Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

Nothing I force myself to write about ever turns out well, and so I've learned to wait for the voice, the incident,…

— Louise Erdrich

I have brothers and was a tomboy, if that's still a designation. It wasn't a stretch for me to think and write…

— Louise Erdrich

Talking about how I might write the next book is like talking about whether or not to have sex. Any dithering ruins…

— Louise Erdrich

Time was rushing around me like water around a big wet rock. The only difference is, I was not so durable as…

— Louise Erdrich

“Why now that he's sober and thoughtful, and living as a good man, does he get in the worst trouble of his…

— Louise Erdrich

On any state elections map, the reservations are blue places. Native people are most often progressives, Democrats, and by no means gun-toting…

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

I work really out of mythology, so often I work out of a story that has remained lodged inside somehow, or I…

— Louise Erdrich

When I moved to Minnesota, I found there was a thriving and determined movement, a grassroots movement, to revitalize the Ojibwe language.…

— Louise Erdrich

At times the whole sky was ringed in shooting points and puckers of light gathering and falling, pulsing, fading, rhythmical as breathing.…

— Louise Erdrich

I was the sort of kid who spent a Sunday afternoon prying little trees out of the foundation of his parents' house.…

— Louise Erdrich

“What are you?' he [Nanapush] said to Damien, who was deep in a meditation over his [chess] bishop's trajectory. 'A priest' said…

— Louise Erdrich

Being a girl didn't really affect me until I entered junior high and had to wear skirts, curl my hair, and even…

— Louise Erdrich

We are conjured voiceless out of nothing and must return to an unknowing state. What happens in between is an uncontrolled dance,…

— 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.…

— Louise Erdrich

“Exactly right—folded quietly and knitted in right along with the working DNA there is a shadow self. This won’t surprise poets. We…

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

The music was more than music - at least what we are used to hearing. The music was feeling itself. The sound…

— Louise Erdrich

“from Mooshum to Sonja, back and forth. They wouldn’t look at each other. I’m gonna ask you to leave in a nice…

— Louise Erdrich

I am part of what she thinks is her illness, a symptom of which she thinks she has been cured. She, on…

— Louise Erdrich

They were so strong in their beliefs that there came a time when it hardly mattered what exactly those beliefs were; they…

— Louise Erdrich

“To fly from one tree to another, the raven hangs itself, hawklike, on the air. I hang myself that same way in…

— Louise Erdrich

“I hold his name close as my own blood and I will never let it out. I only spoke it that once…

— Louise Erdrich

“You undergo your own incarceration. You may witness your demise piece by piece. You may be one kind of fool who never…

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

“When we are young, the words are scattered all around us. As they are assembled by experience, so are we, sentence by…

— Louise Erdrich

Now that I knew fear, I also knew it was not permanent. As powerful as it was, its grip on me would…

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

“Albertine was one of those who took on too much in order to remain perpetually dissatisfied with herself.”

— Louise Erdrich

Here I am, where I ought to be. A writer must have a place where he or she feels this, a place…

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

“Our individual consciousnesses were sieves of the divine. We could only know what our minds could encompass safely.”

— 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…

— Louise Erdrich

We do know that no one gets wise enough to really understand the heart of another, though it is the task of…

— Louise Erdrich

“The pleasure of this sort of life-bookish, she supposed it might be called, a reading life- had made her isolation into a…

— Louise Erdrich

“The present was enough, though my work in the cemetery told me every day what happens when you let an unsatisfactory present…

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich