Louise Erdrich Quotes
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Talking about how I might write the next book is like talking about whether or not to have sex. Any dithering ruins it.
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Things which do not grow and change are dead things.
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It was enough just to sit there without words.
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If life's a joke, then suicide's a bad punch line.
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[On her and husband Michael Dorris:] We both have title collections. I think a title is like a magnet. It begins to draw these scraps of experience or conversation or memory to it. Eventually, it collects a book.
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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.
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Right and wrong were shades of meaning, not sides of a coin.
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I rarely step on sidewalk cracks. I don't wear a watch. I touch my favorite tree before going on long trips.
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He had a thousand-year-old stare.
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To sew is to pray. Men don't understand this. They see the whole but they don't see the stitches. They don't see the speech of the creator in the work of the needle. We mend. We women turn things inside out and set things right. We salvage what we can of human garments and piece the rest into blankets. Sometimes our stitches stutter and slow. Only a woman's eyes can tell. Other times, the tension in the stitches might be too tight because of tears, but only we know what emotion went into the making. Only women can hear the prayer.
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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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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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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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I tried out the unfamiliar syllables. They fit. They cracked in my ears like a fist through ice.
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I work really out of mythology, so often I work out of a story that has remained lodged inside somehow, or I work out of history, you know, out of a sense of historical inevitability with characters.
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Love. The black hook. The spear singing through the mind.
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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.
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When women age into their power, no wind can upset them, no hand turn aside their knowledge, no fact can deflect their point of view.
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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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Can you stop your mother from singing to you? Who would do such a thing?
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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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...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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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.