Louise Erdrich Quotes
-
I grew up in Wahpeton, N.D., and I didn't leave until I was 18, and I've kept going back.
-
There is no such thing as a complete lack of order, only a design so vast it appears unrepetitive up close.
-
I spend my time dwelling on revenge and try to deal with the monsters crawling out of the ashes.
-
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?
-
Nothing I write ever has a moral. If it seems to a reader that there is one, that is unintentional.
-
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.
-
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.
-
If life's a joke, then suicide's a bad punch line.
-
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.
-
Things which do not grow and change are dead things.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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 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.
-
It was enough just to sit there without words.
-
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.
-
The greatest wisdom doesn't know itself. The richest plan is not to have one.
-
Here is the most telling fact: you wish to possess me. Here is another fact: I loved you and let you think you could.
-
A woman's body is the gate to this life. A man's body is the gate to the next life.
-
Death is the least civilized rite of passage.
-
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.
-
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.