Quotes from Louise Erdrich

I have never felt so supremely right in my emotions, not since I took my vows. To love another human in all of her splendor and imperfect perfection, it is a magnificent task, dear Father Damien, tremendous and foolish and human. I'm sick because I can't eat for the beauty of it, and the anguish is beautiful too.

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

His tawny hat startled me. Before, he'd been an ordinary dreamer. But today the fellow looked like a beautiful animal with its tail curled on its head.

The Pluto boys were already The Planets so the Pluto girls were The Lady Planets. Their colors were purple and white, their mascot was a round planet with legs, arms, a perky face. The Reservation team was The Warriors but the girls weren't The Lady Warriors, they were just The Warriors also. Their colors were blue and gold. They didn't want to have themselves as a mascot so they had an old time shield with two eagle feathers.

There is no one I want to visit except in the Ojibwe heaven, and so at this late age I'm going to convert, stupid dog, and become at long last the pagan that I always was at heart before I was Cecilia, when I was just Agnes, until I was seduced and diverted by the music of Chopin." "That neurasthenic pierogi snarfer!!", the dog ranted—it had never liked the composer . . . .

as with the actions of the action figures. Because the fabric between realities, living and dead, was porous not only to herself. This pass-between existed. LaRose went there too. She was not crazy after all. Just maybe more aware, like LaRose was, like everybody said he was. Special. Something good he was doing for her by playing with her son from the other kingdom.

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

For a while in my life I'd lived with the certainty that I would be held in love, and now I was sleeping in a parking lot.

The Blue Flower, by Penelope Fitzgerald

Alongside my bed there is always a Lazy Stack and a Hard Stack.

Train Dreams, by Denis Johnson

I want to forget this year, but I'm also afraid I won't remember this year. I want this now to be the now where we save our place, your place, on earth.

He was rich, that she knew. The rich aren't difficult to find, she thought, they live in big wika-iganan.

What is the whole of our existence but the sound of an appalling love?

I have always believed in a tortured god from reading Catholic history because I know this: there is nothing that one human being will not do to another. We need a god who sides with the wretched. One willing to share misery.

There is very little said about how repetitious grief is.

Dennis Lehane, Donna Tartt, Stephen Graham Jones, Marcie R. Rendon, Kate Atkinson. She gave me The Death of the Heart

First he caramelizes fresh-cut sweetcorn, toasting it slowly in a heavy pan, adding onions. Then cubed potatoes tossed lightly in butter, to set a crisp. He adds all of this to a garlicky chicken broth with shaved carrots, cannellini beans, fresh dill, parsley, a dash of cayenne, and heavy cream.

some people fall right through the hole in their lives. It's invisible, but they come to it after time, never knowing where.

Indigenous History and Nonfiction Everything You Know About Indians Is Wrong, by Paul Chaat Smith Decolonizing Methodologies, by Linda Tuhiwai Smith Through Dakota Eyes: Narrative Accounts of the Minnesota Indian War of 1862, edited by Gary Clayton Anderson and Alan R.

People put too much stuff on their walls.

There's a word for your impulse, Louise. Cacoëthes,' I said to her. 'The urge to do something somewhat wrong. Not something unspeakable or horrific. Just something you know is a bad idea.

Most of the pending legislation, if passed, would result in the end of our last holdings on this continent and destroy our dignity and distinction as the first inhabitants of this rich land

though down here the air was warm but not blistering. If not for the mosquitoes that got in an ear or went up his nose and occasionally bit through the repellent, he would have been comfortable. The chatter of birds, the light hum of insects. He lay there listening to his stomach complain, waiting for something to happen. Toward late afternoon