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Black Elk

"Now suddenly there was nothing but a world of cloud, and we three were there alone in the middle of a great white plain with snowy hills and mountains staring at us; and it was very still; but there were whispers."

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"Now suddenly there was nothing but a world of cloud, and we three were there alone in the middle of a great white plain with snowy hills and mountains staring at us; and it was very still; but there were whispers."

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Amber Hurdle

"I knew this feeling, the 2 a.m. loneliness that I'd practically invented."

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Amber Hurdle

"O solitude, where are the charms That sages have seen in thy face? Better dwell in the midst of alarms, Than reign in this horrible place."

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Amber Hurdle

"I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude."

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Amber Hurdle

"Solitude produces originality, bold and astonishing beauty, poetry. But solitude also produces perverseness, the disproportianate, the absurd and the forbidden."

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Amber Hurdle

"I inhale loneliness like it is the sweet smell of virgin earth conquered by fiery rain drops. Within me, I'm a thousand others."

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Amber Hurdle

"One may have a blazing hearth in one's soul and yet no one ever comes to sit by it."

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Amber Hurdle

"I have often wished in vain, ' said she, 'for another's judgment to appeal to when I could scarcely trust the direction of my own eye and head, they having been so long occupied with the contemplation of a single object as to become almost incapable of forming a proper idea respecting it.'That, ' replied I, 'is only one of many evils to which a solitary life exposes us."

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Amber Hurdle

"That illusion of a world so shaped that it echoes every groan, of human beings so tied together by common needs and fears that a twitch at one wrist jerks another, where however strange your experience other people have had it too, where however far you travel in your own mind someone has been there before you - - is all an illusion. We do not know our own souls, let alone the souls of others. Human beings do not go hand in hand the whole stretch of the way. There is a virgin forest in each; a snowfield where even the print of birds' feet is unknown. Here we go alone, and like it better so. Always to have sympathy, always to be accompanied, always to be understood would be intolerable."

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Amber Hurdle

"Solitude is the place of purification."

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Amber Hurdle

"The others in the dorm thought I wanted to be a writer, because I was always alone with a book, but I had no such ambition. There was nothing I wanted to be."

Explore more quotes by Black Elk

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Black Elk
"And I say the sacred hoop of my people was one of the many hoops that made one circle, wide as daylight and as starlight, and in the center grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all the children of one mother and one father."
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Black Elk
"And while I stood there I saw more than I can tell and I understood more than I saw; for I was seeing in a sacred manner the shapes of all things in the spirit, and the shape of all shapes as they must live together like one being."
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Black Elk
"I had a vision with which I might have saved my people, but I had not the strength to do it."
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Black Elk
"You see, I had been riding with the storm clouds, and had come to earth as rain, and it was drought that I had killed with the power that the Six Grandfathers gave me."
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Black Elk
"To use the power of the bison, I had to perform that part of my vision for the people to see."
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Black Elk
"After the horse dance was over, it seemed that I was above the ground and did not touch it when I walked."
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Black Elk
"You remember that my great vision came to me when I was only nine years old, and you have seen that I was not much good for anything until after I had performed the horse dance near the mouth of the Tongue River during my eighteenth summer."
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Black Elk
"I looked below and saw my people there, and all were well and happy except one, and he was lying like the dead - and that one was myself."
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Black Elk
"So I took the bright red stick and at the center of the nation's hoop I thrust it in the earth."
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Black Elk
"And if the great fear had not come upon me, as it did, and forced me to do my duty, I might have been less good to the people than some man who had never dreamed at all, even with the memory of so great a vision in me."
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