Louise erdrich quotes

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.

To sew is to pray. Men don't understand this. They see the whole but they don't see the stitches. They don't see the speech of the creator in the work of the needle.

All through my life I never did believe in human measurement. Numbers, time, inches, feet. All are just ploys for cutting nature down to size. I know the grand scheme of the world is beyond our brains to fathom, so I don't try, just let it in.

The only time I see the truth is when I cross my eyes.

We passed over in a sweep of sorrow that would persist into our small forever. We just keep going.

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.

i want to hear what's happened to you," she said evenly after a while. she gestured in the direction, down river, of the butcher shop. "it's just that there is nowhere else to start," she said gently. "niether of us is the same. but i'm different because of small, good, manageable things. you're different because ... things i don't know.

When small towns find they cannot harm the strangest of their members, when eccentrics show resilience, they are eventually embraced and even cherished.

A woman's body is the gate to this life. A man's body is the gate to the next life.

You never know where you're going to find the same thoughts in another brain, but when it happens you know it right off, just like you were connected by a small electrical wire that suddenly glows red hot and sparks.

I want to remember what bullshit looks like when weapons of mass destruction are diagrammed out and whacko "intelligence" is delivered in an ominous way to strike fear into people and especially to pull on the idealism and zeal of the young.

What is this life but the sound of an appalling love.

I stood there in the shadowed doorway thinking with my tears. Yes, tears can be thoughts, why not?

Things which do not grow and change are dead things.

I knew each person's delusion, the places their records had scratched, where the sounds repeated.

When women age into their power, no wind can upset them, no hand turn aside their knowledge, no fact can deflect their point of view.

Sometimes a person's monstrosity seems superhuman.

But if there was embellishment, it only had to do with the facts.

To sew is to pray. Men don't understand this. They see the whole but they don't see the stitches. They don't see the speech of the creator in the work of the needle. We mend. We women turn things inside out and set things right. We salvage what we can of human garments and piece the rest into blankets. Sometimes our stitches stutter and slow. Only a woman's eyes can tell. Other times, the tension in the stitches might be too tight because of tears, but only we know what emotion went into the making. Only women can hear the prayer.

Each life is one short word slowly uttered.

Society is like this card game here, cousin. We got dealt our hand before we were even born, and as we grow we have to play as best as we can.

You know, some people fall right through the hole in their lives. Its invisible, but they come to it after time, never knowing where.

What men call adventures usually consist of the stoical endurance of appalling daily misery.

Women are strong, strong, terribly strong. We don't know how strong until we're pushing out our babies.

When we are young, the words are scattered all around us. As they are assembled by experience, so also are we, sentence by sentence, until the story takes shape.

some people meet the way the sky meets the earth, inevitably, and there is no stopping or holding back their love. It exists in a finished world, beyond the reach of common sense.

You see I thought love got easier over the years so it didn't hurt so bad when it hurt, or feel so good when it felt good. I thought it smoothed out and old people hardly noticed it. I thought it curled up and died, I guess. Now I saw it rear up like a whip and lash.

If life's a joke, then suicide's a bad punch line.

There are ways of being abandoned even when your parents are right there.

When every inch of the world is known, sleep may be the only wilderness that we have left.

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.

I might not be able to use the word "hope," but I could certainly use the word "optimism." I'm very optimistic. I don't feel that it helps to be pessimistic. At some point in my life I made a conscious decision that I would try to be optimistic - not blind to anything at all - but to always hear the way that had the best chance for happiness.

The length of sky is just about the size of my ignorance. Pure and wide.

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.

Love won't be tampered with, love won't go away. Push it to one side and it creeps to the other. Throw it in the garbage and it springs up clean. Try to root it out and it only flourishes. Love is a weed, a dandelion that you poison from your heart. The taproots wait. The seeds blow off, ticklish, into a part of the yard you didn't spray. And one day, though you worked, though you prodded out each spiky leaf, you lift your eyes and dozens of fat golden faces bob in the grass.

Looking at the shape of the world, I see how we're in a time where women are the subject of hatred, fear, and we have to fight that all the time. I feel that there are fights we take for granted. When I look at the world, I see that women are subject to cruelty. And that's why the global gag rule means so much to me, that the United States wouldn't stand up for the rights and health of women.

Death is the least civilized rite of passage.

To think about love and passion and political correctness all together, it doesn't work. Art has to go way past the political to be effective.

He despised his body for its boring hungers, reflex anger; its petty, obliterating rage. But now he'd become detached. He regarded his body with a tender regret. It was the thing his spirit had to haul.

You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart.

We do know that no one gets wise enough to really understand the heart of another, though it is the task of our life to try.

I work really out of mythology, so often I work out of a story that has remained lodged inside somehow, or I work out of history, you know, out of a sense of historical inevitability with characters.

The universe is transformation.

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.

Veils of love which was only hate petrified by longing--that was me.

She had always been a reader… but now she was obsessed. Since her discovery of the book hoard downstairs from her job, she’d been caught up in one such collection of people and their doings after the next…The pleasure of this sort of life – bookish, she supposed it might be called, a reading life – had made her isolation into a rich and even subversive thing. She inhabited one consoling or horrifying persona after another…That she was childless and husbandless and poor meant less once she picked up a book. Her mistakes disappeared into it. She lived with an invented force.

I think one of the most fertile, unexplored areas for poets and fiction writers is the world of science. I become overwhelmed by the science world.

Every so often something shatters like ice and we are in the river of our existence. We are aware.

In order to purify yourself, you have to understand yourself, Father Trais went on. Everything out in the world is also in you. Good, bad, evil, perfection, death, everything. So we study our souls.

I have always kept notebooks and I go back to them over and over. They are my compost pile of ideas.

I can't imagine a home without an overflow of books. The point of books is to have way too many but to always feel you never have enough, or the right one at the right moment, but then sometimes to find you'd longed to fall asleep reading the Aspern Papers, and there it is.

Can you stop your mother from singing to you? Who would do such a thing?

Power travels in the bloodlines, handed out before birth.

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.

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

We have a huge struggle for our sense of what a democracy is. We're not living in reality when we think we have some sort of democracy. We're really on the edge. We have two presidents who lost the popular vote but won the election. This is not working.

Money helps, though not so much as you think when you don't have it.

I prefer to have some beliefs that don't make logical sense.

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.

The world tips away when we look into our children's faces.

Love won't be tampered with, love won't go away. Push it to one side and it creeps to the other.

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.

Her mind was present because she was always gone. Her hands were filled because they grasped the meaning of empty. Life was simple. Her husband returned and she served him with indifferent patience this time. When he asked what had happened to her heat for him, she gestured to the west. The sun was setting. The sky was a body of fire.

I feel myself becoming less a person than a place, inhabited, a foreign land.

By writing I can live in ways that I could not survive.

Life is made up of three kinds of people -- those who live it, those afraid to, those in between.

Ravens are the birds I'll miss most when I die. If only the darkness into which we must look were composed of the black light of their limber intelligence. If only we did not have to die at all. Instead, become ravens.

Love. The black hook. The spear singing through the mind.

...which causes me to wonder, my own purpose on so many days as humble as the spider's, what is beautiful that I make? What is elegant? What feeds the world?

At times the whole sky was ringed in shooting points and puckers of light gathering and falling, pulsing, fading, rhythmical as breathing. All of a piece. As if the sky were a pattern of nerves and our thought and memories traveled across it. As if the sky were one gigantic memory for us all.

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.

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.

Columbus only discovered that he was in some new place. He didn't discover America.

Here is the most telling fact: you wish to possess me.
 Here is another fact: I loved you and let you think you could.

Now I'm sixty-one... sixty-two, pretty soon. It's a really interesting age. Now we have women of your age, and coming up, and all these fantastic writers, who have managed to have their children but continue with their art, their work. I think women are doing the most interesting writing right now, the most interesting art. I see everything through this lens, of women finally taking their place in the world. Their true place. And it's very, very exciting to me.

How come we've got these bodies? They are frail supports for what we feel. There are times I get so hemmed in by my arms and legs I look forward to getting past them. As though death will set me free like a traveling cloud... I'll be out there as a piece of the endless body of the world feeling pleasures so much larger than skin and bones and blood.

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.

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.

I am at the bookstore a lot, but let my friends, the professional Birchbark Books staff, handle the day in and day out.

Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart.

We started dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall.

I had a very free childhood and ranged around on my bicycle the way boys do. I had few restrictions.

In our own beginnings, we are formed out of the body's interior landscape. For a short while, our mothers' bodies are the boundaries and personal geography which are all that we know of the world...Once we no longer live beneath our mother's heart, it is the earth with which we form the same dependent relationship, relying...on its cycles and elements, helpless without its protective embrace.

We have these earthly bodies. We don't know what they want. Half the time, we pretend they are under our mental thumb, but that is the illusion of the healthy and the protected. Of sedate lovers. For the body has emotions it conceives and carries through without concern for anyone or anything else. Love is one of those, I guess. Going back to something very old knit into the brain as we were growing. Hopeless. Scorching. Ordinary.

As soon as there's a crisis, there are people who take charge and want to control others. Climate-change catastrophe and human migration and immigration are great for corporate and governmental control over people, and we have to contend with that. I should say, I see corporate control behind everything that the government is working on right now.

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.

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.

Time is the water in which we live, and we breathe it like fish. ... Time pours into us and then pours out again. In between the two pourings we live our destiny.

We all got holes in our lives. Nobody dies in a perfect garment.

Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that. And living alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on Earth.

Don't read anything except what destroys the insulation between yourself and your experience.

Now that I knew fear, I also knew it was not permanent. As powerful as it was, its grip on me would loosen. It would pass.

I thought how we might have to yell to be heard by Higher Power, but that's not saying it's not there. And that is faith for you. It's belief even when the gods don't deliver.

It's impossible to write about Native life without humor-that's how people maintain sanity.

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.

I make very involved drawings, even little structures, and try using design to figure out the rhythm of a plot. If there are several narrators then a clue has to pop up in the first line. There have to be certain grammatical clues, or distinctive names.

There will never come a time when I will be able to resist my emotions.

I was in love with the whole world and all that lived in its rainy arms.

All of our actions have in their doing the seed of their undoing.

my mind ran over scenes of Shesheeb seducing Margaret until I was a wagon dragged by the runaway horses of my jealousy.

People forget the good, because the bad has more punch.

It was just enough to sit there without words.

It's very hard to track down what's real and what's not real. We haven't absorbed what climate change is doing. Because whether people associate it or not, fear of immigration is completely related to climate change, because the mass migrations that are happening, the war in Syria, all of these structural human migrations are related to climate change.

Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that.

Freedom, I found is not only in the running but in the heart, the mind, the hands.

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.

Hunger steals the memory

Right and wrong were shades of meaning, not sides of a coin.

...Grandpa's mind had left us, gone wild and wary. When I walked with him I could feel how strange it was. His thoughts swam between us, hidden under rocks, disappearing in weeds, and I was fishing for them, dangling my own words like baits and lures.

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.

Coming down off the trail, I am lost in my own thoughts and unprepared when a bear chugs across the path just before it gives out on the gravel road. I am so distracted that I keep walking towards the bear. I only stop when it rears, stands on hind legs, and stares at me, sensitive nose pressed into the air, weak eyes searching. I have never been this close to a wild bear before, but I am not frightened. There is no menace in its stance; it is not even curious. The bear seems to know who or what I am. The bear is not impressed.

To love another another human in all of her splendor and imperfect perfection , it is a magnificent task...tremendous and foolish and human.

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.

Women without children are also the best of mothers,often, with the patience,interest, and saving grace that the constant relationship with children cannot always sustain. I come to crave our talk and our daughters gain precious aunts. Women who are not mothering their own children have the clarity and focus to see deeply into the character of children webbed by family. A child is fortuante who feels witnessed as a peron,outside relationships with parents by another adult.

Your life feels different on you, once you greet death and understand your heart's position. You wear your life like a garment from the mission bundle sale ever after - lightly because you realize you never paid nothing for it, cherishing because you know you won't ever come by such a bargain again.

The greatest wisdom doesn't know itself. The richest plan is not to have one.

Your life feels different on you, once you greet death and understand your heart's position.

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.

What happens when you let an unsatisfactory present go on long enough? It becomes your entire history.

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.

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

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

Be lovely and do no harm.

There is a legacy of violence against native women that has gotten worse and worse over time.

There is no such thing as a complete lack of order, only a design so vast it appears unrepetitive up close.