Joseph Boyden Quotes

“I say that humans are the only ones in this world that need everything within it ... But there is nothing in the world that needs us for its survival. We aren't the masters of the earth. We're the servants.”

— Joseph Boyden

“When I die, nieces, I want to be cremated, my ashes taken up in a bush plane and sprinkled onto the people in town below. Let them think my body is snowflakes, sticking in their hair and on their shoulders like dandruff.”

— Joseph Boyden

“They laugh at this, the idea that one might keep herds of friendly deer or elk that walk happily to their slaughter whenever it's time for the human to eat meat. Some ask openly if there aren't consequences of a life so easy to live.”

— Joseph Boyden

“We all fight on two fronts, the one facing the enemy, the one facing what we do to the enemy.”

— Joseph Boyden

“Mother Nature was one angry slut. She'd try and kill you the first chance she got. You'd screwed with her for so long that she was happy to eliminate you.”

— Joseph Boyden

“This memory, this pretty little stone, I examine it with my eyes closed tight. Turn it over in my fingers.”

— Joseph Boyden

“There's something sexy in cooking for a man who likes my food. Am I growing up?”

— Joseph Boyden

“I thought of my mother late that night, after leaving Dorothy, as I followed the moon's path back home across the Moose River. My mother, maybe she was in that moon's light. I didn't know any more, but when I was younger, Iuse to imagine that she was. I'd talk to the moon some nights, and I knew my mother listened. I haven't done that in a long time, me. -Through Black Spruce, Joseph Boyden, ch 13, pg 119”

— Joseph Boyden

“We are the people birthed from this land. For the first time I can seem something I've not fully understood before, not until now as these pale creatures from somewhere far away stare down at us in wonder, trying to makes sense of what they see. We are this place. This place is us.”

— Joseph Boyden

“In school, it got so that Elijah learned to talk his way out of anything, gave great long speeches so that his words snaked themselves like vines around the nuns until they could no longer move, [ ... ].”

— Joseph Boyden

“Wolves are so frightening not because of their fangs and claws but because of their intelligence, because of their hunger.”

— Joseph Boyden

“Build it all up, and it all falls down. It all burns down. Everything you need can be taken. Remember that, nieces. Everything you hold dear, it can be taken.”

— Joseph Boyden

“Lots of times growing up, I'd just try to do something myself because I believed that being a boy, and being Indian, I should just know how to do things. -Will Bird, Through Black Spruce”

— Joseph Boyden

I passed the friendship centre and nodded to an old couple on the porch. Kookum smiled back and nodded, a cotton kerchief on her head. Moshum's eyes squinted, too, but never looked straight at me, just glanced my presence once, and that was enough. Old school. I knew that when they stood up to hobble home, he would lead a few feet ahead, and she would follow. They grew up in the bush and still walked the same way, as if the wide road was nothing more than a narrow path through the muskeg and spruce.

— Joseph Boyden

“The world is a different place in this new century, [ ... ]. And we are a different people. My visions still come but no one listens any longer to what they tell us, what they warn us. I knew even as a young woman that destruction bred on the horizon. [ ... ] War touches everyone, and windigos spring from the earth.”

— Joseph Boyden

“Your grandfather was a hero in a war, girls. He wasn't a bad man or a weak man. Maybe he was too old to have a second family, a second wife and your mother and me, so many years after he lost his first. Maybe he was too old to fight anymore, and that's why he let me be taken away. I've thought about this for years and years. All I know is there are no heroes in this world. Not really. Just men and women who become old and tired and lose the strength to fight for what they love any longer.”

— Joseph Boyden

“There's something in this particular practice that can teach us Cristians a powerful lesson, that we may see so vividly our own wretched state, that it's not this world we should cherish but the promise of the next.”

— Joseph Boyden

“I would give my left arm to fly in one of those aeroplanes ...”

— Joseph Boyden

“You are a hookimaw. Happiness is not yours to have.”

— Joseph Boyden

“The history needs to serve the story, not the story the history. But at the same time you can't stray too far.”

— Joseph Boyden

“Sometimes, it's not getting what we want that offers us the most important Lessons”

— Joseph Boyden

“Fascinating, often hilarious, always devastatingly truthful, The Inconvenient Indian is destined to become a classic of historical narrative. For those who wish to better understand Native peoples, it is a must read. For those who don't wish to understand, it is even more so.”

— Joseph Boyden

“Being a mixed-blood person of Ojibway and European ancestry, I always found that I only heard one side of the story - that was the conquerers' side, the side of the French Jesuit missionaries that came to live in what is now Ontario.”

— Joseph Boyden

“People will say that Canada, unlike America, was not birthed from violence. But I want to say, "What are you talking about?" It's just not true.”

— Joseph Boyden

There's the concept that dreams are as important - if not more important - than reality. The attention that one pays to those things in the shadows is very much a part of the Indian experience.

— Joseph Boyden

“America seems to celebrate its more violent past, but Canada doesn't like to recognize those things. The willingness to accept the existence of violence separates our two countries.”

— Joseph Boyden

“There's a few scholars that object to how the italicized sections suggest that Native people are to take some part in the blame for how colonization occurred. But I say, "Yes they are." Not nearly as much blame as the colonizers, of course. But we are not just victims. I hate this idea that we are all just victimized and oppressed and etcetera etcetera. It's dehumanizing in its own way.”

— Joseph Boyden

“During World War I the Canadians were the shock troops. In many historical cases, Canadians have been very proficient at killing, and doing what we have to in order to survive. But no one wants to acknowledge that fact.”

— Joseph Boyden

“Canada and America are very, very different. It's true that we share a language and many customs. But Americans have a very different view of the world.”

— Joseph Boyden

“I never want to play down to the reader. I think readers are willing to go along if they're intrigued.”

— Joseph Boyden

“I'm intrigued by the classic Greek tragedies, as well as by the idea of the Greek chorus.”

— Joseph Boyden

The beliefs of Native people are no less powerful or important just because they focus on a different "form of magic."

— Joseph Boyden

“I'm fascinated by the magic realism used by many writers. I think it goes hand-in-hand with the Indian experience. It's a very different way of viewing the world.”

— Joseph Boyden

From a craft standpoint, telling a story in the first-person present tense over the course of 500 pages is a daunting challenge.

— Joseph Boyden

“As a fiction writer, of course, you need to take some leeway with certain aspects of history to make the story work.”

— Joseph Boyden

“There were incredibly complex societies already existing in North America long before Europeans arrived. So many people think that before European contact it was just Natives huddling around a fire, waiting for civilization to come save them. But that was not the case.”

— Joseph Boyden

“Compared to Americans, Canadians are often more gentle in their approach to things. They're much more apologetic. There's less room for conflict.”

— Joseph Boyden