Louise Erdrich Quotes
-
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.
-
I tried out the unfamiliar syllables. They fit. They cracked in my ears like a fist through ice.
-
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.
-
Can you stop your mother from singing to you? Who would do such a thing?
-
He had a thousand-year-old stare.
-
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.
-
Things which do not grow and change are dead things.
-
Sometimes a person's monstrosity seems superhuman.
-
To love another another human in all of her splendor and imperfect perfection , it is a magnificent task...tremendous and foolish and human.
-
...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.
-
It's impossible to write about Native life without humor-that's how people maintain sanity.
-
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.
-
Right and wrong were shades of meaning, not sides of a coin.
-
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.
-
Each life is one short word slowly uttered.
-
When small towns find they cannot harm the strangest of their members, when eccentrics show resilience, they are eventually embraced and even cherished.
-
Columbus only discovered that he was in some new place. He didn't discover America.
-
I spend most of my time writing.
-
I have to write. I have to be an artist.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Old love, middle love, the kind of love that knows itself and knows that nothing lasts, is a desperate shared wildness.
-
My parents' marriage is a gift to everyone around them - 60 years of making their kids laugh. How many parents are actually funny?
-
Love. The black hook. The spear singing through the mind.