Louise Erdrich Quotes
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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 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 have to write. I have to be an artist.
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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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The greatest wisdom doesn't know itself. The richest plan is not to have one.
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The world tips away when we look into our children's faces.
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Columbus only discovered that he was in some new place. He didn't discover America.
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To be of mixed blood is a great gift for a writer. I have one foot on tribal lands and one foot in middle-class life.
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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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Each life is one short word slowly uttered.
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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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It is easy to take away the world that we think is so permanent and reliable.
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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 spend most of my time writing.
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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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I was in love with the whole world and all that lived in its rainy arms.
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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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The contents of a house can trigger all sorts of revisions to family history.
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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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I prefer to have some beliefs that don't make logical sense.
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All of our actions have in their doing the seed of their undoing.
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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.