Quotes from Louise Erdrich

in the despair of routine any aberration is a radiant signal.

It was ancient and had risen from the boiling earth. It had slept, falling dormant in the dust, rising in mist. Tuberculosis had flown in a dizzy rush to unite with warm life. It was in each new world, and every old world. First it loved animals, then it loved people too.

Barnes spent a lot of time driving the boys to matches with other towns—off-reservation towns where the crowds broke out fake war whoops and jeers when their hometown favorite lost.

He often devised sentences that began with his favorite capitals. Rs and Qs were his art.

Betty thought the latch had popped by itself until someone outside said, "Could I have a minute of your time to tell you about the Lord's plan for your soul?

Harry lived with an ordinary-looking smart brown dog, named Edith. As happens when one person lives with one dog, the dog became psychic.

The beauty of the sensation was so intense that fear dropped away. It felt like a kind of birth. She opened her eyes. Sunlight through a foggy window. A green plant on a shelf. The dim delicious fall air. She was a new baby—skin frail as paper, arms weak as milk, brain forming shapes into thought.

Why would she waste her time figuring out men when she was a person who had slept with a bear?

The snow had come down in the night, heavily, covering everything. Millie knew the moment she opened her eyes. The air inside was different, filled with a cold radiance. It was a struggle to leave her bed beside the radiator.

I imagined myself in some way defined by my relation to another creature.

In The Sentence, books are matters of life and death, and readers reach through unknowable realms to maintain some connection to the written word. So with the bookstore.

Millie was talking about the classes she would take next semester. Patrice was listening to the titles of the classes. "What do I have to do to become a lawyer?" asked Patrice. Millie told her.

So Patrice continued to ponder her feelings. She wasn't, as she'd heard in a movie, swept away. But she didn't want to live her life by movie examples.

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.

Temptation is a slower process and you'll feel it more in the morning just after waking and in the evening, when you are at loose ends, tired, and yet not ready to fall asleep.

Everyone seems to have within themselves a collection of poems.

The gun jammed on the last shot and the baby stood holding the crib rail, eyes wild, bawling.

the name by which she would—maybe embarrassing to say but she thought it anyway—the name by which she would rise in the world.

Eddy Mink: The services that the government provides to Indians might be likened to rent. The rent for use of the entire country of the United States.

The rain was that endless, gray, pounding kind of rain that makes your house feel cold and sad even if your mother's spirit isn't dying upstairs.

She slept hot just the way her words sometimes blew hot.

Now is it time to burn the house?

And so to be afraid of entering the cemetery by night was to fear not the loving ancestors who lay buried, but the gut kick of our history, which I was bracing to absorb. The old cemetery was filled with its complications.

She gave him a look that would have shaved his face if he'd had whiskers.