Top 100 Erdrich Quotes
#1. All of the guests on 'Faces of America' were deeply moved by what we revealed about their ancestry. We were able to trace the ancestry of Native American writer Louise Erdrich back to 438 A.D. We found that Queen Noor is descended from royalty, and that's before she married King Hussein of Jordan.
Henry Louis Gates
#2. Ten Little Indians once again shows [Alexie] to be not just one of the West's best, but one of the most brilliantly literate American writers, even funnier than Louise Erdrich, even more primal than Jim Harrison, and even more eloquent than Annie Proulx.
Ron Franscell
#3. 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
#4. Statisticians report that television is watched over six hours a day in the average American household. I don't know any fiction writers who live in average American households. I suspect Louise Erdrich might. Actually I have never seen an average American household. Except on TV.
David Foster Wallace
#5. 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
#6. 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.
Louise Erdrich
#7. 1 in 3 Native women will be raped in her lifetime (and that figure is certainly higher as Native women often do not report rape); 86 percent of rapes and sexual assaults upon Native women are perpetrated by non-Native men; few are prosecuted.
Louise Erdrich
#8. 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
#10. The moonless sky was a rich wild blackness of stars.
Louise Erdrich
#12. A MAN FINDS happiness so fleetingly, like the petals melting off a prairie rose. Even as you touch that feeling it dries up, leaving only the dust of that emotion, a powder of hope.
Louise Erdrich
#14. Love. The black hook. The spear singing through the mind.
Louise Erdrich
#16. He gives very questioning sermons, Bazil. Sometimes I wonder if he's entirely stable, or then again, if he might be simply ... intelligent.
Louise Erdrich
#17. 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
#18. 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
#19. 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
#20. Things which do not grow and change are dead things.
Louise Erdrich
#21. Chapter 1, verse 4, he said. One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh, but the earth abideth forever.
Louise Erdrich
#22. The only time I see the truth is when I cross my eyes.
Louise Erdrich
#23. 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
#25. Marshall vested absolute title to the land in the government and gave Indians nothing more than the right of occupancy, a right that could be taken away at any time.
Louise Erdrich
#26. 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
#27. It's impossible to write about Native life without humor-that's how people maintain sanity.
Louise Erdrich
#28. 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
#29. Getting blown up happened in an instant; getting put together took the rest of your life.
Louise Erdrich
#30. 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
#31. Funny how often the Will of God puts a dollar in a pocket, said Dr. Ames.
Louise Erdrich
#32. 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
#33. If, as I suspect, my body survives by uttering itself over and over again, then I have some questions. If [I] am one word, so are my daughters, so are all of us in strings and loops. Each life is one short word slowly uttered.
Louise Erdrich
#34. You said if they're assigned to Indian Country they are either rookies or have trouble with authority. Did
Louise Erdrich
#35. Why do the chimookomanag want us?" she growled. "They take all that makes us Anishinaabeg. Everything about us. First our land, then our trees. Now husbands, our wives, our children, our souls. Why do they want to capture every bit?
Louise Erdrich
#36. 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
#37. I grew up in North Dakota around Dakota and Ojibwe people, and also small-town people in Wahpeton. Writers make few choices, really, about their material. We have to write about what comes naturally and what interests us - so I do.
Louise Erdrich
#38. 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
#40. 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
#41. Our reservation is not real estate, luck fades when sold. Attraction has no staying power, no weight, no heart.
Louise Erdrich
#42. 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
#43. I knew each person's delusion, the places their records had scratched, where the sounds repeated.
Louise Erdrich
#44. I got well by talking. Death could not get a word in edgewise, grew discouraged, and traveled on.
Louise Erdrich
#45. Columbus only discovered that he was in some new place. He didn't discover America.
Louise Erdrich
#46. Women are strong, strong, terribly strong. We don't know how strong until we're pushing out our babies.
Louise Erdrich
#47. He began his morning at six a.m. with a cup of coffee and a paperback.
Louise Erdrich
#48. 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
#49. We started dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall.
Louise Erdrich
#50. It seemed to her that almost any pain was sympathetic to her loss and she inserted herself immediately into the concept of fantastic suffering.
Louise Erdrich
#51. 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
#52. My father had bought an ugly new clock, and it was ticking again in the quiet kitchen.
Louise Erdrich
#53. Old love, middle love, the kind of love that knows itself and knows that nothing lasts, is a desperate shared wildness.
Louise Erdrich
#54. What I am doing now is for the future, though it may seem small, or trivial, or boring, to you.
Louise Erdrich
#55. I already knew, too, that these questions would not change the facts. But they would inevitably change the way we sought justice.
Louise Erdrich
#56. Numbers, time, inches, feet. All are just ploys for cutting nature down to size.
Louise Erdrich
#58. There are several kinds of land on reservations. And all of these pieces of land have different entities who are in charge of enforcing laws on this land.
Louise Erdrich
#59. Still what? I made my voice grating and sarcastic. I was never like so many Indian boys, who'd look down quiet in their anger and say nothing. My mother had taught me different.
Louise Erdrich
#61. The greatest wisdom doesn't know itself. The richest plan is not to have one.
Louise Erdrich
#62. This was our ritual. Our breaking break, our communion. and it all began with that trusting moment where my father walked up behind my mother and she smiled at his approach without turning. By now they stood staring at each other helplessly over the broken dish.
Louise Erdrich
#63. Decide first what is authentic,then go after it with all your heart.
Louise Erdrich
#64. 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
#65. We all got holes in our lives. Nobody dies in a perfect garment.
Louise Erdrich
#66. 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.
Louise Erdrich
#67. Getting out of bed, out of a chair, changing her position, was like moving furniture.
Louise Erdrich
#68. She had a talent for looking at a person with no expression - you filled in whatever you felt guiltiest about.
Louise Erdrich
#70. 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
#72. I spend my time dwelling on revenge and try to deal with the monsters crawling out of the ashes.
Louise Erdrich
#73. Here I am, where I ought to be. A writer must have a place where he or she feels this, a place to love and be irritated with.
Louise Erdrich
#74. There is a legacy of violence against native women that has gotten worse and worse over time.
Louise Erdrich
#75. I grew up in Wahpeton, N.D., and I didn't leave until I was 18, and I've kept going back.
Louise Erdrich
#76. 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.
Louise Erdrich
#78. I feel myself becoming less a person than a place, inhabited, a foreign land.
Louise Erdrich
#79. Life is made up of three kinds of people
those who live it, those afraid to, those in between.
Louise Erdrich
#80. The whiskey had its own mind. Or spirit, he said. A cunning spirit. Sometimes it fooled him. Sometimes it set him free.
Louise Erdrich
#81. When small towns find they cannot harm the strangest of their members, when eccentrics show resilience, they are eventually embraced and even cherished.
Louise Erdrich
#82. I have always kept notebooks and I go back to them over and over. They are my compost pile of ideas.
Louise Erdrich
#83. 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
#85. I prefer to have some beliefs that don't make logical sense.
Louise Erdrich
#86. Freedom, I found is not only in the running but in the heart, the mind, the hands.
Louise Erdrich
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. 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
#90. On any state elections map, the reservations are blue places. Native people are most often progressives, Democrats, and by no means gun-toting vigilantes.
Louise Erdrich
#91. 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.
Louise Erdrich
#92. For me, this is old. I probably know what is happening better than he does because I've tried over and over to wreck myself on another human, and always failed. I fail now. For it seems that my sorrow is deep in my bones and I'd have to break every single one to let it out.
Louise Erdrich
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. 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.
Louise Erdrich
#97. 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
#98. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart.
Louise Erdrich
#99. We passed over in a sweep of sorrow that would persist into our small forever. We just keep going.
Louise Erdrich
#100. So you see, once a person drops the scales of prejudiced certainty and doubts appear, there is no telling how far a heart can open.
Louise Erdrich
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