Quotes from Louise Erdrich

You rarely hear about police killings of Indigenous people, though the numbers are right up there with Black people, because so often it happens on remote reservations, and the police don't wear cameras. So I was thankful, however shattering the truth, for the witnesses with the cameras.

Donna Leon. But she also liked history, so I handed over Jacqueline Winspear and John Banville. A little questioning changed the trajectory. I extolled Kate Atkinson and P. D. James, suggested Transcription. She mentioned liking Children of Men. I mentioned The Handmaid's Tale, which of course she had already read, then I catapulted over to my most special lady, Octavia Butler. One of my all-time favorite characters is bitter, angry, tender Lilith, who has lots of transcendent

The strong old woman was walking away, and in her step there was the sadness of parting with an old but dangerously foolish friend.

She not only taught but lived music, existed for those hours when she could be concentrated in her being—which was half music, half divine light, only flesh to the degree she could not admit otherwise. At the piano keyboard, absorbed into the notes that rose beneath her hands, she existed in her essence, a manifestation of compelling sound.

He gives very questioning sermons, Bazil. Sometimes I wonder if he's entirely stable, or then again, if he might be simply...intelligent.

Like every state in our country, Minnesota began with blood dispossession and enslavement. Officers in the U.S. Army bought and sold enslaved people

Women don't realize how much store men set on the regularity of their habits. We absorb their comings and goings into our bodies, their rhythms into our bones. Our pulse is set to theirs

The self will not be forced under, nor will the baby's needs gracefully retreat. The world tips away when we look into our children's faces.

Power travels in the bloodlines, handed out before birth.

It wasn't that she neglected her other duties, rather it was the playing itself—distilled of longing—that disturbed her sisters. In her music Sister Cecilia explored profound emotions. Her phrasing described her faith and doubt, her passion as the bride of Christ, her loneliness, shame, ultimate redemption.

Her playing was of the utmost sincerity. And Chopin, played simply, devastates the heart. Sometimes a pause between the piercing sorrows of minor notes made a sister scrubbing the floor weep into the bucket where she dipped her rag so that the convent's boards, washed in tears, seemed to creak now in a human tongue. The air of the house thickened with sighs.

People still lived on the margins of the land they had owned.

English is an all-devouring language that has moved across North America like the fabulous plagues of locusts that darkened the sky and devoured even the handles of rakes and hoes. Yet the omnivorous nature of a colonial language is a writer's gift. Raised in the English language, I partake of a mongrel feast.

Alongside my bed there is always a Lazy Stack and a Hard Stack. I put Flora's book onto the Hard Stack, which included Being Mortal, by Atul Gawande, two works by Svetlana Alexievich, and other books on species loss, viruses, antibiotic resistance, and how to prepare dried food. These were books I would avoid reading until some wellspring of mental energy was uncapped. Still, I usually managed to read the books in my Hard Stack, eventually.

the great de-Kindling, which started when people realized their e-readers were collecting data on their reading habits, like what page they stopped on. Jackie thinks people miss turning real pages. Gruen says it's note taking, marking up the books, that people miss.

Penstemon's conviction is that people miss the scent of paper, so clean and dry and pleasant.

They were graceful. It looked like they were pollinating flowers

Did you ever eat commodities?' I asked Pollux. 'You know I did. My Grandma had a closet of commodities that people traded to her. Everybody wanted the cheese and the peaches.' …We ate government commodities, sure, but we had our own recipes…

And so, you see, her absence stopped time.

Like every state in our country, Minnesota began with blood dispossession and enslavement.

To one born in the phenomenon of strength, weakness is an alien lie.

We are never so poor that we cannot bless another human, are we? So it is that every evil, whether moral or material, results

So maybe we are on the wrong side of the English language.

Our conversations slide through time, and we dwell often on setting straight the town record.