Louise Erdrich Quotes
-
There is no such thing as a complete lack of order, only a design so vast it appears unrepetitive up close.
-
Nothing I write ever has a moral. If it seems to a reader that there is one, that is unintentional.
-
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.
-
I grew up in Wahpeton, N.D., and I didn't leave until I was 18, and I've kept going back.
-
I spend my time dwelling on revenge and try to deal with the monsters crawling out of the ashes.
-
My grandfather was a persuasive man who made friends with people at every level of influence. In order to fight against our tribe's termination, he went to newspapers and politicians and urged them to advocate for our tribe in Washington. He also supported his family through the Depression as a truck farmer.
-
I think one of the most fertile, unexplored areas for poets and fiction writers is the world of science. I become overwhelmed by the science world.
-
Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that.
-
...which causes me to wonder, my own purpose on so many days as humble as the spider's, what is beautiful that I make? What is elegant? What feeds the world?
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
It was enough just to sit there without words.
-
A woman's body is the gate to this life. A man's body is the gate to the next life.
-
Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart.
-
Death is the least civilized rite of passage.
-
Things which do not grow and change are dead things.
-
It's impossible to write about Native life without humor-that's how people maintain sanity.
-
If life's a joke, then suicide's a bad punch line.
-
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.
-
Some people meet the way the sky meets the earth, inevitably, and there is no stopping or holding back their love. It exists in a finished world, beyond the reach of common sense.
-
Right and wrong were shades of meaning, not sides of a coin.