Quotes from Louise Erdrich

The only answer to this, and it isn't an entire answer, said Father Travis, is that God made human beings free agents. We are able to choose good over evil, but the opposite too. And in order to protect our human freedom, God doesn't often, very often at least, intervene. God can't do that without taking away our moral freedom. Do you see? No. But yeah. The only thing that God can do, and does all of the time, is to draw good from any evil situation.

What is this life but the sound of an appalling love.

He had a thousand-year-old stare.

So many things in the world have happened before. But it's like they never did. Every new thing that happens to a person, it's a first... In that night I felt expansion, as if the world was branching out in shoots and growing faster than the eye could see. I felt smallness, how the earth divided into bits and kept dividing. I felt stars.

The first thing that happens at the end of the world is that we don't know what is happening.

It didn't occur to me that my books would be widely read at all, and that enabled me to write anything I wanted to. And even once I realized that they were being read, I still wrote as if I were writing in secret. That's how one has to write anyway--in secret.

Getting blown up happened in an instant; getting put together took the rest of your life.

The story comes around, pushing at our brains, and soon we are trying to ravel back to the beginning, trying to put families into order and make sense of things. But we start with one person, and soon another and another follows, and still another, until we are lost in the connections.

In order to purify yourself, you have to understand yourself, Father Trais went on. Everything out in the world is also in you. Good, bad, evil, perfection, death, everything. So we study our souls.

The universe is transformation.

When small towns find they cannot harm the strangest of their members, when eccentrics show resilience, they are eventually embraced and even cherished.

I was in love with the whole world and all that lived in its rainy arms.

Veils of love which was only hate petrified by longing--that was me.

Your life feels different on you, once you greet death and understand your heart's position. You wear your life like a garment from the mission bundle sale ever after – lightly because you realize you never paid nothing for it, cherishing because you know you won't ever come by such a bargain again.

Of course, English is a very powerful language, a colonizer's language and a gift to a writer. English has destroyed and sucked up the languages of other cultures - its cruelty is its vitality.

The greatest wisdom doesn't know itself. The richest plan is not to have one.

I think she is confused by the way I want her, which is like nobody else. I know this deep down. I want her in a new way, a way she's never been told about.

Freedom, I found is not only in the running but in the heart, the mind, the hands.

I am part of what she thinks is her illness, a symptom of which she thinks she has been cured. She, on the other hand, is what I was looking for.

Here is the most telling fact: you wish to possess me. Here is another fact: I loved you and let you think you could.

Very little is needed to make a happy life, he said.

Tu dois aimer. Tu dois ressentir. C'est la raison pour laquelle tu es ici sur terre. Tu es ici pour mettre ton coeur en danger

I hold his name close as my own blood and I will never let it out. I only spoke it that once so he would know he was alive.

All of our actions have in their doing the seed of their undoing. ... That in her creation of her children there should be the unspeakable promise of their death, for by their birth she had created mortal beings.