Louise Erdrich Quotes
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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.
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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.
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I'd love to meet my ancestors. I'd love to be able to speak to them.
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You see I thought love got easier over the years so it didn't hurt so bad when it hurt, or feel so good when it felt good. I thought it smoothed out and old people hardly noticed it. I thought it curled up and died, I guess. Now I saw it rear up like a whip and lash.
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It's very hard to track down what's real and what's not real. We haven't absorbed what climate change is doing. Because whether people associate it or not, fear of immigration is completely related to climate change, because the mass migrations that are happening, the war in Syria, all of these structural human migrations are related to climate change.
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Our tribe unraveled like a coarse rope, frayed at either end as the old and new among us were taken.
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Money helps, though not so much as you think when you don't have it.
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You never know where you're going to find the same thoughts in another brain, but when it happens you know it right off, just like you were connected by a small electrical wire that suddenly glows red hot and sparks.
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In our own beginnings, we are formed out of the body's interior landscape. For a short while, our mothers' bodies are the boundaries and personal geography which are all that we know of the world...Once we no longer live beneath our mother's heart, it is the earth with which we form the same dependent relationship, relying...on its cycles and elements, helpless without its protective embrace.
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We have a huge struggle for our sense of what a democracy is. We're not living in reality when we think we have some sort of democracy. We're really on the edge. We have two presidents who lost the popular vote but won the election. This is not working.
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People forget the good, because the bad has more punch.
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Most writers have been influenced by Faulkner.
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What happens when you let an unsatisfactory present go on long enough? It becomes your entire history.
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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.
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I can't imagine a home without an overflow of books. The point of books is to have way too many but to always feel you never have enough, or the right one at the right moment, but then sometimes to find you'd longed to fall asleep reading the Aspern Papers, and there it is.
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I spend my time dwelling on revenge and try to deal with the monsters crawling out of the ashes.
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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.
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What I see in the book is an exquisite form of technology: one that doesn't require a power source and can be passed from hand to hand and lasts a lot longer than an electronic reader.
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There is no such thing as a complete lack of order, only a design so vast it appears unrepetitive up close.
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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.
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My mind ran over scenes of Shesheeb seducing Margaret until I was a wagon dragged by the runaway horses of my jealousy.
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It was enough just to sit there without words.
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I knew each person's delusion, the places their records had scratched, where the sounds repeated.
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I grew up in Wahpeton, N.D., and I didn't leave until I was 18, and I've kept going back.