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Power travels in the bloodlines, handed out before birth.
Louise Erdrich -
I knew each person's delusion, the places their records had scratched, where the sounds repeated.
Louise Erdrich
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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.
Louise Erdrich -
It was enough just to sit there without words.
Louise Erdrich -
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.
Louise Erdrich -
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.
Louise Erdrich -
I grew up in Wahpeton, N.D., and I didn't leave until I was 18, and I've kept going back.
Louise Erdrich -
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.
Louise Erdrich
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If life's a joke, then suicide's a bad punch line.
Louise Erdrich -
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.
Louise Erdrich -
Nothing I write ever has a moral. If it seems to a reader that there is one, that is unintentional.
Louise Erdrich -
I rarely step on sidewalk cracks. I don't wear a watch. I touch my favorite tree before going on long trips.
Louise Erdrich -
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.
Louise Erdrich -
I might not be able to use the word "hope," but I could certainly use the word "optimism." I'm very optimistic. I don't feel that it helps to be pessimistic. At some point in my life I made a conscious decision that I would try to be optimistic - not blind to anything at all - but to always hear the way that had the best chance for happiness.
Louise Erdrich
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...Grandpa's mind had left us, gone wild and wary. When I walked with him I could feel how strange it was. His thoughts swam between us, hidden under rocks, disappearing in weeds, and I was fishing for them, dangling my own words like baits and lures.
Louise Erdrich -
He had a thousand-year-old stare.
Louise Erdrich -
Here is the most telling fact: you wish to possess me. Here is another fact: I loved you and let you think you could.
Louise Erdrich -
Death is the least civilized rite of passage.
Louise Erdrich -
I have to write. I have to be an artist.
Louise Erdrich -
Can you stop your mother from singing to you? Who would do such a thing?
Louise Erdrich
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To love another another human in all of her splendor and imperfect perfection , it is a magnificent task...tremendous and foolish and human.
Louise Erdrich -
I grew up in North Dakota around Dakota and Ojibwe people, and also small-town people in Wahpeton. Writers make few choices, really, about their material. We have to write about what comes naturally and what interests us - so I do.
Louise Erdrich -
Right and wrong were shades of meaning, not sides of a coin.
Louise Erdrich -
Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that.
Louise Erdrich