Top 18 Quotes & Sayings by Gerald Vizenor

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American writer Gerald Vizenor.
Last updated on December 3, 2024.
Gerald Vizenor

Gerald Robert Vizenor is an American writer and scholar, and an enrolled member of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, White Earth Reservation. Vizenor also taught for many years at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was Director of Native American Studies. With more than 30 books published, Vizenor is Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, and Professor of American Studies at the University of New Mexico.

It's so difficult to write in motion and get rid of the past tense, and also to create a sense of impermanence.
There is a sense of motion and a concise, immediate image in haikus and Anishinaabe dream songs.
The idea of victimage is a dreadful thing, a product of a safe middle-class perspective. What people who are not safe develop is a tragic wisdom, a wisdom that embraces contradiction and seeks a sense of balance rather than going to extremes.
There are 13 stories in 'The Fencepost Chronicles' about corrupt tribal leaders, trouble on the reserve, survival schemes, and communal drinking.
Trickster stories are pleasurable, contradictory, annoying, abrasive. They're powerful, transformational acts of liberation because they are not nailed down to the real, to the representation of something in the world.
The great liberation of imaginative writing is that you're not held back by the facts.
Naanabozho was the first tribal trickster on the earth.
Confucius would give his seat to an old woman. Communist cadres, on the other hand, took the best seats and called it a cultural revolution. — © Gerald Vizenor
Confucius would give his seat to an old woman. Communist cadres, on the other hand, took the best seats and called it a cultural revolution.
If you desecrate a white grave, you wind up sitting in prison. But desecrate an Indian grave, and you get a Ph.D.
The first Western teacher of English in Japan was a Native American.
Indians are usually seen as capsulized: limited to one environment, with the illusion of stability in that environment. But Indians have been engaged all over the world for centuries, in Europe, even in Asia.
Mixed-bloods loosen the seams in the shrouds of identities. — © Gerald Vizenor
Mixed-bloods loosen the seams in the shrouds of identities.
Even the earliest cave paintings in France and Spain had natural motion.
W. P. Kinsella, who was born on a farm near Edmunton, Alberta, has earned wide recognition for his wild imagination and rash humor as a writer.
I use not casual phrases but imagistic phrases that create a rhythm of natural presence.
Life is a chance, a story is a chance. That I am here is a chance.
Race is an invention, not a noticeable genetic presence, and cultural traits are brute concoctions of the social sciences.
I'm a visual thinker. With almost all of my writing, I start with something that's visual: either the way someone says something that is visual or an actual visual description of a scene and color.
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