Louise Erdrich Quotes

The universe is transformation.

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

But if there was embellishment, it only had to do with the facts.

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

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.

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

Each life is one short word slowly uttered.

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.

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

I work really out of mythology, so often I work out of a story that has remained lodged inside somehow, or I work out of history, you know, out of a sense of historical inevitability with characters.

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

Death is the least civilized rite of passage.

There are people who are always, I think, going to remain people of the book, to use another author's title, but people of the book, who really must be around.

I prefer to have some beliefs that don't make logical sense.

Numbers, time, inches, feet. All are just ploys for cutting nature down to size.

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

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

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.

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

I am part of what she thinks is her illness, a symptom of which she thinks she has been cured. She, on the other hand, is what I was looking for.

He had a thousand-year-old stare.

A woman's body is the gate to this life. A man's body is the gate to the next life.

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.

Old love, middle love, the kind of love that knows itself and knows that nothing lasts, is a desperate shared wildness.

When small towns find they cannot harm the strangest of their members, when eccentrics show resilience, they are eventually embraced and even cherished.

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

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

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.

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

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 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.

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

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

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.

Hunger steals the memory

Sometimes a person's monstrosity seems superhuman.

I am at the bookstore a lot, but let my friends, the professional Birchbark Books staff, handle the day in and day out.

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.

Veils of love which was only hate petrified by longing--that was me.

I knew each person's delusion, the places their records had scratched, where the sounds repeated.

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.

Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that.

The world tips away when we look into our children's faces.

I thought how we might have to yell to be heard by Higher Power, but that's not saying it's not there. And that is faith for you. It's belief even when the gods don't deliver.

If only I had discipline, but alas, it is only an obsessive-compulsive trait and the beauty of habit that causes me to return again and again to my work.

I had a very free childhood and ranged around on my bicycle the way boys do. I had few restrictions.

I spend most of my time writing.

Her clothes were filled with safety pins and hidden tears.