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Louise Erdrich Quotes | Quotes said by Louise Erdrich

  • Louise Erdrich Quote #1

    A woman's body is the gate to this life. A man's body is the gate to the next life.


  • Louise Erdrich Quote #2

    And how funny, strange, that a thing can grow so powerful even when planted in the wrong place. Ideas too, I muttered. Ideas.

  • Louise Erdrich Quote #3

    And it occurred to me how even pulling trees that day, just months ago, I was in heaven. Unaware. I had known nothing even as the evil was occurring, I hadn't been touched yet.

  • Louise Erdrich Quote #4

    As Delphine watched, into her head there popped a strange notion: the idea that perhaps strongly experienced moments, as when Eva turned and the sun met her hair and for that one instant the symbol blazed out, those particular moments were eternal. Those moments actually went somewhere. Into a file of moments that existed out of time's range and could not be pilfered by God.

  • Louise Erdrich Quote #5

    As I feel into a darker sleep, I understood that I had learned something. Now that I knew fear, I also knew that it was not permanent. As powerful as it was, its grip on me would loosen. It would pass.

  • Louise Erdrich Quote #6

    Delphine began to read with a mad attention when she wanted to talk to Clarisse. She saw that in her life there was a woman-shaped hole, a cutout that led to a mysterious place. Through it, her mother, then Eva, and now Clarisse had walked. If only she could plunge her arms through and drag them back.

  • Louise Erdrich Quote #7

    Delphine witnessed awful things occurring to other humans. Worse than that, she was powerless to alter their fate. It would be that way all her life--disasters, falling like chairs all around her, falling so close they disarranged her hair, but not touching her.

  • Louise Erdrich Quote #8

    Emotions unreel in her like spools of cotton.

  • Louise Erdrich Quote #9

    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.

  • Louise Erdrich Quote #10

    Freedom, I found is not only in the running but in the heart, the mind, the hands.

  • Louise Erdrich Quote #11

    He had a thousand-year-old stare.

  • Louise Erdrich Quote #12

    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.

  • Louise Erdrich Quote #13

    I am part of what she thinks is her illness, a symptom of which she thinks she has been cured. She, on the other hand, is what I was looking for.

  • Louise Erdrich Quote #14

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

  • Louise Erdrich Quote #15

    I hold his name close as my own blood and I will never let it out. I only spoke it that once so he would know he was alive.

  • Louise Erdrich Quote #16

    I look down at my black Diablo, head on his paws. He is at my feet. He knows that he must trust to my forgiveness for his daily meat. So he wags his plumed tail and noses at my foot and I pat him gently. Affection, I tell him, is how a dog survives. Knowing how to exist without it is how a woman wrests her life into her own hands. But then it comes, it takes one by surprise. Affection and freedom and the will to risk. Everything that happened since I answered the door to Fleur was leading up to this.

  • Louise Erdrich Quote #17

    I stood there in the shadowed doorway thinking with my tears. Yes, tears can be thoughts, why not?

  • Louise Erdrich Quote #18

    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.

  • Louise Erdrich Quote #19

    I tried to get away from him, to get to that door, but instead I backed up against the wall and was stuck there in that white, white room.

  • Louise Erdrich Quote #20

    If, as I suspect, my body survives by uttering itself over and over again, then I have some questions. If [I] am one word, so are my daughters, so are all of us in strings and loops. Each life is one short word slowly uttered.

  • Louise Erdrich Quote #21

    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.

  • Louise Erdrich Quote #22

    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. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.

  • Louise Erdrich Quote #23

    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. You are here to be swallowed up.

  • Louise Erdrich Quote #24

    Now that she was conscious there was no end to her questions and exclamations, for Dot was a born traveler, meant to go places, unlike us.

  • Louise Erdrich Quote #25

    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.

  • Louise Erdrich Quote #26

    Old love, middle love, the kind of love that knows itself and knows that nothing lasts, is a desperate shared wildness.

  • Louise Erdrich Quote #27

    Our baby gives herself to me completely. There is no hesitation, no reservation, no holding back, no coldness, no craft, no tremor or fear in her love. Although our relationship may encompass tears, frustration, even fury, it is an utterly reliable bond. As it grows, her love is literally unadulterated. Her love is wholly of the child, pure in its essence as children are in their direct passions. Children do not love wisely, but perhaps they love the best of all.

  • Louise Erdrich Quote #28

    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.

  • Louise Erdrich Quote #29

    Ravens are the birds I'll miss most when I die. If only the darkness into which we must look were composed of the black light of their limber intelligence. If only we did not have to die at all. Instead, become ravens.

  • Louise Erdrich Quote #30

    She compares the deepest wells of depression to gestation, to a time enclosed, a secluded lightlessness in which, unknown and unforced, we grow.

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