Louise Erdrich Quotes
-
The universe is transformation.
-
Talking about how I might write the next book is like talking about whether or not to have sex. Any dithering ruins it.
-
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.
-
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.
-
I spend most of my time writing.
-
The contents of a house can trigger all sorts of revisions to family history.
-
Freedom, I found is not only in the running but in the heart, the mind, the hands.
-
Old love, middle love, the kind of love that knows itself and knows that nothing lasts, is a desperate shared wildness.
-
It is easy to take away the world that we think is so permanent and reliable.
-
A woman's body is the gate to this life. A man's body is the gate to the next life.
-
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.
-
My parents' marriage is a gift to everyone around them - 60 years of making their kids laugh. How many parents are actually funny?
-
I was in love with the whole world and all that lived in its rainy arms.
-
The world tips away when we look into our children's faces.
-
But if there was embellishment, it only had to do with the facts.
-
All of our actions have in their doing the seed of their undoing.
-
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.
-
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.
-
On any state elections map, the reservations are blue places. Native people are most often progressives, Democrats, and by no means gun-toting vigilantes.
-
There are ways of being abandoned even when your parents are right there.
-
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.
-
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.
-
It kills your writing if you try to manipulate it with crude politics.
-
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.