Louise Erdrich Quotes - Page 3

The universe is transformation.

You see I thought love got easier over the years so it didn't hurt so bad when it hurt, or feel so good when it felt good. I thought it smoothed out and old people hardly noticed it. I thought it curled up and died, I guess. Now I saw it rear up like a whip and lash.

When every inch of the world is known, sleep may be the only wilderness that we have left.

Love. The black hook. The spear singing through the mind.

Here I am, where I ought to be. A writer must have a place where he or she feels this, the place to love and be irritated with.

...Grandpa's mind had left us, gone wild and wary. When I walked with him I could feel how strange it was. His thoughts swam between us, hidden under rocks, disappearing in weeds, and I was fishing for them, dangling my own words like baits and lures.

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

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

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

Her mind was present because she was always gone. Her hands were filled because they grasped the meaning of empty. Life was simple. Her husband returned and she served him with indifferent patience this time. When he asked what had happened to her heat for him, she gestured to the west. The sun was setting. The sky was a body of fire.

There are ways of being abandoned even when your parents are right there.

There is no such thing as a complete lack of order, only a design so vast it appears unrepetitive up close.

If life's a joke, then suicide's a bad punch line.

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.

History works itself out in the living.

Sometimes a person's monstrosity seems superhuman.

He despised his body for its boring hungers, reflex anger; its petty, obliterating rage. But now he'd become detached. He regarded his body with a tender regret. It was the thing his spirit had to haul.

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.

What is this life but the sound of an appalling love.

I was in love with the whole world and all that lived in its rainy arms.

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.

All of our actions have in their doing the seed of their undoing.

Here is the most telling fact: you wish to possess me.
 Here is another fact: I loved you and let you think you could.

It kills your writing if you try to manipulate it with crude politics.

Don't read anything except what destroys the insulation between yourself and your experience.