Quotes from Louise Erdrich

I'd love to meet my ancestors. I'd love to be able to speak to them.

Talking about how I might write the next book is like talking about whether or not to have sex. Any dithering ruins it.

Nothing I force myself to write about ever turns out well, and so I've learned to wait for the voice, the incident, the image that reverberates.

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

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

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.

my mind ran over scenes of Shesheeb seducing Margaret until I was a wagon dragged by the runaway horses of my jealousy.

I rarely step on sidewalk cracks. I don't wear a watch. I touch my favorite tree before going on long trips.

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.

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

I think one of the most fertile, unexplored areas for poets and fiction writers is the world of science. I become overwhelmed by the science world.

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.

It's impossible to write about Native life without humor-that's how people maintain sanity.

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.

Your life feels different on you, once you greet death and understand your heart's position.

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

We are never so poor that we cannot bless another human being, are we? So it is that every evil, whether moral or material, results in good. You'll see.

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

How come we've got these bodies? They are frail supports for what we feel. There are times I get so hemmed in by my arms and legs I look forward to getting past them. As though death will set me free like a traveling cloud... I'll be out there as a piece of the endless body of the world feeling pleasures so much larger than skin and bones and blood.

When we're young, we think we are the only species worth knowing. But the more I come to know people, the better I like ravens.

Women don't realize how much store men set on the regularity of their habits. We absorb their comings and goings into our bodies, their rhythms into our bones.

Right and wrong were shades of meaning, not sides of a coin.

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.

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