Louise Erdrich

I spend most of my time writing.

— Louise Erdrich

“...which causes me to wonder, my own purpose on so many days as h umbel as the spider's, what is beautiful that…

— 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

I grew up in Wahpeton, N.D., and I didn't leave until I was 18, and I've kept going back.

— Louise Erdrich

But then as time passed, I learned the lesson that parents do early on. You fail sometimes. No matter how much you…

— Louise Erdrich

Power travels in the bloodlines, handed out before birth.

— Louise Erdrich

“He was not all good, would never be; yet there were slender threads of okay.”

— Louise Erdrich

“While their moral standards for the rest of the world were rigid, they were always able to find excuses for their own…

— Louise Erdrich

He had a thousand-year-old stare.

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

We are never so poor that we cannot bless another human being, are we? So it is that every evil, whether moral…

— Louise Erdrich

I think one of the reasons to be here on earth is to finally be who we are, at all times -…

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

“It seemed to her that almost any pain was sympathetic to her loss and she inserted herself immediately into the concept of…

— Louise Erdrich

“He always had trouble opening his heart. Tonight it was stuck again. It was a wooden chest secured by locked iron bands.…

— Louise Erdrich

You never know where you're going to find the same thoughts in another brain, but when it happens you know it right…

— Louise Erdrich

“Father Travis leaned back. I glanced up at him. He was watching us from under his brow, his hands folded in his…

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

In order to purify yourself, you have to understand yourself, Father Trais went on. Everything out in the world is also in…

— Louise Erdrich

Nothing I write ever has a moral. If it seems to a reader that there is one, that is unintentional.

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

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

— 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

“One of Tobasonakwut's favorite phrases is andopawatchigan , which means "seek your dream," but is lots more complicated. It means that first…

— Louise Erdrich

I live on the margin of just about everything. I'm a marginal person, and I think that is where I've become comfortable.…

— Louise Erdrich