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 was in love with the whole world and all that lived in its rainy arms.
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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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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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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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The only time I see the truth is when I cross my eyes.
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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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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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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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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 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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We started dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall.
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By writing I can live in ways that I could not survive.
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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.
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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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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.