Tommy Orange
Born: 01-01-1982
Tommy Orange is a celebrated Native American author known for his debut novel "There There," which explores the complex identities and struggles of urban Native Americans. An enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma, Orange was born and raised in Oakland, California. He holds an MFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts and has received critical acclaim for his powerful storytelling and poignant insights into contemporary Native American life.
Book summaries for books written by Tommy Orange
Quotes
Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield, not one of the bears, but the shield, the protector, the mother, the grandmother, the great-grandmother, the great-great-grandmother, on back many generations.
He wasn’t sure why, but he felt a little more calm, a little more like everything was going to be okay, at least for the moment, at least as long as he could hold onto the feeling.
What he had mistaken for anger was actually concern.
He couldn’t remember the last time they’d sat and talked.
There’s the thing you do, the thing you are known for, and when you finally do it, when you finally do the very thing you’ve been known for, you don’t feel like you thought you would.
The thing he was finding about getting older is that there are not a lot of things to find out anymore. He was who he was, and that was that.
And the way the drum made him feel. He felt like he was part of something, like he was something at all, like he belonged to something.
He looked at the drum and thought, I don’t even know how to do that, and he felt a little lost, like he didn’t know who he was, like he’d been pretending to be someone else for a long time.
He felt like the drum was talking to him, and he wanted to talk back. He didn’t know what he would say, but he knew he wanted to say something, to do something.
The hardest thing about the road to sobriety is that the road is a straight line, it doesn’t have dips or curves.
Loneliness is only the noise of your own thoughts. It’s why we need people. Voices to speak to, hands to hold. Otherwise, we’re just here by ourselves, in this world that makes no sense.
We’ll all be stories in the end. What matters is what kind of stories we’re part of.