Louise Erdrich Quotes

So what is wild? What is wilderness? What are dreams but an internal wilderness and what is desire but a wildness of the soul?

Louise Erdrich

• Soul
• Desire
• Wilderness

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.

Louise Erdrich

• Men
• Women
• Habits

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.

Louise Erdrich

• People
• Up
• Singing

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.

Louise Erdrich

• Earth
• Reason
• Times

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.

Louise Erdrich

• Children
• She
• Death

This so gnawed at him on some nights that he lay awake wondering just how many unknown and similarly inconsequential accidents and bits of happenstance were at this moment occurring or failing to occur in order to ensure he took his next breath, and the next.

Louise Erdrich

• Moment
• Unknown
• Breath

It was just enough to sit there without words.

Louise Erdrich

• Words

I got well by talking. Death could not get a word in edgewise, grew discouraged, and traveled on.

Louise Erdrich

• Death

Numbers, time, inches, feet. All are just ploys for cutting nature down to size.

Louise Erdrich

• Time
• Nature
• Cutting

I have never fully exorcised shames that struck me to the heart as a child except through written violence, shadowy caricature, and dark jokes.

Louise Erdrich

• Heart
• Dark
• Violence