Quotes from Louise Erdrich

Things which do not grow and change are dead things.

Now that I knew fear, I also knew it was not permanent. As powerful as it was, its grip on me would loosen. It would pass.

What happens when you let an unsatisfactory present go on long enough? It becomes your entire history.

There will never come a time when I will be able to resist my emotions.

So what is wild? What is wilderness? What are dreams but an internal wilderness and what is desire but a wildness of the soul?

Ravens are the birds I'll miss most when I die. If only the darkness into which we must look were composed of the black light of their limber intelligence. If only we did not have to die at all. Instead, become ravens.

And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself that you tasted as many as you could.

We started dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall.

I stood there in the shadowed doorway thinking with my tears. Yes, tears can be thoughts, why not?

Sorrow eats time. Be patient. Time eats sorrow.

which causes me to wonder, my own purpose on so many days as humble as the spider's, what is beautiful that I make? What is elegant? What feeds the world?

Her clothes were filled with safety pins and hidden tears.

When every inch of the world is known, sleep may be the only wilderness that we have left.

Society is like this card game here, cousin. We got dealt our hand before we were even born, and as we grow we have to play as best as we can.

don't read anything except what destroys the insulation between yourself and your experience...

We have these earthly bodies. We don't know what they want. Half the time, we pretend they are under our mental thumb, but that is the illusion of the healthy and the protected. Of sedate lovers. For the body has emotions it conceives and carries through without concern for anyone or anything else. Love is one of those, I guess. Going back to something very old knit into the brain as we were growing. Hopeless. Scorching. Ordinary.

The only time I see the truth is when I cross my eyes.

There is no such thing as a complete lack of order, only a design so vast it appears unrepetitive up close.

So what is wild? What is wilderness? What are dreams but an internal wilderness and what is desire but a wildness of the soul?

Time is the water in which we live, and we breathe it like fish. ... Time pours into us and then pours out again. In between the two pourings we live our destiny.

When we are young, the words are scattered all around us. As they are assembled by experience, so also are we, sentence by sentence, until the story takes shape.

I was in love with the whole world and all that lived in its rainy arms.

Love won't be tampered with, love won't go away. Push it to one side and it creeps to the other.