Louise Erdrich Quotes & Sayings

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. — Louise Erdrich

I spend my time dwelling on revenge and try to deal with the monsters crawling out of the ashes. — Louise Erdrich

We are never so poor that we cannot bless another human being, are we? So it is that every evil, whether moral or material, results in good. You'll see. — Louise Erdrich

You said if they're assigned to Indian Country they are either rookies or have trouble with authority. Did — Louise Erdrich

The buffalo were taking leave of the earth and all they loved," said the old chiefs and hunters after years had passed and they could tell what split their hearts. "The buffalo went crazy with grief to see the end of things. Like us, they saw the end of things and like many of us, many today, they did not care to live. — Louise Erdrich

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

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

Our tribe unraveled like a coarse rope, frayed at either end as the old and new among us were taken. — Louise Erdrich

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

Her outfit must have penetrated his unconscious. She wore a shirt of softly fringed suede that clung to her breasts like an unforgiven sin. — Louise Erdrich

Time was rushing around me like water around a big wet rock. The only difference is, I was not so durable as stones. Very quickly I would be smoothed away. — Louise Erdrich

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

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. — Louise Erdrich

He said that while Clemence adored the sacrament, he meditated on how it could be possible that humans had evolved out of apes only to sit gaping at a round white cracker. — Louise Erdrich

Getting out of bed, out of a chair, changing her position, was like moving furniture. — Louise Erdrich

It was Sister Hildegarde's belief that good penmanship was the defining key to success in life. — Louise Erdrich

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. — Louise Erdrich

Upon walking into Eva's kitchen, something profound happened to Delphine. She experienced a fabulous expansion of being. Light-headed, she felt a swooping sensation and then a quiet, as though she'd settled like a bird. — Louise Erdrich

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

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. — Louise Erdrich

I tried out the unfamiliar syllables. They fit. They cracked in my ears like a fist through ice. — Louise Erdrich

I hold his name close as my own blood and I will never let it out. I only spoke it that once so he would know he was alive. — Louise Erdrich

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

What I am doing now is for the future, though it may seem small, or trivial, or boring, to you. — Louise Erdrich

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

From Mooshum to Sonja, back and forth. They wouldn't look at each other. I'm gonna ask you to leave in a nice way, Joe. — Louise Erdrich

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

It was as though her soul were neatly removed by a drinking straw and siphoned into the green pool of quiet that lay beneath the rippling cascade of notes. — Louise Erdrich

Wherever the family was, these two dogs, both six-year-old shepherd mixes, took up their posts at the central coming-and-going point. Gil called them concierge dogs. And it's true, they were inquisitive and accommodating. But they were not fawning or overly playful. They were watchful and thoughtful. Irene thought they had gravitas. Weighty demeanors. She thought of them as diplomats. She had noticed that when Gil was about to lose his temper one of the dogs always appeared and did something to divert his attention. Sometimes they acted like fools, but it was brilliant acting. Once, when he was furious about a bill for the late fees for a lost video, one of the dogs had walked right up to Gil and lifted his leg over his shoe. Gil was shouting at Florian when the piss splattered down, and she'd felt a sudden jolt of pride in the dog. — Louise Erdrich

And so, you see, her absence stopped time. What — Louise Erdrich

The habits of Franciscan nuns still shrouded all but their faces, and so each of the new nun's features were emphasized, read forty times over in astonishment. Outlined in a stiff white frame of starched linen, Sister's eyes, nose, and mouth leapt out, a mask from a dream, a great raw-boned jackal's muzzle. — Louise Erdrich

My father could out-weather anybody. Like people anywhere, there were times when it was the only topic where people here felt comfortably expressive, and my father could go on earnestly, seemingly forever. When the current weather was exhausted, there was all the weather that had occurred in recorded history, weather lived through or witnessed by a relative, or even heard about on the news. Catastrophic weather of all types. And when that was done, there was all the weather that might possibly occur in the future. I'd even heard him speculate about weather in the afterlife. — Louise Erdrich

If I am loved," Father Damien went on, "it is a merciless and exacting love against which I have no defense. If I am not loved, then I am being pitilessly manipulated by a force I cannot withstand, either, and so it is all the same. I must do what I must do. Go in peace. — Louise Erdrich

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. — Louise Erdrich

I spend most of my time writing. — Louise Erdrich

Nothing I force myself to write about ever turns out well, and so I've learned to wait for the voice, the incident, the image that reverberates. — Louise Erdrich

For as I am standing there I look closer into the grandstand and see that there is someone waiting. It is my mother, and all at once I cannot stop seeing her. Her skin is rough. Her whole face seems magnetized, like ore. Her deep brown eyes are circled with dark skin, but full of eagerness. In her eyes I see the force of her love. It is bulky and hard to carry, like a package that keeps untying. It is like this dress that no excuse accounts for. It is embarrassing. I walk to her, drawn by her, unable to help myself. — Louise Erdrich

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. — Louise Erdrich

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. — Louise Erdrich

It kills your writing if you try to manipulate it with crude politics. — Louise Erdrich

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. — Louise Erdrich

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

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. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could. — Louise Erdrich

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. — Louise Erdrich

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. — Louise Erdrich

Getting blown up happened in an instant; getting put together took the rest of your life. — Louise Erdrich

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. — Louise Erdrich

Then his head tipped down on his chest and he fell into the instant sleep of the ancient and the very young. — Louise Erdrich

We have a lot of books in our house. They are our primary decorative motif-books in piles and on the coffee table, framed book covers, books sorted into stacks on every available surface, and of course books on shelves along most walls. Besides the visible books, there are books waiting in the wings, the basement books, the garage books, the storage locker books ... They function as furniture, they prop up sagging fixtures and disguised by quilts function as tables ... 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. — Louise Erdrich

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

The contents of a house can trigger all sorts of revisions to family history. — Louise Erdrich

To join the company of women, to be adults, we go through a period of proudly boasting of having survived our own mother's indifference, anger, overpowering love, the burden of her pain, her tendency to drink or teetotal, her warmth or coldness, praise or criticism, sexual confusions or embarrassing clarity. It isn't enough that she sweat, labored, bore her daughters howling or under total anesthesia or both. No. She must be responsible for our psychic weaknesses the rest of her life. It is alright to feel kinship with your father, to forgive. We all know that. But your mother is held to a standard so exacting that it has no principles. She simply must be to blame. — Louise Erdrich

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. — Louise Erdrich

What I see in the book is an exquisite form of technology: one that doesn't require a power source and can be passed from hand to hand and lasts a lot longer than an electronic reader. — Louise Erdrich

Veils of love which was only hate petrified by longing
that was me. — Louise Erdrich

It seemed to Chickadee that those houses held the powers of the world. The ones who built and lived in those houses were making an outsize world. An existence he'd never dreamed of. Almost a spirit world, but one on earth. Chickadee could see that they used up forests of trees in making the houses. He could see that they were pumping up the river and even using up the animals. He thought of the many animals whose dead hides were bound and sold in St. Paul in one day. Everything that the Anishinabeg counted on in life, and loved, was going into this hungry city mouth. This mouth, this city, was wide and insatiable. it would never be satisfied, thought Chickadee dizzily, until everything was gone. — Louise Erdrich

Higher Power makes promises we all know they can't back up, but anybody ever go and slap an old malpractice suit on God? Or the U.S. government? No they don't. Faith might be stupid, but it gets us through. — Louise Erdrich

I shared with Fleur the mysterious self-contempt of the survivor. There were times we hated who we were, and who we had to become, in order not to follow those we loved into the next world. We grew hard. We became impenetrable, sparing of our pity. Sorrows that leveled other people were small to us. We made no move to avoid pain. Sometimes we even welcomed it--we were clumsy with knives, fire, boiling water, steel traps. Pain took our minds off the greater pain that was the mistake that we still existed. — Louise Erdrich

People forget the good, because the bad has more punch. — Louise Erdrich

They were so strong in their beliefs that there came a time when it hardly mattered what exactly those beliefs were; they all fused into a single stubbornness. — Louise Erdrich

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. — Louise Erdrich

The universe is transformation. — Louise Erdrich

And it occurred to me how even pulling trees that day, just months ago, I was in heaven. Unaware. I had known nothing even as the evil was occurring, I hadn't been touched yet. — Louise Erdrich

Funny how often the Will of God puts a dollar in a pocket, said Dr. Ames. — Louise Erdrich

Full of the usual blights, mistakes, ruinous beetles and parasites, glorious for one week, bedraggled the next, my actual garden is always a mixed bag. As usual, it will fall far short of the imagined perfection. It is a chore. Hard work. I'll by turns aggressively weed and ignore it. The ground I tend sustains me in early summer, but the garden of the spirit is the place I go when the wind howls. This lush and fragrant expectation has a longer growing season than the plot of earth I'll hoe for the rest of the year. Raised in the mind's eye, nurtured by the faithful composting of orange rinds and tea leaves and ideas, it is finally the wintergarden that produces the true flowering, the saving vision. — Louise Erdrich

The story comes around, pushing at our brains, and soon we are trying to ravel back to the beginning, trying to put families into order and make sense of things. But we start with one person, and soon another and another follows, and still another, until we are lost in the connections. — Louise Erdrich

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

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. — Louise Erdrich

At any rate those two, one the shadow of a shadow in the hall and the other a shadow also, an imitation of the ruthless man who'd stolen from the world with careless ease, both poised, caught in time. — Louise Erdrich

We try to press against the boundaries of what we are allowed, walk a step past the edge. Our records will be scrutinized by Congress one day and decisions on whether to enlarge our jurisdiction will be made. — Louise Erdrich

Girls were not named for flowers, as flowers died so quickly. Girls were named for deathless things - forms of light, forms of cloud, shapes of stars, that which appears and disappears like an island on the horizon. — Louise Erdrich

Father Travis leaned back. I glanced up at him. He was watching us from under his brow, his hands folded in his lap. His eyes had taken on that cyborg gleam. His cheekbones looked like they were going to break right through his skin. Not only did he own a copy of Alien, not only did he have an amazing and terrible wound, but he had called us humiliating names without actually resorting to the usual swear words. Besides that there was the deft speed with which he'd caught Angus, the free weights beside the television, the fancy Michelob. It was almost enough to make a boy want to be a Catholic. — Louise Erdrich

My parents' marriage is a gift to everyone around them - 60 years of making their kids laugh. How many parents are actually funny? — Louise Erdrich

Most writers have been influenced by Faulkner. — Louise Erdrich

The Creator made us for each other. Me here. Zelia there. Space was put between us by human error. But our hearts listened to divine will. — Louise Erdrich

Nector [speaking to Bernadette] could have told her, having drunk down the words of Nanapush, that comfort is not security and money in the hand disappears. He could have told her that only the land matters and never to let go of the papers, the titles, the tracks of the words, all those things that his ancestors never understood how the vital relationship to the dirt and grass under their feet. — Louise Erdrich

The family took all the seeds from the garden and then they buried Nokomis there, deeply, wrapped in her blanket with gifts and tobacco for the spirit world. They buried her simply. There was no stone, no grave house, nothing to mark where she lay except the exuberant and drying growth of her garden.
Nokomis had said:
I do not need a marker of my passage, for my creator knows where I am. I do not want anyone to cry. I lived a good life, my hair turned to snow, I saw my great grandchildren, I grew my garden. That is all. — Louise Erdrich

My grandfather was a persuasive man who made friends with people at every level of influence. In order to fight against our tribe's termination, he went to newspapers and politicians and urged them to advocate for our tribe in Washington. He also supported his family through the Depression as a truck farmer. — Louise Erdrich

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

Whom he had saved from a life of excessive freedom — Louise Erdrich

These are the decisions that I and many other tribal judges try to make. Solid decisions with no scattershot opinions attached. Everything we do, no matter how trivial, must be crafted keenly. We are trying to build a solid base here for our sovereignty. — Louise Erdrich

There are Indian grandmas who get too much church and Indian grandmas where the church doesn't take, and who are let loose in their old age to shock the young. Zack had one of those last sort. — Louise Erdrich

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. — Louise Erdrich

Power travels in the bloodlines, handed out before birth. — Louise Erdrich

Death is the least civilized rite of passage. — Louise Erdrich

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? — Louise Erdrich

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

[On her and husband Michael Dorris:] We both have title collections. I think a title is like a magnet. It begins to draw these scraps of experience or conversation or memory to it. Eventually, it collects a book. — Louise Erdrich

The pattern glitters with cruelty. The blue beads are colored with fish blood, the reds with powdered heart. The beads collect in borders of mercy. The yellows are dyed with the ocher of silence. There is no telling which twin will fall asleep first, allowing the other's colors to dominate, for how long. The design grows, the overlay deepens. The beaders have no other order at the heart of their being. Do you know that the beads are sewn onto the fabric of the earth with endless strands of human muscle, human sinew, human hair? We are as crucial to this making as other animals. No more and no less important than the deer. — Louise Erdrich

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

Someone had cleared that hillside once to make an orchard that had fallen into ruin and was now only twisted silver branches and split trunks. I sat there and continued to watch the sky as, out of nowhere, great solid-looking clouds built hot stacks and cotton cones. I was sixteen years old. — Louise Erdrich

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. — Louise Erdrich

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

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

TO LOVE Nanapush, to love at all, is like trying to remember the tune and words to a song that the spirits have given you in your sleep. Some days, I knew exactly how the song went and some days I couldn't even hum the first line. — Louise Erdrich

And how funny, strange, that a thing can grow so powerful even when planted in the wrong place. Ideas too, I muttered. Ideas. — Louise Erdrich

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

He was becoming an effective human being. He had learned from his birth family how to snare rabbits, make stew, paint fingernails, glue wallpaper, conduct ceremonies, start outside fires in a driving rain, sew with a sewing machine, cut quilt squares, play Halo, gather, dry, and boil various medicine teas. He had learned from the old people how to move between worlds seen and unseen. Peter taught him how to use an ax, a chain saw, safely handle a .22, drive a riding lawn mower, drive a tractor, even a car. Nola taught him how to paint walls, keep animals, how to plant and grow things, how to fry meat, how to bake. Maggie taught him how to hide fear, fake pain, how to punch with a knuckle jutting. How to go for the eyes. How to hook your fingers in a person's nose from behind and threaten to rip the nose off your face. He hadn't done these things yet, and neither had Maggie, but she was always looking for a chance. When — Louise Erdrich

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. — Louise Erdrich

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