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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.
Louise Erdrich -
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.
Louise Erdrich
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Time was rushing around me like water around a big wet rock. The only difference is, I was not so durable as stones. Very quickly I would be smoothed away.
Louise Erdrich -
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.
Louise Erdrich -
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.
Louise Erdrich -
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.
Louise Erdrich -
But if there was embellishment, it only had to do with the facts.
Louise Erdrich -
A woman's body is the gate to this life. A man's body is the gate to the next life.
Louise Erdrich
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Your life feels different on you, once you greet death and understand your heart's position.
Louise Erdrich -
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.
Louise Erdrich -
I had a very free childhood and ranged around on my bicycle the way boys do. I had few restrictions.
Louise Erdrich -
By writing I can live in ways that I could not survive.
Louise Erdrich -
[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.
Louise Erdrich -
If only I had discipline, but alas, it is only an obsessive-compulsive trait and the beauty of habit that causes me to return again and again to my work.
Louise Erdrich
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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.
Louise Erdrich -
All of our actions have in their doing the seed of their undoing.
Louise Erdrich -
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.
Louise Erdrich -
The world tips away when we look into our children's faces.
Louise Erdrich -
There are ways of being abandoned even when your parents are right there.
Louise Erdrich -
It's impossible to write about Native life without humor-that's how people maintain sanity.
Louise Erdrich
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Women are strong, strong, terribly strong. We don't know how strong until we are pushing out our babies. We are too often treated like babies having babies when we should be in training, like acolytes, novices to high priestesshood, like serious applicants for the space program.
Louise Erdrich -
I have brothers and was a tomboy, if that's still a designation. It wasn't a stretch for me to think and write as a 13-year-old boy - it is freeing.
Louise Erdrich -
We have these earthly bodies. We don't know what they want. Half the time, we pretend they are under our mental thumb, but that is the illusion of the healthy and the protected. Of sedate lovers. For the body has emotions it conceives and carries through without concern for anyone or anything else. Love is one of those, I guess. Going back to something very old knit into the brain as we were growing. Hopeless. Scorching. Ordinary.
Louise Erdrich -
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.
Louise Erdrich