John Trudell - Fables and Other Realities

waterbird

"Those Teachings that we are given reflect the identity of the Spirit that is in each and everyone of us. You carry all those Teachings inside of you. As long as you have an ounce of blood of Anishinaabe, you have the genetic memory to know those Teachings. The holy spot of our people is the knowledge the Ceremony, the language, the relationship that we have with the land, that is the holy spot of our people. What an awesome gift that the Creator gave us as Anishinaabe people." -Dave Courchene Jr.

James Baldwin

Remember why you write.

The bottom line is this: You write in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably can’t, but also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world. In some way, your aspirations and concern for a single man in fact do begin to change the world. The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way a person looks or people look at reality, then you can change it.

-from a 1979 interview published in The New York Times