Louise Erdrich Quotes
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It didn't occur to me that my books would be widely read at all, and that enabled me to write anything I wanted to. And even once I realized that they were being read, I still wrote as if I were writing in secret. That's how one has to write anyway--in secret.
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Your life feels different on you, once you greet death and understand your heart's position.
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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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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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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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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 had a very free childhood and ranged around on my bicycle the way boys do. I had few restrictions.
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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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Freedom, I found is not only in the running but in the heart, the mind, the hands.
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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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By writing I can live in ways that I could not survive.
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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 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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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.
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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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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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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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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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Her clothes were filled with safety pins and hidden tears.
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We started dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall.
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There will never come a time when I will be able to resist my emotions.
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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.