Louise Erdrich Quotes
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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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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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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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The only time I see the truth is when I cross my eyes.
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The world tips away when we look into our children's faces.
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Sometimes a person's monstrosity seems superhuman.
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Each life is one short word slowly uttered.
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Freedom, I found is not only in the running but in the heart, the mind, the hands.
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Columbus only discovered that he was in some new place. He didn't discover America.
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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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I want to remember what bullshit looks like when weapons of mass destruction are diagrammed out and whacko "intelligence" is delivered in an ominous way to strike fear into people and especially to pull on the idealism and zeal of the young.
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I have to write. I have to be an artist.
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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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I spend most of my time writing.
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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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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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I had a very free childhood and ranged around on my bicycle the way boys do. I had few restrictions.
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But if there was embellishment, it only had to do with the facts.
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It is easy to take away the world that we think is so permanent and reliable.
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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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My mother is Turtle Mountain Chippewa, and she lived on her home reservation. My father taught there. He had just been discharged from the Air Force. He went to school on the GI Bill and got his teaching credentials. He is adventurous - he worked his way through Alaska at age seventeen and paid for his living expenses by winning at the poker table.
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There are several kinds of land on reservations. And all of these pieces of land have different entities who are in charge of enforcing laws on this land.
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The universe is transformation.
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I did not choose solitude. Who would? It came on me like a kind of vocation, demanding an effort that married women can't picture.