Louise Erdrich Quotes
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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 spend my time dwelling on revenge and try to deal with the monsters crawling out of the ashes.
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Nothing I write ever has a moral. If it seems to a reader that there is one, that is unintentional.
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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.
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It was enough just to sit there without words.
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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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If life's a joke, then suicide's a bad punch line.
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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.
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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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Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that.
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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.
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Here is the most telling fact: you wish to possess me. Here is another fact: I loved you and let you think you could.
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Death is the least civilized rite of passage.
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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.
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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.
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The music was more than music - at least what we are used to hearing. The music was feeling itself. The sound connected instantly with something deep and joyous.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Love won't be tampered with, love won't go away. Push it to one side and it creeps to the other. Throw it in the garbage and it springs up clean. Try to root it out and it only flourishes. Love is a weed, a dandelion that you poison from your heart. The taproots wait. The seeds blow off, ticklish, into a part of the yard you didn't spray. And one day, though you worked, though you prodded out each spiky leaf, you lift your eyes and dozens of fat golden faces bob in the grass.
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...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?
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I tried out the unfamiliar syllables. They fit. They cracked in my ears like a fist through ice.
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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.
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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.