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Louise Erdrich
108 quotes
“Sorrow eats time. Be patient. Time eats sorrow.”
Louise Erdrich (born 1954) first seen 2016 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: LaRose (2016)
“Getting blown up happened in an instant; getting put together took the rest of your life.”
Louise Erdrich (born 1954) first seen 2016 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: LaRose (2016)
“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. (p381)”
Louise Erdrich (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We are never so poor that we cannot bless another human being, are we? So it is that every evil, whether moral or material, results in good. You'll see. (p384)”
Louise Erdrich (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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. (p400)”
Louise Erdrich (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Any judge knows there are many kinds of justice—for instance, ideal justice as opposed to the best-we-can-do justice, which is what we end up with in making so many of our decisions. (p463)”
Louise Erdrich (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When we're young, we think we are the only species worth knowing. But the more I come to know people, the better I like ravens. ("Revival Road")”
Louise Erdrich (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Earth and sky touch everywhere and nowhere, like sex between two strangers. There is no definition and no union for sure. ("The Antelope Wife")”
Louise Erdrich (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He also found that white people are good witnesses to have on your side since they have names, addresses, social security numbers, and work phones. But they are terrible witnesses to have against you, almost as bad as having Indians witness for you. ("Scales")”
Louise Erdrich (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There are ways of being abandoned even when your parents are right there. (p203)”
Louise Erdrich (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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. (p268)”
Louise Erdrich (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We never talked about the future anymore — she refused to, and I had to accept that. The present was enough, though my work in the cemetery told me every day what happens when you let an unsatisfactory present go on long enough: it becomes your entire history. (p282)”
Louise Erdrich (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When we’re young, we think we are the only species worth knowing. But the more I come to know people, the better I like ravens. (p15)”
Louise Erdrich (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The contents of a house can trigger all sorts of revisions to family history. (p29)”
Louise Erdrich (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is very little said about how repetitious grief is. (p64)”
Louise Erdrich (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“They are patient with the gravity of their intent. Of their means of survival they've made these elegant webs, their beauty a by-product of their purpose. 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? (p77)”
Louise Erdrich (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“That's what the drum is about - it gathers people in and holds them. It looks after them. But like a person, things can go wrong in spite of all the best care. And this drum had its own history and sorrow. (p180)”
Louise Erdrich (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that. And living alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on Earth. You have to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes too near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself that you tasted as many as you could. (p274)”
Louise Erdrich (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“And that was where the whiskey got hold of her. As it has with so many of us, even myself, the liquor sneaked up and grabbed her, got into her mind and talked to her, fooled her into thinking she was thinking for herself when really it was the whiskey thinking whiskey thoughts. (p75)”
Louise Erdrich (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“once a person drops the scales of prejudiced certainty and doubts appear, there is no telling how far a heart can open. (p98)”
Louise Erdrich (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A man finds happiness so fleetingly, like the petals melting off a prairie rose. Even as you touch that feeling it dries up, leaving only the dust of that emotion, a powder of hope. (chapter 9, p99)”
Louise Erdrich (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To love Nanapush, to love at all, is like trying to remember the tune and words to a song that the spirits have given you in your sleep. Some days, I knew exactly how the song went and some days I couldn’t even hum the first line. (p182)”
Louise Erdrich (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Spent, she thought that there was no place as unknown as grief. (p38)”
Louise Erdrich (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I have never seen the truth...without crossing my eyes. Life is crazy." (p135)”
Louise Erdrich (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It was this immense resignation to the shape of his life that opened him every day to the experience of joy. (p140)”
Louise Erdrich (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“...comfort is not security and money in the hand disappears. He could have told her that only the land matters and never to let go of the papers, the titles, the tracks of the words, all those things that his ancestors never understood how the vital relationship to the dirt and grass under their feet. (p171)”
Louise Erdrich (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Slowly and inevitably, she fell in love with each person in the family, only she didn’t know what to call it. She simply found herself related. (p184)”
Louise Erdrich (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For it was through books that she felt her life to be unjudged Look at all of the great mix-ups, messes, confinement, and double-dealings in Shakespeare, she thought. Identities disguised continually, in a combative dance of illusion and discovery. Hers was hardly the most sinful, tragic, or bizarre. (p199)”
Louise Erdrich (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Whenever he thought he knew the truth it merged into another truth. (p327)”
Louise Erdrich (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To love another human in all of her splendor and imperfect perfection, it is a magnificent task...tremendous and foolish and human." (p331)”
Louise Erdrich (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The only person left alive on the island was a baby girl. (first line)”
Louise Erdrich (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If there is no laughter, the soul dies. (p186)”
Louise Erdrich (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Although spring, with all the force of its poised new growth, called to her, although the tender new buds, opening magically, touched her heart, there would always be a shadow to her laughter, a corner of sadness in her smile. (p221)”
Louise Erdrich (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Effortless. Easy. The lack of trying is what makes them lovely. We all try too hard. Striving wears down our edges, dulls the best of us. (p23)”
Louise Erdrich (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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. (p28)”
Louise Erdrich (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All of our actions have in their doing the seed of their undoing. (p59)”
Louise Erdrich (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[He] was a slim and handsome boy when he left, but his look when he returned was reeling and deathly. His face was puffed up and his eyes, they were like pits in his face. He had a thousand-year-old stare. (p131)”
Louise Erdrich (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A woman's body is the gate to this life. A man's body is the gate to the next life. (p190)”
Louise Erdrich (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“...the world of grass was never meant to be shortened to a carpet so that the outdoors is like one big wall-to-wall room. (p225)”
Louise Erdrich (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The self will not be forced under, nor will the baby's needs gracefully retreat. The world tips away when we look into our children's faces. (p4)”
Louise Erdrich (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Organized Christian religion is more often about denying the body when what we profoundly need are rituals that regard the blood, the shock, the heat, the shit, the anguish, the glory, the earnestness of the female body. (p47)”
Louise Erdrich (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Life seems to flood by, taking our loves quickly in its flow. In the growth of children, in the aging of beloved parents, time's chart is magnified, shown in its particularity, focused, so that with each celebration of maturity there is also a pang of loss. This is our human problem, one common to parents, sons and daughters, too - how to let go while holding tight, how to simultaneously cherish the closeness and intricacy of the bond while at the same time letting out the raveling string, the red yarn that ties our hearts. (p69)”
Louise Erdrich (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Laughter is our consolation prize for consciousness. (p81)”
Louise Erdrich (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Women who are not mothering their own children have the clarity and focus to see deeply into the character of children webbed by family. A child is fortunate who feels witnessed as a person, outside relationships with parent, by another adult." (p162)”
Louise Erdrich (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What are dreams but an internal wilderness and what is desire but a wildness of the soul? (p182)”
Louise Erdrich (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When every inch of the world is known, sleep may be the only wilderness that we have left. (p190)”
Louise Erdrich (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Each life is one short word slowly uttered. (p191)”
Louise Erdrich (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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. (p6)”
Louise Erdrich (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You may be one kind of fool who never gets enough or another who gets too much. (p18)”
Louise Erdrich (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[She] was one of those who took on too much in order to remain perpetually dissatisfied with herself. It worked — a plume of spent fuel trailed her days, headlong in concentration, and her nights were black. (p25)”
Louise Erdrich (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source