Quotes from Louise Erdrich

She took drugs, therefore I exist. Ain't life odd? But still, please refrain from getting mixed up with substances.

His generation would have to define themselves. Who was an Indian? What? Who, who, who? And how? How should being an Indian relate to this country that had conquered and was trying in every way possible to absorb them?

She had felt the movement of something vaster, impersonal yet personal, in her life. She thought that maybe people in contact with that nameless greatness had a way of catching at the edges, a way of being pulled along or even entering this thing beyond experience.

The whole time we made love, in deepening light, we watched each other's faces as the expressions came and went. We saw the pleasure and the tenderness. We saw the helplessness deepen. We saw the need that was a beautiful sickness between us.

If I stepped off a cliff in that heart of his, he'd catch me. He'd put me back in the sun.

The Shadow-Line, by Joseph Conrad The All of It, by Jeannette Haien Winter in the Blood, by James Welch Swimmer in the Secret Sea, by William Kotzwinkle The Blue Flower, by Penelope Fitzgerald First Love, by Ivan Turgenev Wide Sargasso Sea, by Jean Rhys Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf Waiting for the Barbarians, by J. M. Coetzee Fire on the Mountain, by Anita Desai These are books that knock you sideways in around 200 pages. Between

Short Perfect Novels Too Loud a Solitude, by Bohumil Hrabal Train Dreams, by Denis Johnson Sula, by Toni Morrison

Immersed in the saltless broth of my existence, I tried on moods.

There was the residue of joy in their tattered yard.

We are connected to the way-back people, here, in so many ways. Maybe a way-back person touched these shells. Maybe the little creatures in them disintegrated into the dirt. Maybe some tiny piece from that creatures is inside us now. We can't know these things.

New devils require new gods.

Fury lived in me under pressure. Now it all started going off inside my body like popped corks; the rage champagne and feral glee were foaming out.

Denis Johnson's Angels

Tree of Smoke and excoriated Johnson

Father Jude frowned into the blond sky. He was well thought of in his parish, calm and good. Things had been going smoothly down in Argus. He'd had a comfortable routine figured out. And now, what an unwelcome complication, in spite of the huge honor, to be afflicted with so many new problems, uncertainties, even doubts. And how terrifying, this feeling of loving someone. Thrilling. Awful.

In fact, there is no question that a number of people of all ages lost their lives on account of this house.

He led and directed conversations. He did not resort to subterfuge, certainly of this nature. And yet, even if he had, not one of the Catholic Daughters, nuns, or Theresians, would have challenged him. This elderly Ojibwe woman did so with a perfect ease.

That's what a drum is all about - it gathers people in and holds them.

Why do I long to be devoured and to forget in life rather than in death? What is the difference?

Recycle the mail, don't read it, don't read anything except what destroys the insulation between yourself and your experience or what pulls down or what strikes at or what shatters this ruse you call necessity.

Awee, said Mooshum. A happy death. And a noble lover for you, Ignatia, as he satisfied you even from the other side. I wish to die that way, but who will give me the chance?

What was it that made the black robes desperate to gather up the spirits of the Anishinaabeg for their god? Fleur decided that the chimookoman god was greedy, which made sense as all the people she had seen of their kind certainly were, grabbing up Anishinaabeg land, hunting down every last animal and wasting half the meat, swiping all they could.

Drugs now travel the old fur trade routes, and where once Corwin

This book is set in 1988, but the tangle of laws that hinder prosecution of rape cases on many reservations still exists.