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Louise Erdrich
108 quotes
“We'll get to the truth quicker if we don't worry about logic. (p111)”
Louise Erdrich (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Pain comes to us from deep back, from where it grew in the human body. Pain sucks more pain into it, we don't know why. It lives, and we harbor its weight. When the worst comes, we will not act the opposite. We will do what we were taught, we who learnt our lessons in the dead light. We pass them on. We hurt, and hurt others, in a circular motion. (p199)”
Louise Erdrich (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“So that's how I came to Argus. I was the girl in the stiff coat. (first line)”
Louise Erdrich (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But then as time passed, I learned the lesson that parents do early on. You fail sometimes. No matter how much you love your children, there are times you slip. There are moments you can't give, stutter, lose your temper, or simply lose face with the world, and you can't explain this to a child. (p236)”
Louise Erdrich (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All that held him together now was the crowd, and when the parade was finally over and they drew apart he would disperse, too, in so many pieces that not even the work of his own clever hands could shape him back the way he was. (p315)”
Louise Erdrich (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The length of sky is just about the size of my ignorance. Pure and wide. (p40)”
Louise Erdrich (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“...I let my thoughts run out like water from a dam. (p66)”
Louise Erdrich (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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. It was happening already. (p94)”
Louise Erdrich (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You know, some people fall right through the hole in their lives. It's invisible, but they come to it after time, never knowing where. (p190)”
Louise Erdrich (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I had gotten humble in the past week, not just losing the touch but getting jolted into the understanding that would prey on me from here on out. Your life feels different on you, once you greet death and understand your heart's position. You wear your life like a garment from the mission bundle sale ever after -- lightly because you realize you never paid nothing for it, cherishing because you know you won't ever come by such a bargain again. Also, you have the feeling someone wore it before you and someone will after. I can't explain that, not yet, but I'm putting my mind to it. (p213)”
Louise Erdrich (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“And so when they tell you that I was heartless, a shameless man-chaser, don't ever forget this: I loved what I saw. And yes, it is true that I've done all the things they say. That's not what gets them. What aggravates them is I've never shed one solitary tear. I'm not sorry. (p217)”
Louise Erdrich (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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. (p221)”
Louise Erdrich (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“...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." (p263)”
Louise Erdrich (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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. To be a son of a father was like that. 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 the stars. I felt them roosting on my shoulders with his hand. The moon came up red and warm. (p271)”
Louise Erdrich (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“(Did you feel you weren't finding yourself in the books you read?) LE: Perhaps that's why I was drawn to science fiction. If you don't see yourself reflected, you can travel to another world. I suppose that was probably what drew me to the captivity narrative. This idea that this was telling me something about my family.”
Louise Erdrich (born 1954) first seen 2020 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: in The writer's library: the authors you love on the books that changed their lives by Nancy Pearl and Jeff Schwager (2020)
“I started Future Home of the Living God sometime after the 2000 U.S. election. I was furious and worried. I saw the results of electing George W. Bush as a disaster for reproductive rights. Sure enough, he began by reinstating the global gag rule, which cuts international funding for contraceptives if abortion is mentioned. This, when we face overpopulation.”
Louise Erdrich (born 1954) first seen 2017 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On one of her inspirations for writing Future Home of the Living God in “Inside The Dystopian Visions Of Margaret Atwood And Louise Erdrich” in Elle Magazine (2017 Nov 14)
“(What moves you most in a work of literature?) Reading about an ordinary person who behaves with integrity in a terrifying situation. (2016)”
Louise Erdrich (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Nothing. I was a model child. It was the teacher’s mistake I am sure. The box was drawn on the blackboard and the names of misbehaving children were written in it. As I adored my teacher, Miss Smith, I was destroyed to see my name appear. This was just the first of the many humiliations of my youth that I’ve tried to revenge through my writing. I have never fully exorcised shames that struck me to the heart as a child except through written violence, shadowy caricature, and dark jokes.”
Louise Erdrich (born 1954) first seen 2010 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On how a childhood experience shaped her future writing in “Louise Erdrich, The Art of Fiction No. 208” in The Paris Review (Winter 2010)
“These treaties had been made since the beginning of our country on a nation-to-nation basis with every tribe. And they all contain these words, as long as the grass grows, as long as the rivers flow.”
Louise Erdrich (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I'm a very mixed person. And yet, being a citizen of a nation within our nation gives one a certain sense of - it changes your life. It means that I care deeply about my people, my mother's people.”
Louise Erdrich (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Now there is a lot more awareness about missing and murdered Indigenous women. And it hasn't - of course, it hasn't stopped. It's probably gotten worse.”
Louise Erdrich (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If you should ever doubt that a series of dry words in a government document can shatter spirits and demolish lives, let this book (The Night Watchman) erase that doubt. Conversely, if you should be of the conviction that we are powerless to change those dry words, let this book give you heart.”
Louise Erdrich (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I have never fully exorcised shames that struck me to the heart as a child except through written violence, shadowy caricature, and dark jokes.”
Louise Erdrich (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Ojibwe say that each word has a spirit.”
Louise Erdrich (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“English is a very powerful language, a colonizer’s language and a gift to a writer. English has destroyed and sucked up the languages of other cultures—its cruelty is its vitality.”
Louise Erdrich (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I’ve come to love the traditional Ojibwe ceremonies, and some rituals, but I hate religious rules. They are usually about controlling women. On Sundays when other people go to wood-and-stone churches, I like to take my daughters into the woods. Or at least work in the garden and be outside. Any god we have is out there. I’d hate to be certain that there was nothing. When it comes to God, I cherish doubt.”
Louise Erdrich (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“People assume there is just one sort of Native experience. No.”
Louise Erdrich (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
Louise Erdrich (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I suppose one develops a number of personas and hides them away, then they pop up during writing. The exertion of control comes later. I take great pleasure in writing when I get a real voice going and I’m able to follow the voice and the character. It’s like being in a trance state. Once that had happened a few times, I knew I needed to write for the rest of my life. I began to crave the trance state. I would be able to return to the story anytime, and it would play out in front of me, almost effortlessly.”
Louise Erdrich (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All of the books will be connected somehow—by history and blood and by something I have no control over, which is the writing itself. The writing is going to connect where it wants to, and I will have to try and follow along.”
Louise Erdrich (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Bits of narrative always cling to a title, like magnetism.”
Louise Erdrich (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I have always kept notebooks—I have an obsessive devotion to them—and I go back to them over and over. They are my compost pile of ideas.”
Louise Erdrich (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If I am writing a novel, it casts an aura around me and I get ideas for it, descriptions, words, phrases, at all times. I’m always jotting in notebooks I keep with me. That delight of immersion in a book is as good as a trance. For a while, the book is so powerful that I can follow the thread even through my chaotic daily existence, with children at all hours, school, dinner, long calls to my daughters, my ever-demanding house, barking dogs, and the bookstore.”
Louise Erdrich (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Any good business is about its people.”
Louise Erdrich (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“People need bookstores and need other readers. We need the intimate communication with others who love books. We don’t really think we do, because of the ease that the Internet has introduced, but we still need the physical world more than we know.”
Louise Erdrich (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“(Is writing a lonely life for you?) LE: Strangely, I think it is. I am surrounded by an abundance of family and friends, and yet I am alone with the writing. And that is perfect.”
Louise Erdrich (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“(BM: Your cultures, plural, keep competing within your imagination, don’t they?...Where do your ideas come from, if you have this constant interplay between these many cultures?) LE: You know, I live on the margin of just about everything. I’m a marginal person, and I think that is where I’ve become comfortable. I’m marginally there in my native life. I can do as much as I can, but I’m always German too, you know, and I’m always a mother. That’s my first identity, but I’m always a writer too. I have to write. I have to be an artist. You know, I have a very fractured inner life, I think.”
Louise Erdrich (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“(Wasn't it Pete Seeger who once said that any time you assemble a group of people, for whatever purpose, you have the body politic?) LE: That's what people on reservations say. You know, everything's political. Getting your teeth fixed is political. There's no way around it. I just don't want to become polemical. That's the big difference. (1991)”
Louise Erdrich (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“when you love someone you try to listen to them. Their voice then comes through. (1987)”
Louise Erdrich (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“there's such a sense of humor and irony in Native American life, in tribal life. I mean, that's one of the things that does not get portrayed often enough-that there's such an irony and humor. (1986)”
Louise Erdrich (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is difficult for a woman to admit that she gets along with her own mother — somehow it seems a form of betrayal, at least, it used to among other women in my generation. To join the company of women, to be adults, we go through a period of proudly boasting of having survived our own mother's indifference, anger, overpowering love, the burden of her pain, her tendency to drink or teetotal, her warmth or coldness, praise or criticism, sexual confusions or embarrassing clarity. It isn't enough that she sweat, labored, bore her daughters howling or under total anesthesia or both. No. She must be responsible for our psychic weaknesses the rest of her life. It is alright to feel kinship with your father, to forgive. We all know that. But your mother is held to a standard so exacting that it has no principles. She simply must be to blame. (p20)”
Louise Erdrich (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Time is the water in which we live, and we breathe it like fish. It’s hard to swim against the current. Onrushing, inevitable, carried like a leaf, Fleur fooled herself in thinking she could choose her direction. But time is an element no human has mastered, and Fleur was bound to go where she was sent. Maybe in those long nights as she watched the crack of light beneath the door, she had an inkling. She thought revenge was behind that door, and satisfaction. Maybe she began to realize that she was wrong. There was only time. For what is a man, what are we all, but bits of time caught for a moment in a tangle of blood, bones, skin, and brain? She was time. Mauser was time. I am a sorry bit of time myself. We are time’s containers. Time pours into us and then pours out again. In between the two pourings we live our destiny. (p28)”
Louise Erdrich (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What is the question we spend our entire lives asking? Our question is this: Are we loved? I don’t mean by one another. Are we loved by the one who made us? Constantly, we look for evidence. In the gifts we are given—children, good weather, money, a happy marriage perhaps—we find assurance. In contrast, our pains, illnesses, the deaths of those we love, our poverty, our innocent misfortunes—those we take as signs that God has somehow turned away. But, my friends, what exactly is love here? How to define it? Does God’s love have anything at all to do with the lack or plethora of good fortune at work in our lives? Or is God’s love, perhaps, something very different from what we think we know?...If I am loved, it is a merciless and exacting love against which I have no defense. If I am not loved, then I am being pitilessly manipulated by a force I cannot withstand, either, and so it is all the same. I must do what I must do. Go in peace." (p227)”
Louise Erdrich (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We live and work with a divided consciousness. It is a beautiful enough shock to fall in love with another adult, to feel the possibility of unbearable sorrow at the loss of that other, essential, personality, expressed just so, that particular touch. But love of an infant is of a different order. It is twinned love, all absorbing, a blur of boundaries and messages. It is uncomfortably close to self-erasure, and in the face of it one's fat ambitions, desperations, private icons, and urges fall away into a dreamlike before that haunts and forces itself into the present with tough persistence. (p4)”
Louise Erdrich (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Everything that ever happened to him in his life," she said, "all the things we said and did. Where did it go?" I didn't have an answer, so I just drove. Once I had caused a miracle by smashing my face on ice, but now I was an ordinary person. In the few miles we had left I could not help drawing out [her] strange idea in my mind. In my line of work I've seen thousands of brains that belonged to sheep, pork, steers. They were all gray lumps like ours. Where did everything go? What was really inside? The flat fields unfolded, the shallow ditches ran beside the road. I felt the live thoughts hum inside of me, and I pictured tiny bees, insects made of blue electricity, in a colony so fragile that it would scatter at the slightest touch. I imagined a blow, like a mallet to the sheep, or a stroke, and I saw the whole swarm vibrating out. Who could stop them? Who could catch them in their hands? (p203-4)”
Louise Erdrich (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The reasoning behind the best schools being far away was to assimilate native children, to train them to live in a culture that was very different from their parents. So that when they came home, often children couldn't speak the language that their parents were speaking. I have to say right here that boarding schools are often characterized in sort of a lump definition, but they were all very different. And the government had secular boarding schools which underwent a real sea change in the 1930s and became much more supportive of native culture, while many of the boarding schools which were run by religious groups did not and remained hostile to native religion and native culture.”
Louise Erdrich (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I've been asked by people, well, why wasn't that great? Why didn't people just want to move away from their reservation and become like everybody else? You know, I've been asked that question. It's a fair question. And the answer is because native people aren't like everybody else, and native people want to stay who we are, right? And that's because the government made a very firm decision not to put money into the infrastructure on reservations, not to keep the treaties. The treaties stated that they would provide for health, education and the general welfare of native people as they struggled into this new form of existence. And that was basically rent for all that the rest of the country enjoys; all of the lands, all of the rivers, all of the places that no longer belonged to Native Americans.”
Louise Erdrich (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“By having children, I’ve both sabotaged and saved myself as a writer. I hate to pigeonhole myself as a writer, but being a female and a mother and a Native American are important aspects of my work, and even more than being mixed blood or Native, it’s difficult to be a mother and a writer...It’s because you’re always fighting sentiment. You’re fighting sentimentality all of the time because being a mother alerts you in such a primal way. You are alerted to any danger to your child, and by extension you become afraid of anybody getting hurt. This becomes the most powerful thing to you; it’s instinctual. Either you end up writing about terrible things happening to children—as if you could ward them off simply by writing about them—or you tie things up in easily opened packages, or you pull your punches as a writer. All deadfalls to watch for...having children has also made me this particular writer. Without my children, I’d have written with less fervor; I wouldn’t understand life in the same way. I’d write fewer comic scenes, which are the most challenging. I’d probably have become obsessively self-absorbed, or slacked off. Maybe I’d have become an alcoholic. Many of the writers I love most were alcoholics. I’ve made my choice, I sometimes think: Wonderful children instead of hard liquor.”
Louise Erdrich (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“(A journalist once asked you what advice you would give someone trying to write a novel. You said, “Don’t take the project too seriously.” Is that what you would say today?) LE: I think I meant that grand ideas kill first efforts. Begin with something in your range. Then write it as a secret. I’d be paralyzed if I thought I had to write a great novel, and no matter how good I think a book is on one day, I know now that a time will come when I will look upon it as a failure. The gratification has to come from the effort itself. I try not to look back. I approach the work as though, in truth, I’m nothing and the words are everything. Then I write to save my life. If you are a writer, that will be true. Writing has saved my life...I needed a way to go at life. I needed meaning. I might have chosen something more self-destructive had I not found writing.”
Louise Erdrich (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There’s something very wrong in our country—and not just in the book business. We now see what barely fettered capitalism looks like. We are killing the small and the intimate. We all feel it and we don’t know quite why everything is beginning to look the same. The central cores of large cities can still sustain interesting places. But all across our country we are intent on developing chain after chain with no character and employees who work for barely livable wages. We are losing our individuality. Killing the soul of our landscape. Yet we’re supposed to be the most individualistic of countries. I feel the sadness of it every time I go through cities like Fargo and Minneapolis and walk the wonderful old Main Streets and then go out to the edges and wander through acres of concrete boxes. Our country is starting to look like Legoland.”
Louise Erdrich (born 1954) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source