Louise Erdrich Quotes

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

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

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

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

Why now that he's sober and thoughtful, and living as a good man, does he get in the worst trouble of his life?

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

Nector got even by the use of penmanship.

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.

Plans sprang up. She would get fancier chickens.

I grew up in Wahpeton, N.D., and I didn't leave until I was 18, and I've kept going back.

What happens when you let an unsatisfactory present go on long enough? It becomes your entire history.

To fly from one tree to another, the raven hangs itself, hawklike, on the air. I hang myself that same way in sleep, between one day and the next.

I hold his name close as my own blood and I will never let it out. I only spoke it that once so he would know he was alive.

Every so often something shatters like ice and we are in the river of our existence. We are aware.

Bad smells made her angry, they were a personal affront.

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.

Getting out of bed, out of a chair, changing her position, was like moving furniture.

Blue Juneberry, tough diamond willow.

Getting blown up happened in an instant; getting put together took the rest of your life.

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

Talking about how I might write the next book is like talking about whether or not to have sex. Any dithering ruins it.

He was poised on circumstance.

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

I spend most of my time writing.

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

Then his head tipped down on his chest and he fell into the instant sleep of the ancient and the very young.

I tried to get away from him, to get to that door, but instead I backed up against the wall and was stuck there in that white, white room.

It was Sister Hildegarde's belief that good penmanship was the defining key to success in life.

Now that she was conscious there was no end to her questions and exclamations, for Dot was a born traveler, meant to go places, unlike us.

It kills your writing if you try to manipulate it with crude politics.

Soon she cried and farted herself to sleep.

Nothing I write ever has a moral. If it seems to a reader that there is one, that is unintentional.

I feel myself becoming less a person than a place, inhabited, a foreign land.

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

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

From Mooshum to Sonja, back and forth. They wouldn't look at each other. I'm gonna ask you to leave in a nice way, Joe.

The gun jammed on the last shot and the baby stood holding the crib rail, eyes wild, bawling.

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

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

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

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

It was enough just to sit there without words.

Nothing I force myself to write about ever turns out well, and so I've learned to wait for the voice, the incident, the image that reverberates.

The Creator made us for each other. Me here. Zelia there. Space was put between us by human error. But our hearts listened to divine will.

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

She compares the deepest wells of depression to gestation, to a time enclosed, a secluded lightlessness in which, unknown and unforced, we grow.

What I am doing now is for the future, though it may seem small, or trivial, or boring, to you.

You said if they're assigned to Indian Country they are either rookies or have trouble with authority. Did

My father had bought an ugly new clock, and it was ticking again in the quiet kitchen.

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.

Revenge is a sorrow for the person who has to take it on. And the person who is rash enough to think it's going to help a situation is always wrong.

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

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

History works itself out in the living.

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

Our love is a hurting delicacy, an old killer whiskey, a curse, and too beautiful for words.

To think about love and passion and political correctness all together, it doesn't work. Art has to go way past the political to be effective.

You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart.

They're all the same
the cop, the criminal, the defense, the prosecutor
they all share a fundamental belief in the malleability of truth

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

I stood there in the shadowed doorway thinking with my tears. Yes, tears can be thoughts, why not?

Sometimes owls came near to warn of death. Sometimes they just asked people to be careful. Sometimes they were just owls.

Whenever he thought he knew the truth it merged into another truth.

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

I'd love to meet my ancestors. I'd love to be able to speak to them.

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

To love another human in all of her splendor and imperfect perfection , it is a magnificent task ... tremendous and foolish and human.

I imagined myself in some way defined by my relation to another creature.

Albertine was one of those who took on too much in order to remain perpetually dissatisfied with herself.

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

She had a talent for looking at a person with no expression - you filled in whatever you felt guiltiest about.

Power travels in the bloodlines, handed out before birth.

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

Now that I knew fear, I also knew it was not permanent. As powerful as it was, its grip on me would loosen. It would pass.

It was just enough to sit there without words.

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

Her clothes were filled with safety pins and hidden tears.

White people covered the earth like lice.

People still lived on the margins of the land they had owned.

Sorrow eats time. Be patient. Time eats sorrow.

It seemed to her that almost any pain was sympathetic to her loss and she inserted herself immediately into the concept of fantastic suffering.

Her outfit must have penetrated his unconscious. She wore a shirt of softly fringed suede that clung to her breasts like an unforgiven sin.

I have never seen the truth," said Damien, "without crossing my eyes. Life is crazy.

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

So what is wild? What is wilderness? What are dreams but an internal wilderness and what is desire but a wildness of the soul?

Whom he had saved from a life of excessive freedom

Emotions unreel in her like spools of cotton.

He was a bad thing waiting for a worse thing to happen.

I rarely step on sidewalk cracks. I don't wear a watch. I touch my favorite tree before going on long trips.

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

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

Funny how often the Will of God puts a dollar in a pocket, said Dr. Ames.

Death is the least civilized rite of passage.

He began his morning at six a.m. with a cup of coffee and a paperback.

The people stared through her as though she were invisible until she thought she was, and walked more easily then, just a cloud reflected in a stream.

There are ways of being abandoned even when your parents are right there.

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.

Only when you are secure enough not to fear immediate survival can you display creative intelligence in anything you do.

I have to write. I have to be an artist.

He had started to understand how a woman's attention could succeed in making sense of a man's blind chaos..