Louise Erdrich Quotes
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I spend most of my time writing.
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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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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 contents of a house can trigger all sorts of revisions to family history.
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Columbus only discovered that he was in some new place. He didn't discover America.
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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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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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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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Our songs travel the earth. We sing to one another. Not a single note is ever lost and no song is original. They all come from the same place and go back to a time when only the stones howled.
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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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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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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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Freedom, I found is not only in the running but in the heart, the mind, the hands.
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It kills your writing if you try to manipulate it with crude politics.
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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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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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Every so often something shatters like ice and we are in the river of our existence. We are aware.
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The world tips away when we look into our children's faces.
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I was in love with the whole world and all that lived in its rainy arms.
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Sometimes a person's monstrosity seems superhuman.
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So many things in the world have happened before. But it's like they never did. Every new thing that happens to a person, it's a first... In that night I felt expansion, as if the world was branching out in shoots and growing faster than the eye could see. I felt smallness, how the earth divided into bits and kept dividing. I felt stars.