Louise Erdrich Quotes
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The universe is transformation.
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I prefer to have some beliefs that don't make logical sense.
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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 have to write. I have to be an artist.
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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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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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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 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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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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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 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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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 stood there in the shadowed doorway thinking with my tears. Yes, tears can be thoughts, why not?
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Her clothes were filled with safety pins and hidden tears.
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There are ways of being abandoned even when your parents are right there.
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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 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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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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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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We started dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall.
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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 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.