Louise Erdrich Quotes
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All of our actions have in their doing the seed of their undoing.
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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 prefer to have some beliefs that don't make logical sense.
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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 stood there in the shadowed doorway thinking with my tears. Yes, tears can be thoughts, why not?
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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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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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But if there was embellishment, it only had to do with the facts.
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There are ways of being abandoned even when your parents are right there.
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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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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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It kills your writing if you try to manipulate it with crude politics.
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The only time I see the truth is when I cross my eyes.
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Your life feels different on you, once you greet death and understand your heart's position.
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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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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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We started dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall.
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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 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 writing I can live in ways that I could not survive.
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I think she is confused by the way I want her, which is like nobody else. I know this deep down. I want her in a new way, a way she's never been told about.
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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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Women don't realize how much store men set on the regularity of their habits. We absorb their comings and goings into our bodies, their rhythms into our bones.