Louise Erdrich Quotes
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The contents of a house can trigger all sorts of revisions to family history.
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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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[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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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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The universe is transformation.
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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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Freedom, I found is not only in the running but in the heart, the mind, the hands.
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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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It is easy to take away the world that we think is so permanent and reliable.
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All of our actions have in their doing the seed of their undoing.
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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 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 was in love with the whole world and all that lived in its rainy arms.
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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.
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I think one of the most fertile, unexplored areas for poets and fiction writers is the world of science. I become overwhelmed by the science world.
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The world tips away when we look into our children's faces.
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It kills your writing if you try to manipulate it with crude politics.
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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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But if there was embellishment, it only had to do with the facts.
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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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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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There are ways of being abandoned even when your parents are right there.
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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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On any state elections map, the reservations are blue places. Native people are most often progressives, Democrats, and by no means gun-toting vigilantes.