Louise Erdrich Quotes
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Things which do not grow and change are dead things.
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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.
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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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Can you stop your mother from singing to you? Who would do such a thing?
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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.
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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.
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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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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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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.
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Right and wrong were shades of meaning, not sides of a coin.
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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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My parents' marriage is a gift to everyone around them - 60 years of making their kids laugh. How many parents are actually funny?
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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.
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When small towns find they cannot harm the strangest of their members, when eccentrics show resilience, they are eventually embraced and even cherished.
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As soon as there's a crisis, there are people who take charge and want to control others. Climate-change catastrophe and human migration and immigration are great for corporate and governmental control over people, and we have to contend with that. I should say, I see corporate control behind everything that the government is working on right now.
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The contents of a house can trigger all sorts of revisions to family history.
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Old love, middle love, the kind of love that knows itself and knows that nothing lasts, is a desperate shared wildness.
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Coming down off the trail, I am lost in my own thoughts and unprepared when a bear chugs across the path just before it gives out on the gravel road. I am so distracted that I keep walking towards the bear. I only stop when it rears, stands on hind legs, and stares at me, sensitive nose pressed into the air, weak eyes searching. I have never been this close to a wild bear before, but I am not frightened. There is no menace in its stance; it is not even curious. The bear seems to know who or what I am. The bear is not impressed.
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Her mind was present because she was always gone. Her hands were filled because they grasped the meaning of empty. Life was simple. Her husband returned and she served him with indifferent patience this time. When he asked what had happened to her heat for him, she gestured to the west. The sun was setting. The sky was a body of fire.
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It kills your writing if you try to manipulate it with crude politics.
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I spend most of my time writing.
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I always have some way of putting the stories together that works for the book. I've always switched points of view in my books. I'm a Gemini.
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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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Ravens are the birds I'll miss most when I die. If only the darkness into which we must look were composed of the black light of their limber intelligence. If only we did not have to die at all. Instead, become ravens.