Louise Erdrich Quotations

Here I am, where I ought to be. A writer must have a place where he or she feels this, the place to love and be irritated with.

I was in love with the whole world and all that lived in its rainy arms.

I got well by talking. Death could not get a word in edgewise, grew discouraged, and traveled on.

Columbus only discovered that he was in some new place. He didn't discover America.

Love won't be tampered with, love won't go away. Push it to one side and it creeps to the other.

It was enough just to sit there without words.

You know, some people fall right through the hole in their lives. Its invisible, but they come to it after time, never knowing where.

You're talking about evolving a cuisine from a people whose cuisine has been whatever we could get for a long time.

I think one of the reasons to be here on earth is to finally be who we are, at all times - to know and be predictable to ourselves.

I had a very free childhood and ranged around on my bicycle the way boys do. I had few restrictions.

Sometimes a person's monstrosity seems superhuman.

Being a girl didn't really affect me until I entered junior high and had to wear skirts, curl my hair, and even get used to panty hose. However, my hatred of panty hose helped make me a writer who only wears comfortable clothes. I've successfully avoided panty hose for most of my life.

I make very involved drawings, even little structures, and try using design to figure out the rhythm of a plot. If there are several narrators then a clue has to pop up in the first line. There have to be certain grammatical clues, or distinctive names.

I am at the bookstore a lot, but let my friends, the professional Birchbark Books staff, handle the day in and day out.

I have brothers and was a tomboy, if that's still a designation. It wasn't a stretch for me to think and write as a 13-year-old boy - it is freeing.

If only I had discipline, but alas, it is only an obsessive-compulsive trait and the beauty of habit that causes me to return again and again to my work.

I always have some way of putting the stories together that works for the book. I've always switched points of view in my books. I'm a Gemini.

Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that.

I spend most of my time writing.

I want to remember what bullshit looks like when weapons of mass destruction are diagrammed out and whacko "intelligence" is delivered in an ominous way to strike fear into people and especially to pull on the idealism and zeal of the young.

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.

She had always been a reader… but now she was obsessed. Since her discovery of the book hoard downstairs from her job, she’d been caught up in one such collection of people and their doings after the next…The pleasure of this sort of life – bookish, she supposed it might be called, a reading life – had made her isolation into a rich and even subversive thing. She inhabited one consoling or horrifying persona after another…That she was childless and husbandless and poor meant less once she picked up a book. Her mistakes disappeared into it. She lived with an invented force.

People forget the good, because the bad has more punch.

I thought how we might have to yell to be heard by Higher Power, but that's not saying it's not there. And that is faith for you. It's belief even when the gods don't deliver.

At times the whole sky was ringed in shooting points and puckers of light gathering and falling, pulsing, fading, rhythmical as breathing. All of a piece. As if the sky were a pattern of nerves and our thought and memories traveled across it. As if the sky were one gigantic memory for us all.

The length of sky is just about the size of my ignorance. Pure and wide.

Love. The black hook. The spear singing through the mind.

Money helps, though not so much as you think when you don't have it.

Numbers, time, inches, feet. All are just ploys for cutting nature down to size.

If life's a joke, then suicide's a bad punch line.

Time was rushing around me like water around a big wet rock. The only difference is, I was not so durable as stones. Very quickly I would be smoothed away.

We passed over in a sweep of sorrow that would persist into our small forever. We just keep going.

The only answer to this, and it isn't an entire answer, said Father Travis, is that God made human beings free agents. We are able to choose good over evil, but the opposite too. And in order to protect our human freedom, God doesn't often, very often at least, intervene. God can't do that without taking away our moral freedom. Do you see? No. But yeah. The only thing that God can do, and does all of the time, is to draw good from any evil situation.

I was the sort of kid who spent a Sunday afternoon prying little trees out of the foundation of his parents' house. I should have given in to the inevitable truth that this was the sort of person I would become, in the end, but I kept fighting it.

We are never so poor that we cannot bless another human being, are we? So it is that every evil, whether moral or material, results in good. You'll see.

This so gnawed at him on some nights that he lay awake wondering just how many unknown and similarly inconsequential accidents and bits of happenstance were at this moment occurring or failing to occur in order to ensure he took his next breath, and the next.

I knew each person's delusion, the places their records had scratched, where the sounds repeated.

Hunger steals the memory

They were so strong in their beliefs that there came a time when it hardly mattered what exactly those beliefs were; they all fused into a single stubbornness.

It's impossible to write about Native life without humor-that's how people maintain sanity.

To be of mixed blood is a great gift for a writer. I have one foot on tribal lands and one foot in middle-class life.

Right and wrong were shades of meaning, not sides of a coin.

He despised his body for its boring hungers, reflex anger; its petty, obliterating rage. But now he'd become detached. He regarded his body with a tender regret. It was the thing his spirit had to haul.

Where was I?""A different island," said old Tallow. Her voice was stern, but there was an ache in her look that Omakayas had never before seen. "An island called Spirit Island where everyone but you died of the itching sickness- you were the toughest one, the littlest one, and you survived them all.""You were sent here so you could save the others," she said. "Because you'd had the sickness, you were strong enough to nurse them through it. They did a good thing when they took you in, and you saved them for their good act. Now the circle that began when I found you is complete.

He had a thousand-year-old stare.

I think she is confused by the way I want her, which is like nobody else. I know this deep down. I want her in a new way, a way she's never been told about.

The world tips away when we look into our children's faces.

Her mind was present because she was always gone. Her hands were filled because they grasped the meaning of empty. Life was simple. Her husband returned and she served him with indifferent patience this time. When he asked what had happened to her heat for him, she gestured to the west. The sun was setting. The sky was a body of fire.

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 then as time passed, I learned the lesson that parents do early on. You fail sometimes. No matter how much you love your children, there are times you slip. There are moments you can't give, stutter, lose your temper, or simply lose face with the world, and you can't explain this to a child.

The universe is transformation.

Add there was that moment when my mother and father walked in the door disguised as old people. I thought the miles in the car had bent them, dulled their eyes, even grayed and whitened their hair and caused their hands and voices to tremble. At the same time, I found, as I rose form the chair, I'd gotten old along with them.

Coming down off the trail, I am lost in my own thoughts and unprepared when a bear chugs across the path just before it gives out on the gravel road. I am so distracted that I keep walking towards the bear. I only stop when it rears, stands on hind legs, and stares at me, sensitive nose pressed into the air, weak eyes searching. I have never been this close to a wild bear before, but I am not frightened. There is no menace in its stance; it is not even curious. The bear seems to know who or what I am. The bear is not impressed.

What is this life but the sound of an appalling love.

I tried out the unfamiliar syllables. They fit. They cracked in my ears like a fist through ice.

...whom he had saved from a life of excessive freedom

It was just enough to sit there without words.

If, as I suspect, my body survives by uttering itself over and over again, then I have some questions. If [I] am one word, so are my daughters, so are all of us in strings and loops. Each life is one short word slowly uttered.

Be lovely and do no harm.

I truly think that you can't go and stalk your material, you have to leave the door open and whatever chooses you, chooses you. You can't go and wrestle it to the ground.

There is no such thing as a complete lack of order, only a design so vast it appears unrepetitive up close.

Women without children are also the best of mothers,often, with the patience,interest, and saving grace that the constant relationship with children cannot always sustain. I come to crave our talk and our daughters gain precious aunts. Women who are not mothering their own children have the clarity and focus to see deeply into the character of children webbed by family. A child is fortuante who feels witnessed as a peron,outside relationships with parents by another adult.

i want to hear what's happened to you," she said evenly after a while. she gestured in the direction, down river, of the butcher shop. "it's just that there is nowhere else to start," she said gently. "niether of us is the same. but i'm different because of small, good, manageable things. you're different because ... things i don't know.

I prefer to have some beliefs that don't make logical sense.

I don't pray. When I was young, I vowed I never would be caught begging God. If I want something I get it for myself. I go to church only to show the old hens they don't get me down.

Time is the water in which we live, and we breathe it like fish. ... Time pours into us and then pours out again. In between the two pourings we live our destiny.

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

Power travels in the bloodlines, handed out before birth.

Freedom, I found is not only in the running but in the heart, the mind, the hands.

So many things in the world have happened before. But it's like they never did. Every new thing that happens to a person, it's a first... In that night I felt expansion, as if the world was branching out in shoots and growing faster than the eye could see. I felt smallness, how the earth divided into bits and kept dividing. I felt stars.

Her clothes were filled with safety pins and hidden tears.

Veils of love which was only hate petrified by longing--that was me.

When small towns find they cannot harm the strangest of their members, when eccentrics show resilience, they are eventually embraced and even cherished.

Ravens are the birds I'll miss most when I die. If only the darkness into which we must look were composed of the black light of their limber intelligence. If only we did not have to die at all. Instead, become ravens.

The contents of a house can trigger all sorts of revisions to family history.

Here is the most telling fact: you wish to possess me.
 Here is another fact: I loved you and let you think you could.

It didn't occur to me that my books would be widely read at all, and that enabled me to write anything I wanted to. And even once I realized that they were being read, I still wrote as if I were writing in secret. That's how one has to write anyway--in secret.

Old love, middle love, the kind of love that knows itself and knows that nothing lasts, is a desperate shared wildness.

I am part of what she thinks is her illness, a symptom of which she thinks she has been cured. She, on the other hand, is what I was looking for.

The only time I see the truth is when I cross my eyes.

You really need to approach each book as if you have been a failure. . . . If you start to believe your flap-copy, you're finished as a writer.

I spend my time dwelling on revenge and try to deal with the monsters crawling out of the ashes.

All of our actions have in their doing the seed of their undoing.

Each life is one short word slowly uttered.

Life is made up of three kinds of people -- those who live it, those afraid to, those in between.

[On her and husband Michael Dorris:] We both have title collections. I think a title is like a magnet. It begins to draw these scraps of experience or conversation or memory to it. Eventually, it collects a book.

Our tribe unraveled like a coarse rope, frayed at either end as the old and new among us were taken.

The music was more than music - at least what we are used to hearing. The music was feeling itself. The sound connected instantly with something deep and joyous.

All through my life I never did believe in human measurement. Numbers, time, inches, feet. All are just ploys for cutting nature down to size. I know the grand scheme of the world is beyond our brains to fathom, so I don't try, just let it in.

Death is the least civilized rite of passage.

I did not choose solitude. Who would? It came on me like a kind of vocation, demanding an effort that married women can't picture.

I have always kept notebooks and I go back to them over and over. They are my compost pile of ideas.

The greatest wisdom doesn't know itself. The richest plan is not to have one.

The story comes around, pushing at our brains, and soon we are trying to ravel back to the beginning, trying to put families into order and make sense of things. But we start with one person, and soon another and another follows, and still another, until we are lost in the connections.

There are people who are always, I think, going to remain people of the book, to use another author's title, but people of the book, who really must be around.

There is a legacy of violence against native women that has gotten worse and worse over time.

Women are strong, strong, terribly strong. We don't know how strong until we're pushing out our babies.

Society is like this card game here, cousin. We got dealt our hand before we were even born, and as we grow we have to play as best as we can.

When we are young, the words are scattered all around us. As they are assembled by experience, so also are we, sentence by sentence, until the story takes shape.