Quotes from Louise Erdrich

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, and as always on a weekend afternoon we were waiting for my mother to start us ticking away on the evening. And so, you see, her absence stopped time.

They sat on chairs made of air and fanned their faces with transparent leaves. They spoke in both languages. We love you, don't cry. Sorrow eats time. Be patient. Time eats sorrow.

You said if they're assigned to Indian Country they are either rookies or have trouble with authority. Did

The otter's picnic ground is a large rock where we always find empty turtle shells. It is rather sad, but I can't help thinking how conveniently packaged a turtle is to an otter. Like a kind of Big Mac in a crushproof box.

Plans sprang up. She would get fancier chickens.

The more I come to know people, the better I like ravens.

Delphine witnessed awful things occurring yo other humans. Worse than that, she was powerless to alter their fate. It would be that way all her life- disasters, falling like chairs all around her, falling so close they disarranged her hair, but not touching her.

deliquesce. 1. To melt away or disappear as if by melting. 2. Chemistry. To dissolve and become liquid by absorbing moisture from the air. 3. Botany. a. To branch out into numerous subdivisions that lack a main axis. b. To become fluid or soft on maturing, as do certain fungi.

If we are cut off from God by sinning," he said, low, "why do I feel so close to God when I touch you in this darkness, in this cloud?

The sobs were wrecking her, tossing her like a storm. They built up and died down and built up again. Her father sat listening to the waves, almost reverent, his head bowed as though he were attentive to a sermon

Dawn was sad, calm, and brimming with debt.

In heraldry the quatrefoil is a stylized four-petaled flower. As a Christian symbol, the petals are supposed to represent the four evangelists. But the quatrefoil is also an Indigenous symbol, Mayan, Olmec. It represents the four directions, the opening of the cosmos. And get this: It is considered a passageway between the celestial world and the underworld.

Who but an NDN would know that some days truth is a ghost who shouts in the voice of no one in particular and other days it is a secret nostalgia poured into the coffee cups of the living? —Billy-Ray Belcourt, NDN Coping Mechanisms: Notes from the Field

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

While in prison, I received a dictionary. It was sent to me with a note. This is the book I would take to a deserted island.

hell is not black or fiery. It is an unvaried gray without promise.

Each of Old Tallow's feet seemed to take up as much space as a small child, but Omakayas didn't mind. Warily, but completely, she loved the fierce old woman.

Here we go . . .' Small bookstores have the romance of doomed intimate spaces about to be erased by unfettered capitalism.

Rain tapping through the brilliant leaves the only sound. She stopped. The sense of something there, with her, all around her, swirling and seething with energy. How intimately the trees seized the earth. How exquisitely she was included. Patrice closed her eyes and felt a tug. Her spirit poured into the air like song. Wait! She opened her eyes and threw her weight into her cold feet. This must be how Gerald felt when he flew across the earth. Sometimes she frightened herself.

She told the holy stories and the funny stories, the aadizookaanag that explained how the world came into being, how it continued to be made.

The next world, of what shall consist its poisons and delights? Love in this world avoided me. And love's issue, beyond all measure. Immersed in the saltless broth of my existence, I tried on moods.

The prairie almost seemed to mock them with its beauty. Every inch of their skin was covered with bites upon bites. Their faces were purple and swollen. The mosquitoes bit through cloth, they bit through hair, they were implacable. Every being suffered. Yet they kept moving.

How strange that her absence would have no effect whatsoever on the things of this world. Proving that they were not just things, she thought, proving that they were spirit surrounded by a shell of substance, just like her.

Thus was her salvation composed of the very great and very small. The vast comfort of a God who comforted her in a language other than her own. The bread of life. The gold orange of washed carrots and the taste of salt.