Louise Erdrich Quotes

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

Things which do not grow and change are dead things.

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.

When women age into their power, no wind can upset them, no hand turn aside their knowledge, no fact can deflect their point of view.

Our songs travel the earth. We sing to one another. Not a single note is ever lost and no song is original. They all come from the same place and go back to a time when only the stones howled.

You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart.

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.

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.

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.

Love won't be tampered with, love won't go away. Push it to one side and it creeps to the other.

So what is wild? What is wilderness? What are dreams but an internal wilderness and what is desire but a wildness of the soul?

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

Power travels in the bloodlines, handed out before birth.

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

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

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

Can you stop your mother from singing to you? Who would do such a thing?

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.

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.

By writing I can live in ways that I could not survive.

Your life feels different on you, once you greet death and understand your heart's position.

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

When every inch of the world is known, sleep may be the only wilderness that we have left.

Don't read anything except what destroys the insulation between yourself and your experience.

Women are strong, strong, terribly strong. We don't know how strong until we're pushing out our babies.

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

If life's a joke, then suicide's a bad punch line.

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

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

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

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

What is this life but the sound of an appalling love.

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

...which causes me to wonder, my own purpose on so many days as humble as the spider's, what is beautiful that I make? What is elegant? What feeds the world?

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

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.

History works itself out in the living.

Here I am, where I ought to be. A writer must have a place where he or she feels this, the place to love and be irritated with.

Love. The black hook. The spear singing through the mind.

It was just enough to sit there without words.

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

To be of mixed blood is a great gift for a writer. I have one foot on tribal lands and one foot in middle-class life.

We passed over in a sweep of sorrow that would persist into our small forever. We just keep going.

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

Be lovely and do no harm.

To think about love and passion and political correctness all together, it doesn't work. Art has to go way past the political to be effective.

I think one of the most fertile, unexplored areas for poets and fiction writers is the world of science. I become overwhelmed by the science world.

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.

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

You know, some people fall right through the hole in their lives. Its invisible, but they come to it after time, never knowing where.