, and then there's one voice from the past that's also driving the story forward. And you know that the two story lines will meet eventually.

Success and failure are both part of life. Both are not permanent.

Surely the glory of journalism is its transience.

I have realized that the past and future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is.

You cannot build a house for last year's summer.

The now, the here, through which all future plunges into the past.

For all I know, I am beginning with the ending. My page one can wind up a year later as page two hundred, if it's still even around.

Life is a bubble in a lake, that glitters for an instant, bursts, and leaves not even a blur on the water; it is the leap of a minnow, which sends a tiny ripple trembling for a few inches.

The frailty of everything revealed at last. Old and troubling issues resolved into nothingness and night. The last instance of a thing takes the class with it. Turns out the light and is gone. Look around you. Ever is a long time. But the boy knew what he knew. That ever is no time at all.

People say you never remember anybody who dies in movies, and it's true, you don't. You don't even remember people who disappear. Although the moment that it happens might be terribly sad and moving, five minutes later, if you're asked to remember that person, you go, "Oh right, yeah, yeah!" 'Cause you're just moving forward.

The most intractable of our experiences is the experience of Time-the intuition of duration, combined with the thought of perpetual perishing.

There's no beauty without poignancy and there's no poignancy without the feeling that it's going, men, names, books, houses--bound for dust--mortal--

And these things that keep alive on departure know that you praise them; transient, they look to us, the most transient, to be their rescue. They want us to change them completely, in our invisible hearts, into -- O endlessly -- us! Whoever, finally, we may be.

A new chapter in a novel is something like a new scene in a play.

Keep constantly in mind in how many things you yourself have witnessed changes already. The universe is change, life is understanding.

Times of luxury do not last long, but pass away very quickly; nothing in this world can be long enjoyed.

Neither death nor wisdom has a full stop. There are only commas-no destinations, only waiting rooms.

We are all under sentence of death, but with a sort of indefinite reprieve.

A novel, basically, is writing one sentence — then, without violating the scope of the first one, writing the next sentence.

We're all travelers, all sojourners.

Man passes; he knows that he is dust; nothing is more evident than his frailty. If he should for a single moment forget it, what a chorus of voices would recall it to him! And yet, in the drop of existence which he absorbs, he takes in ages through memory and ages through presentiment. In the moments as they pass, he dimly sees eternity, and more than this, he possesses it by anticipation.

Life is so fluid that one can only hope to capture the living moment, to capture it alive and fresh ... without destroying that moment.