Louise Erdrich Quotes

56 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

Louise Erdrich
When they were wild
When they were not yet human
When they could have been anything,
I was on the other side ready with milk to lure them,
And their father, too, each name a net in his hands.

Louise Erdrich
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.

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
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.

Louise Erdrich
When every inch of the world is known, sleep may be the only wilderness that we have left. In sleep's preserve, the body repairs itself, talks to itself, leads a separate life we cannot know.

Louise Erdrich
The liquor sneaked up and grabbed her, got into her mind and talked to her, fooled her into thinking she was thinking for herself when really it was the whiskey thinking whiskey thoughts.

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
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
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
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.

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

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
Her clothes were filled with safety pins and hidden tears.

Louise Erdrich