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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.
Louise Erdrich -
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.
Louise Erdrich
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Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that.
Louise Erdrich -
Sometimes a person's monstrosity seems superhuman.
Louise Erdrich -
Things which do not grow and change are dead things.
Louise Erdrich -
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.
Louise Erdrich -
When small towns find they cannot harm the strangest of their members, when eccentrics show resilience, they are eventually embraced and even cherished.
Louise Erdrich -
It kills your writing if you try to manipulate it with crude politics.
Louise Erdrich
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I spend most of my time writing.
Louise Erdrich -
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.
Louise Erdrich -
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.
Louise Erdrich -
My parents' marriage is a gift to everyone around them - 60 years of making their kids laugh. How many parents are actually funny?
Louise Erdrich -
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.
Louise Erdrich -
I was in love with the whole world and all that lived in its rainy arms.
Louise Erdrich
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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.
Louise Erdrich -
I tried out the unfamiliar syllables. They fit. They cracked in my ears like a fist through ice.
Louise Erdrich -
Old love, middle love, the kind of love that knows itself and knows that nothing lasts, is a desperate shared wildness.
Louise Erdrich -
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.
Louise Erdrich -
The contents of a house can trigger all sorts of revisions to family history.
Louise Erdrich -
It is easy to take away the world that we think is so permanent and reliable.
Louise Erdrich
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My father is my biggest literary influence. Recently, I've been looking through his letters. He was in the National Guard when I was a child, and whenever he left, he would write to me. He wrote letters to me all through college, and we still correspond. His letters, and my mother's, are one of my life's treasures.
Louise Erdrich -
...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?
Louise Erdrich -
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.
Louise Erdrich -
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.
Louise Erdrich