Erdrich Quotes & Sayings

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

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. — Louise Erdrich

The otter's picnic ground is a large rock where we always find empty turtle shells. It is rather sad, but I can't help thinking how conveniently packaged a turtle is to an otter. Like a kind of Big Mac in a crushproof box. — Louise Erdrich

Old love, middle love, the kind of love that knows itself and knows that nothing lasts, is a desperate shared wildness. — Louise Erdrich

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

Sorrow eats time. Be patient. Time eats sorrow. — Louise Erdrich

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. — Louise Erdrich

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

I tried to get away from him, to get to that door, but instead I backed up against the wall and was stuck there in that white, white room. — Louise Erdrich

The only answer to this, and it isn't an entire answer, said Father Travis, is that God made human beings free agents. We are able to choose good over evil, but the opposite too. And in order to protect our human freedom, God doesn't often, very often at least, intervene. God can't do that without taking away our moral freedom. Do you see?
No. But yeah.
The only thing that God can do, and does all of the time, is to draw good from any evil situation. — Louise Erdrich

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

Sometimes owls came near to warn of death. Sometimes they just asked people to be careful. Sometimes they were just owls. — Louise Erdrich

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

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

Our baby gives herself to me completely. There is no hesitation, no reservation, no holding back, no coldness, no craft, no tremor or fear in her love. Although our relationship may encompass tears, frustration, even fury, it is an utterly reliable bond. As it grows, her love is literally unadulterated. Her love is wholly of the child, pure in its essence as children are in their direct passions. Children do not love wisely, but perhaps they love the best of all. — 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

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

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

Albertine was one of those who took on too much in order to remain perpetually dissatisfied with herself. — 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

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

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

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

The music was more than music- at least what we are used to hearing. The music was feeling itself. The sound connected instantly with something deep and joyous. Those powerful moments of true knowledge that we have to paper over with daily life. The music tapped the back of our terrors, too. Things we'd lived through and didn't want to ever repeat. Shredded imaginings, unadmitted longings, fear and also surprisingly pleasures. No, we can't live at that pitch. But every so often something shatters like ice and we are in the river of our existence. We are aware. And this realization was in the music, somehow, or in the way Shamengwa played it. — 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

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. — Louise Erdrich

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

He had a thousand-year-old stare. — Louise Erdrich

Whenever you leave cleared land, when you step from some place carved out, plowed, or traced by a human and pass into the woods, you must leave something of yourself behind. It is that sudden loss, I think, even more than the difficulty of walking through undergrowth, that keeps people firmly fixed to paths. In the woods, there is no right way to go, of course, no trail to follow but the law of growth. You must leave behind the notion that things are right. Just look around you. Here is the way things are. Twisted, fallen, split at the root. What grows best does so at the expense of what's beneath. A white birch feeds on the pulp of an old hemlock and supports the grapevine that will slowly throttle it. In the dead wood of another tree grow fungi black as devil's hooves. Overhead the canopy, tall pines that whistle and shudder and choke off light from their own lower branches. (from "Revival Road") — Louise Erdrich

Now that she was conscious there was no end to her questions and exclamations, for Dot was a born traveler, meant to go places, unlike us. — Louise Erdrich

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

I imagined myself in some way defined by my relation to another creature. — Louise Erdrich

Chapter 1, verse 4, he said. One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh, but the earth abideth forever. — Louise Erdrich

Pain comes to us from deep back, from where it grew in the human body. Pain sucks more pain into it, we don't know why. It lives, and we harbor its weight. When the worst comes, we will not act the opposite. We will do what we were taught, we who learnt our lessons in the dead light. We pass them on. We hurt, and hurt others, in a circular motion. — Louise Erdrich

You undergo your own incarceration. You may witness your demise piece by piece. You may be one kind of fool who never gets enough or another who gets too much. — Louise Erdrich

She was a horse lover and she and Whitey kept a mean old paint, a fancy quarter horse/Arabian mix, a roan Appaloosa with one ghost eye named Spook, and a pony. So along with the whiskey and perfume and smoke, she often exuded faint undertones of hay, dust, and the fragrance of horse, which once you smell it you always miss it. Humans were meant to live with the horse. — 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

It was ancient and had risen from the boiling earth. It had slept, falling dormant in the dust, rising in mist. Tuberculosis had flown in a dizzy rush to unite with warm life. It was in each new world, and every old world. First it loved animals, then it loved people too. — Louise Erdrich

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. She loved him. She was jealous. She mourned him like the dead. And he just smiled into the air, trapped in the seams of his mind. — 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

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

The Larks are the sort of people who trot out their relationships with "good Indians," whom they secretly despise and openly patronize, in order to prove their general love for Indians, whom they are engaged in cheating. — Louise Erdrich

She had a talent for looking at a person with no expression - you filled in whatever you felt guiltiest about. — Louise Erdrich

The world halted. There sounded a great gong made of sky. A gasp. Silence. — Louise Erdrich

They're all the same
the cop, the criminal, the defense, the prosecutor
they all share a fundamental belief in the malleability of truth — Louise Erdrich

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

If I die, don't take this too hard," she counseled them, "death is only part of things bigger than we can imagine. Our brains are just starting the greatness, to learn how to do things like flying. What next? You will see, and you will see that your mother is of the design. And I will always be made of things, and things will always be made of me. Nothing can get rid of me because I am already included into the pattern. — Louise Erdrich

Some have ideas. You know how old chickens scratch and gabble. That's how the tales started, all the gossip, the wondering, all the things people said without knowing and then believed, since they heard it with their own ears, from their own lips, each word. — Louise Erdrich

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. — Louise Erdrich

We Anishinaabeg are the keepers of the names of the earth. And unless the earth is called by the names it gave us humans, won't it cease to love us? And isn't it true that if the earth stops loving us, everyone, not just the Anishinaabeg, will cease to exist? That is why we all must speak our language, nindinawemagonidok, and call everything we see by the name of its spirit. Even the chimookomanag, who are trying to destroy us, are depending upon us to remember. Mi'sago'i. — Louise Erdrich

She smelled of Marlboros, Aviance Night Musk, and her first drink of the late afternoon. — Louise Erdrich

Talking about how I might write the next book is like talking about whether or not to have sex. Any dithering ruins it. — Louise Erdrich

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

History works itself out in the living. — Louise Erdrich

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

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. — Louise Erdrich

I love plants. For the longest time I thought that they died without pain. But of course after I had argued with Mary she showed me clippings on how plants went into shock when pulled up by their roots, and even uttered something indescribable, like panic, a drawn-out vowel only registered on special instruments. Still, I love their habit of constant return. I don't like cut flowers. Only the ones that grow in the ground. — Louise Erdrich

The people stared through her as though she were invisible until she thought she was, and walked more easily then, just a cloud reflected in a stream. — 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

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

She was a woman of reserve. — Louise Erdrich

Hildegarde stood, scratched her nose, an act for which she must later say a penance. — Louise Erdrich

He was a bad thing waiting for a worse thing to happen. — Louise Erdrich

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

He began his morning at six a.m. with a cup of coffee and a paperback. — Louise Erdrich

Just as he dropped with a jerk into the pit of unconsciousness, he thought how odd it was that he was falling asleep in his sleep. When he entered the dream that he was dreaming, later, it was a dream within the dream he dreamed originally when he lay down in his bed. — Louise Erdrich

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

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

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

We'd better get there soon," said Corwin. "They're probably building new streets in Paris right this minute."
"What if I don't want to, being a lesbian?"
Corwin fell silent; after a while he spoke.
"So you think it might be permanent? — Louise Erdrich

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. — Louise Erdrich

He had started to understand how a woman's attention could succeed in making sense of a man's blind chaos.. — Louise Erdrich

Temptation is a slower process and you'll feel it more in the morning just after waking and in the evening, when you are at loose ends, tired, and yet not ready to fall asleep. — Louise Erdrich

In 'Shadow Tag,' Erdrich creates scenes from a fictional marriage, that of two American Indians, Irene and her painter husband Gil, that suggest some of the worst psychological torments and stresses of real life. — Alan Cheuse

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

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. — Louise Erdrich

But a quick-acting poison, that's different. It strikes with blind swiftness. You can be bit by temptation anytime. It is a thought, a direction, a noise in your brain, a hunch, an intuition that leads you to darker places than you've ever imagined. I — Louise Erdrich

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

She told him that he had survived by doing the opposite of all the others. Where they abandoned, he saved. Where they were cruel, he was kind. Where they betrayed, he was faithful. — Louise Erdrich

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. — Louise Erdrich

Whenever he thought he knew the truth it merged into another truth. — Louise Erdrich

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

For real food our people had traveled off reservation twenty miles or more to put our money in the pockets of store clerks who watched us with suspicion and took our money with contempt. — Louise Erdrich

When we're young, we think we are the only species worth knowing. But the more I come to know people, the better I like ravens. — 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

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. — Louise Erdrich

Nector got even by the use of penmanship. — Louise Erdrich

The moonless sky was a rich wild blackness of stars. — Louise Erdrich

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. — Louise Erdrich

Nothing I write ever has a moral. If it seems to a reader that there is one, that is unintentional. — Louise Erdrich

The next world, of what shall consist its poisons and delights? Love in this world avoided me. And love's issue, beyond all measure. Immersed in the saltless broth of my existence, I tried on moods. — 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

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. — Louise Erdrich

When the first of us failed at growing or herding or plowing the fields, we were told that we could sign a piece of paper and get money for the land, without anyone taking it. Mortgage, this was called, a piece of banker's cleverness that sounded good to many. I spoke against this trick, but who listened to Nanapush? People signed the paper, got money, came home night after night full of whiskey and food. Suddenly the foreclosure notices were handed out and the land was barred. It belonged to someone else. — Louise Erdrich

Delphine began to read with a mad attention when she wanted to talk to Clarisse. She saw that in her life there was a woman-shaped hole, a cutout that led to a mysterious place. Through it, her mother, then Eva, and now Clarisse had walked. If only she could plunge her arms through and drag them back. — 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

She was the kind
To tell it like it is
To kiss and tell
To kiss and kill
To kill with kindness

She was the kind
To get things through her thick skull
To work her fingers to the bone
To work on her back
To never take it lying down

She was the kind
To lay down the law
To get down on her knees
To get up on her feet
To give an inch and take a mile

She was the kind
To stand up for herself
To sit down strike
To go to the wall
To take it to the limit

She was the kind
To take it too far
To drop off the face of the earth
To face the music
To hit rock bottom

She was the kind
To get back on that horse and ride it
To get up on her high horse
To get down to business
To turn the world upside down — Heid E. Erdrich