Louise Erdrich Quotes

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 are here to risk your heart.

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.

What happens when you let an unsatisfactory present go on long enough? It becomes your entire history.

When women age into their power, no wind can upset them, no hand turn aside their knowledge, no fact can deflect their point of view.

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. We mend. We women turn things inside out and set things right. We salvage what we can of human garments and piece the rest into blankets. Sometimes our stitches stutter and slow. Only a woman's eyes can tell. Other times, the tension in the stitches might be too tight because of tears, but only we know what emotion went into the making. Only women can hear the prayer.

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.

Our songs travel the earth. We sing to one another. Not a single note is ever lost and no song is original. They all come from the same place and go back to a time when only the stones howled.

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 love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart.

Things which do not grow and change are dead things.

People forget the good, because the bad has more punch.

In our own beginnings, we are formed out of the body's interior landscape. For a short while, our mothers' bodies are the boundaries and personal geography which are all that we know of the world...Once we no longer live beneath our mother's heart, it is the earth with which we form the same dependent relationship, relying...on its cycles and elements, helpless without its protective embrace.

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

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

some people meet the way the sky meets the earth, inevitably, and there is no stopping or holding back their love. It exists in a finished world, beyond the reach of common sense.

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

Of course, 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.

Be lovely and do no harm.

The greatest wisdom doesn't know itself. The richest plan is not to have one.

Each life is one short word slowly uttered.

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

By writing I can live in ways that I could not survive.

Love won't be tampered with, love won't go away. Push it to one side and it creeps to the other. Throw it in the garbage and it springs up clean. Try to root it out and it only flourishes. Love is a weed, a dandelion that you poison from your heart. The taproots wait. The seeds blow off, ticklish, into a part of the yard you didn't spray. And one day, though you worked, though you prodded out each spiky leaf, you lift your eyes and dozens of fat golden faces bob in the grass.

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.

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