Louise Erdrich Quotes
-
You really need to approach each book as if you have been a failure. . . . If you start to believe your flap-copy, you're finished as a writer.
-
But then as time passed, I learned the lesson that parents do early on. You fail sometimes. No matter how much you love your children, there are times you slip. There are moments you can't give, stutter, lose your temper, or simply lose face with the world, and you can't explain this to a child.
-
To be of mixed blood is a great gift for a writer. I have one foot on tribal lands and one foot in middle-class life.
-
I live on the margin of just about everything. I'm a marginal person, and I think that is where I've become comfortable. I'm marginally there in my native life. I can do as much as I can, but I'm always German, too, you know, and I'm always a mother. That's my first identity, but I'm always a writer, too.
-
We are conjured voiceless out of nothing and must return to an unknowing state. What happens in between is an uncontrolled dance, and what we ask for in love is no more than a momentary chance to get the steps right, to move in harmony until the music stops.
-
Love won't be tampered with, love won't go away. Push it to one side and it creeps to the other.
-
Add there was that moment when my mother and father walked in the door disguised as old people. I thought the miles in the car had bent them, dulled their eyes, even grayed and whitened their hair and caused their hands and voices to tremble. At the same time, I found, as I rose form the chair, I'd gotten old along with them.
-
Every so often something shatters like ice and we are in the river of our existence. We are aware.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Cold sinks in, there to stay. And people, they'll leave you, sure. There's no return to what was and no way back. There's just emptiness all around, and you in it, like singing up from the bottom of a well, like nothing else, until you harm yourself, until you are a mad dog biting yourself for sympathy. Because there is no relenting.
-
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.
-
The only time I see the truth is when I cross my eyes.
-
I got well by talking. Death could not get a word in edgewise, grew discouraged, and traveled on.
-
I think one of the reasons to be here on earth is to finally be who we are, at all times - to know and be predictable to ourselves.
-
Women are strong, strong, terribly strong. We don't know how strong until we're pushing out our babies.
-
Life is made up of three kinds of people -- those who live it, those afraid to, those in between.
-
Of course, English is a very powerful language, a colonizer's language and a gift to a writer. English has destroyed and sucked up the languages of other cultures - its cruelty is its vitality.
-
Whom he had saved from a life of excessive freedom...
-
All of our actions have in their doing the seed of their undoing. ... That in her creation of her children there should be the unspeakable promise of their death, for by their birth she had created mortal beings.
-
It was just enough to sit there without words.
-
When every inch of the world is known, sleep may be the only wilderness that we have left.
-
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.
-
There are people who are always, I think, going to remain people of the book, to use another author's title, but people of the book, who really must be around.