Quotes from Louise Erdrich

Eddy tells me his book is basically an argument against suicide. Every page contains a reason not to kill yourself.

She turned to the window although it was dark now and the glass held only a tired ghost.

Ada Deer's recent memoir, Making a Difference: My Fight for Native Rights and Social Justice

Where will you be my darling, the last time it snows on earth?

Sometimes energy of this nature, chaos, ill luck, goes out in the world and begets and begets. Bad luck rarely stops with one occurrence. All Indians know that. To stop it quickly takes great effort

What we're living through is either unreal or too real.

While their moral standards for the rest of the world were rigid, they were always able to find excuses for their own shortcomings. It is these people really, said my father, small-time hypocrites, who may in special cases be capable of monstrous acts if given the chance. The Larks, in fact, were shrill opponents of abortion. Yet at the

The cold sap was a spring tonic. When you drank it, you shared the genius of the woods.

Missing only the prefix. The ex.

Patrice leaned to one side and put her ear to the trunk of a birch tree. She could hear the humming rush of the tree drinking from the earth. She closed her eyes, went through the bark like water, and was sucked up off the bud tips into a cloud.

In the newspapers, the author of the proposal had constructed a cloud of lofty words around this bill—emancipation, freedom, equality, success—that disguised its truth: termination. Termination. Missing only the prefix. The ex.

It was the kind of moment, I see now, that could have gone several ways. She could have laughed, she could have cried, she could have reached for him. Or he could have got down on his knees and pretended to have the heart attack that later killed him. She would have been jolted from her shock. Helped him. We would have cleared up the mess, made sandwiches for ourselves, and things would have gone on. If we'd sat down together that night, I do believe things would have gone on.

The jittery focus, the devastated shelves, a couple of fights breaking out over paper towels, a swarm descending on an employee trying to restock toilet paper, madness in people's eyes—it was like the beginning of every show where the streets empty and some grotesque majestic entity emerges from mist or fire.

The warm metal, the gentle ridges, the rounded feminine base of the cap, were pleasant to hold.

There are Indian grandmas who get too much church and Indian grandmas where the church doesn't take, and who are let loose in their old age to shock the young. Zack had one of those last sort.

She was just glad he hadn't come back to life, which did make her sad. How sad it was not to be sad.

she realized that here in Washington she'd seen people shot, a thing she'd never seen before, even on the reservation, a place considered savage by the rest of the country.

So along with the whiskey and perfume and smoke, she often exuded faint undertones of hay, dust, and the fragrance of horse, which once you smell it you always miss it. Humans were meant to live with the horse.

I suppose you could say this delights us although 'delight' is a word I rarely use. Delight seems insubstantial; happiness feels more grounded; ecstasy is what I shoot for; satisfaction is hardest to attain.

But also, he resisted the idea that his endless work, the warmth of his family, and this identity that got him followed in stores and ejected from restaurants and movies, this way he was, for good or bad, was just another thing for a white man to acquire. "No," he said gently, "you could not be an Indian. But we could like you anyway.

We're from here," said Thomas. He thought awhile, drank some tea. "Think about this. If we Indians had picked up and gone over there and killed most of you and took over your land, what about that? Say you had a big farm in England. We camp there and kick you off. What do you say?

In English there was a word for every object. In Ojibwe there was a word for every action. English had more shades of personal emotion, but Ojibwe had more shades of family relationships.

He was poised on circumstance.

Marshall vested absolute title to the land in the government and gave Indians nothing more than the right of occupancy, a right that could be taken away at any time.