10.20.2003

" 'My grandmother was a storyteller; she knew her way around words. She never learned to read and write, but somehow she knew the good of reading and writing; she had learned how to listen and delight. She had learned that in words and in language, and there only, she could have whole and consummate being. She told me stories, and she taught me how to listen. I was a child and I listened. She could neither read nor write, you see, but she taught me how to live among her words, how to listen and delight. "Storytelling; to utter and to hear..." And the simple act of listening is crucial to the concept of language, more crucial even than reading and writing...' "
{N. Scott Momaday, House Made of Dawn, 1968}

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