Quotes from Louise Erdrich

The cold was deeper, the dark blacker, the hard air reassuringly Minnesota. We

How was it that protests against police violence showed how violent police really were?

Things look different from the middle of a flooded river.

Effortless. Easy. The lack of trying is what makes them lovely. We all try too hard. Striving wears down our edges, dulls the best of us.

Then his head tipped down on his chest and he fell into the instant sleep of the ancient and the very young.

James McBride's Deacon King Kong.

At last I passed along Olga Tokarczuk's Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead

I will always be haunted by what I did too... and so we sat there. Two haunted women.

You can't get over things you did to other people as easily as the things they did to you.

Ayiih! Tell me, does this Chopin know love songs? I have a few I don't sing unless I mean for sure to capture my woman." "This Chopin makes songs so beautiful your knees shake. Dogs cry. The trees moan. Your thoughts fly up nowhere. You can't think. You become flooded in the heart.

There were so many sensations in his body that he couldn't feel them all at once, and each, as soon as he felt it, slipped away into the past.

I am probably porous because it costs a lot to not be aware.

A newborn baby has a powerful effect on character. But so does a toddler. A child. A preteen. A teenager. A mother changes with every stage. Some stages are within a mother's skill set. Some stages are like being told to scale a cliff using a rope attached to nothing.

I really believe that to live inauthentically is to live in a sort of hell.

Romeo keeps talking after Father Travis walks through the door. Keeps on talking to the empty coffeepot and waiting chairs, to the walls, to the sun shafts through basement window, to the food smells, to the hands, the knees, the air. Keeps on talking because once he finishes he does not know what will happen next, what awaits him anywhere in his won life, and because he cannot leave with these embarrassing sheets of snot and tears still running down his face.

The only way to fight the righteous was to present an argument that would make giving him what he wanted seem the only righteous thing to do.

No, I mean your quandary. An iffy dimension where I'm afraid for or worried about one of my daughters, like you, where I cross a boundary and then she gets pissed.' 'So you're saying what happened is normal?' 'I think so. It's easy to overstep out of worry. It can infuriate them, though sometimes they understand later on.' I was

It was this immense resignation to the shape of his life that opened him every day to the experience of joy.

I carefully kept myself in a cloud of unknowing.

gave him James McBride's Deacon King Kong. The

Small bookstores have the romance of doomed intimate spaces about to be erased by unfettered capitalism. A lot of people fall in love here.

Out of a whole lifetime, by God, sometimes the only thing that saves a person is error, and I know that we shall not be saved so long as our error is not precious to us.

Why did you stay so faithful? Oh, I wasn't so good—I was just tired of them. Men. They're stressful. You'll see.

Well, consider this Custer's payback." "Since my grandfather killed him," said Archille, "there is a certain justice to the idea. Still, Thomas here is a bona fide American citizen. I'm Canadian. My brother fought in the trenches. My uncle was at the Somme.