Louise Erdrich Men Quotations

By the time I was done with the car it looked worse than any typical Indian car that has been driven all its life on reservation roads, which they always say are like government promises - full of holes.

A woman's body is the gate to this life. A man's body is the gate to the next life.

What men call adventures usually consist of the stoical endurance of appalling daily misery.

But if there was embellishment, it only had to do with the facts.

Women don't realize how much store men set on the regularity of their habits. We absorb their comings and goings into our bodies, their rhythms into our bones.

We all got holes in our lives. Nobody dies in a perfect garment.

When women age into their power, no wind can upset them, no hand turn aside their knowledge, no fact can deflect their point of view.

To sew is to pray. Men don't understand this. They see the whole but they don't see the stitches. They don't see the speech of the creator in the work of the needle. We mend. We women turn things inside out and set things right. We salvage what we can of human garments and piece the rest into blankets. Sometimes our stitches stutter and slow. Only a woman's eyes can tell. Other times, the tension in the stitches might be too tight because of tears, but only we know what emotion went into the making. Only women can hear the prayer.