Louise Erdrich Quotes

56 Sourced Quotes

My mind ran over scenes of Shesheeb seducing Margaret until I was a wagon dragged by the runaway horses of my jealousy.

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
She was the crow of the reservation, she lived off our scraps, and she knew us best because the scraps told our story.

Louise Erdrich
When we are young, the words are scattered all around us. As they are assembled by experience, so also are we, sentence by sentence, until the story takes shape.

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

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
So many things in the world have happened before. But it's like they never did. Every new thing that happens to a person, it's a first... In that night I felt expansion, as if the world was branching out in shoots and growing faster than the eye could see. I felt smallness, how the earth divided into bits and kept dividing. I felt stars.

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

Louise Erdrich
This so gnawed at him on some nights that he lay awake wondering just how many unknown and similarly inconsequential accidents and bits of happenstance were at this moment occurring or failing to occur in order to ensure he took his next breath, and the next.

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
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
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
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
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
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
I was sitting before my third or fourth Jellybean—which is anisette, grain alcohol, a lit match, and a small, wet explosion in the brain.

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

Louise Erdrich
Money helps, though not so much as you think when you don't have it.

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
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
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
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
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
Power travels in the bloodlines, handed out before birth.

Louise Erdrich