Louise Erdrich Quotes

56 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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
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.

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
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
They clung to their rock-bottom opinions. 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
She had a talent for looking at a person with no expression — you filled in whatever you felt guiltiest about.

Louise Erdrich
The practice of deception was so constant with her that it got to be a kind of truth.

Louise Erdrich
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.

Louise Erdrich
Gerry's friends, you see, had no confidence in the United States judicial system. They did not seem comfortable in the courtroom, and this increased their unreliability in the eyes of judge and jury. If you trust the authorities, they trust you better back, it seems.

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

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

Louise Erdrich
God's been going deaf.... Here God used to raineth bread from clouds, smite the Philippines, sling fire down on red-light districts where people got stabbed. He even appeared in person every once in a while. God used to pay attention, is what I'm saying.

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

Louise Erdrich
I want to lean into her the way wheat leans into wind.

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

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

Louise Erdrich
She... stares at me without blinking her cold yellow eyes. She has the look of a hawk, of a person who can see into the future but won't tell you about it.

Louise Erdrich
Her clothes were filled with safety pins and hidden tears.

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

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

Louise Erdrich
I was the sort of kid who spent a Sunday afternoon prying little trees out of the foundation of his parents' house. I should have given in to the inevitable truth that this was the sort of person I would become, in the end, but I kept fighting it.

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
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