Louise Erdrich Quotes
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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.
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To sew is to pray. Men don't understand this. They see the whole but they don't see the stitches. They don't see the speech of the creator in the work of the needle. We mend. We women turn things inside out and set things right. We salvage what we can of human garments and piece the rest into blankets. Sometimes our stitches stutter and slow. Only a woman's eyes can tell. Other times, the tension in the stitches might be too tight because of tears, but only we know what emotion went into the making. Only women can hear the prayer.
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I spend most of my time writing.
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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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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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My mind ran over scenes of Shesheeb seducing Margaret until I was a wagon dragged by the runaway horses of my jealousy.
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I might not be able to use the word "hope," but I could certainly use the word "optimism." I'm very optimistic. I don't feel that it helps to be pessimistic. At some point in my life I made a conscious decision that I would try to be optimistic - not blind to anything at all - but to always hear the way that had the best chance for happiness.
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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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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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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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I don't pray. When I was young, I vowed I never would be caught begging God. If I want something I get it for myself. I go to church only to show the old hens they don't get me down.
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It is easy to take away the world that we think is so permanent and reliable.
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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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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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All of our actions have in their doing the seed of their undoing.
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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 had a very free childhood and ranged around on my bicycle the way boys do. I had few restrictions.
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Sometimes a person's monstrosity seems superhuman.
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I was in love with the whole world and all that lived in its rainy arms.
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The world tips away when we look into our children's faces.
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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.
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Where was I?""A different island," said old Tallow. Her voice was stern, but there was an ache in her look that Omakayas had never before seen. "An island called Spirit Island where everyone but you died of the itching sickness- you were the toughest one, the littlest one, and you survived them all.""You were sent here so you could save the others," she said. "Because you'd had the sickness, you were strong enough to nurse them through it. They did a good thing when they took you in, and you saved them for their good act. Now the circle that began when I found you is complete.