Michael Dorris Quotes

• At different stages in our lives, the signs of love may vary: dependence, attraction, contentment, worry, loyalty, grief, but at heart the source is always the same. Human beings have the rare capacity to connect with each other, against all odds

  Michael Dorris

  Love, Loyalty, Grief

  56 Copy quote

• Grandfather was well known for being stubborn in his ideas. For instance... you had to go to sleep facing east so that you would be ready to greet the sun when it returned.

  Michael Dorris

  Sleep, Ideas, Grandparent

  Michael Dorris (1994). “Guests”

  17 Copy quote

• My son will forever travel through a moonless night with only the roar of wind for company.... A drowning man is not separated from the lust for air by a bridge of thought—he is one with it—and my son, conceived and grown in an ethanol bath, lives each day in the act of drowning. For him there is no shore.

  Michael Dorris

  Son, Night, Men

  The Broken Cord ch. 14 (1989)

  12 Copy quote

• To be known for one's saddest story is not the road to notoriety anyone would willingly choose.

  Michael Dorris

  Stories, Notoriety, Saddest

  Michael Dorris (1994). “Paper trail: essays”, Harpercollins

  12 Copy quote

• Considering that virtually none of the standard fare surrounding Thanksgiving contains an ounce of authenticity, historical accuracy, or cross-cultural perception, why is it so apparently ingrained? Is it necessary to the American psyche to perpetually exploit and debase its victims in order to justify its history?

  Michael Dorris

  Order, Historical, Perception

  8 Copy quote

• Don't ask so many questions and they will all be answered.

  Michael Dorris

  Asks

  Michael Dorris (1987). “A Yellow Raft in Blue Water”

  6 Copy quote

• Here are two facts that should not both be true:
  - There is sufficient food produced in the world every year to feed every human being on the planet.
  - Nearly 800 million people literally go hungry every day, with more than a third of the earth's population -- 2 billion men and women -- malnourished one way or another, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.

  Michael Dorris

  Men, Years, Organization

  6 Copy quote

• I certainly don't object to [writers] trying to imagine the lives of other societies, but you have to do it with a certain amount of humility and respect. If it were not for the ethnographic material that had been collected by missionaries and anthropologists and so forth, much of past Native American society would no longer be accessible. What I object to is making kitsch of things that are very serious.

  Michael Dorris

  Humility, Native American, Past

  9 Copy quote

• The necessity of loyalty between friends, the responsibility that the strong owe the infirm, the illusion of ill-gotten gain, the rewards of hard work, honesty, and trust-these are enduring truths glimpsed and judged first through the imagination, first through art.

  Michael Dorris

  Loyalty, Art, Strong

  Michael Dorris (1994). “Paper trail: essays”, Harpercollins

  7 Copy quote

• We Americans are tempted to distinguish ourselves from other current and former inhabitants of this planet by assuming that we are ruled by progress.

  Michael Dorris

  Progress, Assuming, Currents

  Michael Dorris (1994). “Paper trail: essays”, Harpercollins

  6 Copy quote

• I watched the way you watch when you know you want to remember.

  Michael Dorris

  Life, Memories, Watches

  8 Copy quote

• Dinner is to a day what dessert is to dinner.

  Michael Dorris

  Dinner, Dessert, Eating

  4 Copy quote

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