Louise Erdrich Quotes
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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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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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You know, some people fall right through the hole in their lives. It's invisible, but they come to it after time, never knowing where.
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I prefer to have some beliefs that don't make logical sense.
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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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I have to write. I have to be an artist.
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I was in love with the whole world and all that lived in its rainy arms.
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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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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.
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There are ways of being abandoned even when your parents are right there.
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I truly think that you can't go and stalk your material, you have to leave the door open and whatever chooses you, chooses you. You can't go and wrestle it to the ground.
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I did not choose solitude. Who would? It came on me like a kind of vocation, demanding an effort that married women can't picture.
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Her clothes were filled with safety pins and hidden tears.
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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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Your life feels different on you, once you greet death and understand your heart's position.
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I stood there in the shadowed doorway thinking with my tears. Yes, tears can be thoughts, why not?
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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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Here I am, where I ought to be. A writer must have a place where he or she feels this, the place to love and be irritated with.
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I am at the bookstore a lot, but let my friends, the professional Birchbark Books staff, handle the day in and day out.
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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 am part of what she thinks is her illness, a symptom of which she thinks she has been cured. She, on the other hand, is what I was looking for.
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We started dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall.
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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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When every inch of the world is known, sleep may be the only wilderness that we have left.