Quotes from Louise Erdrich

Thomas Wazhashk removed his thermos from his armpit and set it on the steel deck alongside his scuffed briefcase.

What Juggie said, "They're looking after us," echoed what Zhaanat had said about these lights being the spirits of the dead, joyous, free, benevolent. Even cold to the bone, Millie watched them for a while longer, deciding one explanation did not rule out the other, that charged electrons could be spirits, that nothing ruled out anything else, that mathematics was a rigorous form of madness

And now we're putting another man in the earth. Maybe a drunk, but he wasn't always a drunk.

I was trying to contain a surprise bubble of exultation bobbing in the anger I have always tried to keep bottled up. Fury lived inside me under pressure. Now it all started going off inside my body like popped corks; the rage-champagne and feral glee were foaming out.

He wondered if he would ever see the inside of one of those houses whose great windows blared sheaves of light. They made huge blurred spears that reached out into the balmy spring darkness.

How could Indians hold themselves apart, when the vanquishers sometimes held their arms out, to crush them to their hearts, with something like love?

The thing is, most of us Indigenous people do have to consciously pull together our identities. We've endured centuries of being erased and sentenced to live in a replacement culture.

I've read that certain memories put down in agitation at a vulnerable age do not extinguish with time, but engrave ever deeper as they return and return.

The piano had taken a year or more to make of woods, she knew, collected and seasoned by the craftsmen, each type destined for a different piece of the sounding board and trim. Time was in the wood. Time was in the hammers. Time was the existence of the piano. Time was the human who had voiced the piano, who had balanced the keys, shaped, hardened, softened each hammer.

Sometimes it was exhilarating to be needed.

An individual who drinks himself into a state of stuporous sickness runs the risk of succumbing to accidental death.

I spend my time dwelling on revenge and try to deal with the monsters crawling out of the ashes.

A little tap on the window-pane, as though something had struck it, followed by a plentiful light falling sound, as of grains of sand being sprinkled from a window overhead, gradually spreading, intensifying, acquiring a regular rhythm, becoming fluid, sonorous, musical, immeasurable, universal: it was the rain.

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.

In the darkness, she wound herself into the blanket still more tightly. She was swaddled, confined, protected from herself--as in a very exclusively privately run mental hospital devoted solely to the care of one person: Nola. She fell asleep bothered only by the nagging thought that she would have to start all over in the morning. Existence whined in her head like a mosquito. Then she swatted it. Rode the tide of her comfort down into the earth.

I don't know why they want me here on earth, the little rocks. I don't know why they care about me as they do. I only know that by the time I reached the tree I had no choice but to fling the rope away from myself. I turned back, my fingers rubbing the little agate. All the way back to the store not a single rock slipped underfoot.

Our souls are tethered by the love of things that cannot last, Agnes wrote, a note in her pocket. But she had sometimes to think the opposite. Our souls are freed—the only problem was that freedom was an open and a lonely space.

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

It was like he'd been mildly puzzled to death.

On August 1, 1953, the United States Congress announced House Concurrent Resolution 108, a bill to abrogate nation-to-nation treaties, which had been made with American Indian Nations for "as long as the grass grows and the rivers flow." The announcement called for the eventual termination of all tribes, and the immediate termination of five tribes, including the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa.

They remembered volleyball as a laid back backyard barbecue pastime, or a gym requirement. They had no idea how fierce and cool the sport had become, how girls had taken it over.

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. (Revival Road

We stayed away from the fact of Lark's existence, or anything to do with our actual thoughts.

rectitude that was almost terrifying." When expounding on termination