Louise Erdrich Quotes
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This so gnawed at him on some nights that he lay awake wondering just how many unknown and similarly inconsequential accidents and bits of happenstance were at this moment occurring or failing to occur in order to ensure he took his next breath, and the next.
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We started dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall.
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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.
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Be lovely and do no harm.
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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.
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Love won't be tampered with, love won't go away. Push it to one side and it creeps to the other.
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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.
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I have brothers and was a tomboy, if that's still a designation. It wasn't a stretch for me to think and write as a 13-year-old boy - it is freeing.
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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... 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 stars.
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By writing I can live in ways that I could not survive.
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We all got holes in our lives. Nobody dies in a perfect garment.
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I feel myself becoming less a person than a place, inhabited, a foreign land.
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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.
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I got well by talking. Death could not get a word in edgewise, grew discouraged, and traveled on.
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I prefer to have some beliefs that don't make logical sense.
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She had always been a reader… but now she was obsessed. Since her discovery of the book hoard downstairs from her job, she’d been caught up in one such collection of people and their doings after the next…The pleasure of this sort of life – bookish, she supposed it might be called, a reading life – had made her isolation into a rich and even subversive thing. She inhabited one consoling or horrifying persona after another…That she was childless and husbandless and poor meant less once she picked up a book. Her mistakes disappeared into it. She lived with an invented force.
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We are conjured voiceless out of nothing and must return to an unknowing state. What happens in between is an uncontrolled dance, and what we ask for in love is no more than a momentary chance to get the steps right, to move in harmony until the music stops.
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I might not be able to use the word "hope," but I could certainly use the word "optimism." I'm very optimistic. I don't feel that it helps to be pessimistic. At some point in my life I made a conscious decision that I would try to be optimistic - not blind to anything at all - but to always hear the way that had the best chance for happiness.
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Right and wrong were shades of meaning, not sides of a coin.
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What is this life but the sound of an appalling love.
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There are ways of being abandoned even when your parents are right there.
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If life's a joke, then suicide's a bad punch line.
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You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart.
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I knew each person's delusion, the places their records had scratched, where the sounds repeated.
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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.
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I thought how we might have to yell to be heard by Higher Power, but that's not saying it's not there. And that is faith for you. It's belief even when the gods don't deliver.
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The world tips away when we look into our children's faces.
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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.
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Can you stop your mother from singing to you? Who would do such a thing?
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Things which do not grow and change are dead things.
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