Top 179 Quotes & Sayings by Louise Erdrich - Page 2

...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?

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.

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.

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

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

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.

The only time I see the truth is when I cross my eyes.

There is no such thing as a complete lack of order, only a design so vast it appears unrepetitive up close.

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

Here is the most telling fact: you wish to possess me.? Here is another fact: I loved you and let you think you could.

I stood there in the shadowed doorway thinking with my tears. Yes, tears can be thoughts, why not?

I think one of the reasons to be here on earth is to finally be who we are, at all times - to know and be predictable to ourselves.

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.

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.

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

Power travels in the bloodlines, handed out before birth.

We have a huge struggle for our sense of what a democracy is. We're not living in reality when we think we have some sort of democracy. We're really on the edge. We have two presidents who lost the popular vote but won the election. This is not working.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

The universe is transformation.

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.

Now I'm sixty-one... sixty-two, pretty soon. It's a really interesting age. Now we have women of your age, and coming up, and all these fantastic writers, who have managed to have their children but continue with their art, their work. I think women are doing the most interesting writing right now, the most interesting art. I see everything through this lens, of women finally taking their place in the world. Their true place. And it's very, very exciting to me.

I might not be able to use the word "hope," but I could certainly use the word "optimism." I'm very optimistic. I don't feel that it helps to be pessimistic. At some point in my life I made a conscious decision that I would try to be optimistic - not blind to anything at all - but to always hear the way that had the best chance for happiness.

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.

She had always been a reader… but now she was obsessed. Since her discovery of the book hoard downstairs from her job, she’d been caught up in one such collection of people and their doings after the next…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. She inhabited one consoling or horrifying persona after another…That she was childless and husbandless and poor meant less once she picked up a book. Her mistakes disappeared into it. She lived with an invented force.

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

I want to remember what bullshit looks like when weapons of mass destruction are diagrammed out and whacko "intelligence" is delivered in an ominous way to strike fear into people and especially to pull on the idealism and zeal of the young.

...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.

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 want to hear what's happened to you," she said evenly after a while. she gestured in the direction, down river, of the butcher shop. "it's just that there is nowhere else to start," she said gently. "niether of us is the same. but i'm different because of small, good, manageable things. you're different because ... things i don't know.

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.

We have these earthly bodies. We don't know what they want. Half the time, we pretend they are under our mental thumb, but that is the illusion of the healthy and the protected. Of sedate lovers. For the body has emotions it conceives and carries through without concern for anyone or anything else. Love is one of those, I guess. Going back to something very old knit into the brain as we were growing. Hopeless. Scorching. Ordinary.

I have always kept notebooks and I go back to them over and over. They are my compost pile of ideas.

It was just enough to sit there without words.

You really need to approach each book as if you have been a failure. . . . If you start to believe your flap-copy, you're finished as a writer.

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.

To sew is to pray. Men don't understand this. They see the whole but they don't see the stitches. They don't see the speech of the creator in the work of the needle.

I think she is confused by the way I want her, which is like nobody else. I know this deep down. I want her in a new way, a way she's never been told about.

It's very hard to track down what's real and what's not real. We haven't absorbed what climate change is doing. Because whether people associate it or not, fear of immigration is completely related to climate change, because the mass migrations that are happening, the war in Syria, all of these structural human migrations are related to climate change.

Hunger steals the memory

As soon as there's a crisis, there are people who take charge and want to control others. Climate-change catastrophe and human migration and immigration are great for corporate and governmental control over people, and we have to contend with that. I should say, I see corporate control behind everything that the government is working on right now.

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

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

Right and wrong were shades of meaning, not sides of a coin.

Sometimes a person's monstrosity seems superhuman.

We started dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall.

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.

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.

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

Life is made up of three kinds of people -- those who live it, those afraid to, those in between.

All of our actions have in their doing the seed of their undoing.