Quotes from Louise Erdrich

We'll get to the truth quicker if we don't worry about logic.

Our reservation is not real estate, luck fades when sold. Attraction has no staying power, no weight, no heart.

Life had sprung up along the trail. The thin film of green in the trees had become a cloud of new leaves. Robins, bluebirds, vireos, finches, songbirds of all types made the brush along the trail a wall of sharp melody.

This is eternity, right here, for eternity is nothing other than awareness of time going by.

Animikiins used all his skills. But the earth is good at swallowing up all traces of people. At last, in spite Animikiins's great powers, they lost his trail.

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

She took detailed notes and dispatched a servant to the Indian missions to procure fine lace produced by young women whose mothers had once worked the quills of porcupines and dyed hairs of moose together into intricate clawed flowers and strict emblems before they died of measles, cholera, smallpox, tuberculosis, and left their daughters dexterous and lonely to the talents of nuns.

Pollux made his special potato salad with bacon and hot pickles.

She accepted, now, the great gift of the music as a substitute for all she had lost. Still, one question sometimes nagged. Had the devil in its original tempter's form returned her art, or had God? And furthermore, what did it matter?

There is nothing more vengeful and determined in this world than a cowboy with sore balls, and Gerry soon found out. He also found that white people are good witnesses to have on your side since they have names, addresses, social security numbers, and work phones. But they are terrible witnesses to have against you, almost as bad as having Indians witness for you. (Scales)

Earth and sky touch everywhere and nowhere, like sex between two strangers. There is no definition and no union for sure. (The Antelope Wife)

What was it, to be dreamed of by a bear?

grandma food, 'bad for the arteries but good for the heart.

The door is open. Go. While in prison, I received a dictionary.

He wasn't meek, but he was in his person deeply resigned to what he did. It was this immense resignation to the shape of his life that opened him every day to the experience of

Chapter 1, verse 4, he said. One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh, but the earth abideth forever.

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

Death. That was its name. That's what she dealt with and she knew it, dreaded it, hated death's intimacy and the strange greed with which it pursued every living thing. Agnes screamed, bent her fingers into wire hangers around the mange-bald throat, locked her knees, squeezed harder, harder, harder, until the dog yelped, gave up, and disappeared.

For the countries of the spirit, to which he was now admitted, were accessible only via many dim and tangled trails.

Because God has a very dark sense of humor," said Father Damien. He was not referring to the frightening disorganization of Father Jude Miller's new and untested emotions, but to the erratic tumble of ants scurrying to rebuild a nest disarranged by their feet.

A sense of unreality was stealing over her, a ringing in which all sound was one. Then her eyelids were knocked upright. She saw what was really happening. As the veil was torn away, as the statue of the burned stood washing in pleasant sunlight, as the master butchers parted their lips in song, smoke and ash poured out of their mouth holes like chimneys.

For what is a man, what are we all, but bits of time caught for a moment in a tangle of blood, bones, skin, and brain?

We are time's containers.

Look,' I said, 'I'm gonna help you out. When a person who works retail is off duty, we don't do nothing for nobody—unless that person asks nice.' 'Wow. You could never be a high school teacher.