Louise Erdrich Quotes
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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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I was in love with the whole world and all that lived in its rainy arms.
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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 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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All of our actions have in their doing the seed of their undoing.
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The contents of a house can trigger all sorts of revisions to family history.
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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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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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I prefer to have some beliefs that don't make logical sense.
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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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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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Every so often something shatters like ice and we are in the river of our existence. We are aware.
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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 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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We started dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall.
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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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It kills your writing if you try to manipulate it with crude politics.
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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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There are ways of being abandoned even when your parents are right there.
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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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But then as time passed, I learned the lesson that parents do early on. You fail sometimes. No matter how much you love your children, there are times you slip. There are moments you can't give, stutter, lose your temper, or simply lose face with the world, and you can't explain this to a child.
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I write first drafts by hand. Never do I open an umbrella inside the house. I don't predict wins or losses. I used to stand on a certain piece of rug if my brothers and husband were watching football and their team got in trouble - but now the luck went out of that rug. If a circle is involved, I try to go clockwise.
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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.