Louise Erdrich Quotes
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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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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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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.
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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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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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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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Right and wrong were shades of meaning, not sides of a coin.
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Can you stop your mother from singing to you? Who would do such a thing?
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A woman's body is the gate to this life. A man's body is the gate to the next life.
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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.
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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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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.
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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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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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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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He had a thousand-year-old stare.
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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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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.
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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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The greatest wisdom doesn't know itself. The richest plan is not to have one.
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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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Love. The black hook. The spear singing through the mind.
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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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I want to hear what's happened to you," she said evenly after a while. she gestured in the direction, down river, of the butcher shop. "it's just that there is nowhere else to start," she said gently. "niether of us is the same. but i'm different because of small, good, manageable things. you're different because ... things i don't know.