Skip to content

Quotes from The Sacred Hoop — Paula Gunn Allen

1939–2008 United States

← All quotes by Paula Gunn Allen

29 quotes

The power of imagination, of image, which is the fundamental power of literature, is the power to determine a people’s fate.

The Sacred Hoop (1986)

All tales are born in the mind of Spider Woman, and all creation exists as a result of her naming.

The Sacred Hoop (1986)

One’s emotions are one’s own; to suggest that others should imitate them is to impose on the personal integrity of others.

The Sacred Hoop (1986)

Red, the color of the earth and of the East, and the color of what is sacred.

The Sacred Hoop (1986)

The fragility of the world is a result of its nature as thought. Both land and human being participate in the same kind of being, for both are thoughts in the mind of Grandmother Spider.

The Sacred Hoop (1986)

The oral tradition is more than a record of a people’s culture. It is the creative source of their collective and individual selves.

The Sacred Hoop (1986)

The oral tradition is a living body. It is in continuous flux, which enables it to accommodate itself to the real circumstances of a people’s lives.

The Sacred Hoop (1986)

One sees life as part of oneself; a hint as to which particular part is all that is needed to convey meaning.

The Sacred Hoop (1986)

We are the land, and the land is mother to us all.

The Sacred Hoop (1986)

The mythic dimension of experience—the psychospiritual ordering of nonordinary knowledge—is an experience that all peoples, past, present, and to come, have in common.

The Sacred Hoop (1986)

Literature must, of necessity, express and articulate the deepest perceptions, relationships, and attitudes of a culture, whether it does so deliberately or accidentally.

The Sacred Hoop (1986)

To address a person as “mother” is to pay the highest ritual respect.

The Sacred Hoop (1986)

Timelessness—that place where one is whole.

The Sacred Hoop (1986)

Patriarchy requires that powerful women be discredited so that its own system will seem to be the only one that reasonable or intelligent people can subscribe to.

The Sacred Hoop (1986)

The traditional tribal concept of time is of timelessness, as the concept of space is of multidimensionality. In the ceremonial world the tribes inhabit, time and space are mythic.

The Sacred Hoop (1986)

Every tribe has a responsibility to the workings of the universe; today as yesterday, human beings play an intrinsic role in the ongoing creation.

The Sacred Hoop (1986)

Acceptance is the better part of grief.

The Sacred Hoop (1986)

There is a permanent wilderness in the blood of an Indian, a wilderness that will endure as long as the grass grows, the wind blows, the rivers flow, and one Indian woman remains alive.

The Sacred Hoop (1986)

Democracy by coercion is hardly democracy, in any language, and to some Indians recognizing that fact, the threat of extinction is preferable to the ignominy of enslavement in their own land.

The Sacred Hoop (1986)

You can take the Indian out of Indian country but you can’t take the Indian out of the Indian.

The Sacred Hoop (1986)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Paula Gunn Allen (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.