Louise Erdrich Quotes
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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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The world tips away when we look into our children's faces.
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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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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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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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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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Freedom, I found is not only in the running but in the heart, the mind, the hands.
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It is easy to take away the world that we think is so permanent and reliable.
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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 have to write. I have to be an artist.
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The contents of a house can trigger all sorts of revisions to family history.
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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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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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On any state elections map, the reservations are blue places. Native people are most often progressives, Democrats, and by no means gun-toting vigilantes.
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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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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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All of our actions have in their doing the seed of their undoing.
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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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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 stood there in the shadowed doorway thinking with my tears. Yes, tears can be thoughts, why not?
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I prefer to have some beliefs that don't make logical sense.