Louise Erdrich Quotes
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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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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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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 stood there in the shadowed doorway thinking with my tears. Yes, tears can be thoughts, why not?
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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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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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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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There are ways of being abandoned even when your parents are right there.
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But if there was embellishment, it only had to do with the facts.
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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 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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It kills your writing if you try to manipulate it with crude politics.
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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 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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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 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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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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We started dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall.
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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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By writing I can live in ways that I could not survive.
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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 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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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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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.