Louise Erdrich Quotes
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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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Revenge is a sorrow for the person who has to take it on. And the person who is rash enough to think it's going to help a situation is always wrong.
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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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My father is my biggest literary influence. Recently, I've been looking through his letters. He was in the National Guard when I was a child, and whenever he left, he would write to me. He wrote letters to me all through college, and we still correspond. His letters, and my mother's, are one of my life's treasures.
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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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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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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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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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Your life feels different on you, once you greet death and understand your heart's position.
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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.
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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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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.
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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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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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To be of mixed blood is a great gift for a writer. I have one foot on tribal lands and one foot in middle-class life.
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I prefer to have some beliefs that don't make logical sense.
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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.
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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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The greatest wisdom doesn't know itself. The richest plan is not to have one.
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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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By writing I can live in ways that I could not survive.
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We started dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall.
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Her clothes were filled with safety pins and hidden tears.
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By the time I was done with the car it looked worse than any typical Indian car that has been driven all its life on reservation roads, which they always say are like government promises - full of holes.