Quotes from Louise Erdrich

Someone has been tortured on my behalf. Someone has been tortured on your behalf. Someone in this world will always be suffering on your behalf. If it comes your time to suffer, just remember. Someone suffered for you. That is what taking on a cloak of human flesh is all about, the willingness to hurt for another human being.

I'd taken a pink eraser to my childhood and blurred the pain.

Here I am Where I ought to be

And Patrice thought another thing her mother said was definitely true—you never really knew a man until you told him you didn't love him. That's when his true ugliness, submerged to charm you, might surface.

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

The contents of a house can trigger all sorts of revisions to family history.

The world was filling with ghosts. We were a haunted country in a haunted world.

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

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.

You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart.

For it was through books that she felt her life to be unjudged Look at all of the great mix-ups, messes, confinement, and double-dealings in Shakespeare, she thought.Identities disguised continually, in a combative dance of illusion and discovery.

Decide first what is authentic,then go after it with all your heart.

Some have ideas. You know how old chickens scratch and gabble. That's how the tales started, all the gossip, the wondering, all the things people said without knowing and then believed, since they heard it with their own ears, from their own lips, each word.

Because everything was alive, responsive in its own way, capable of being hurt in its own way, capable of punishment in its own way, Zhaanat's thinking was built on treating everything around her with great care.

It seemed to her that almost any pain was sympathetic to her loss and she inserted herself immediately into the concept of fantastic suffering.

An enemy has to be defeated in battle, but an adversary's different. You must outwit an adversary.

But if there was embellishment, it only had to do with the facts.

And how funny, strange, that a thing can grow so powerful even when planted in the wrong place. Ideas too, I muttered. Ideas.

She gave her husband such a night of sexual pleasure that his eyes followed her constantly after that, narrow and hot. He grew molten when she passed near other men, and at night they made their own shaking tent. They got teased too much and moved farther off, into the brush, into the nesting ground of shy and holy loons. There, no one could hear them. In solitude they made love until they became gaunt and hungry, pale windigos with aching eyes, tongues of flame.

A woman's body is the gate to this life. A man's body is the gate to the next life.

For me, this is old. I probably know what is happening better than he does because I've tried over and over to wreck myself on another human, and always failed. I fail now. For it seems that my sorrow is deep in my bones and I'd have to break every single one to let it out.

Exactly right—folded quietly and knitted in right along with the working DNA there is a shadow self. This won't surprise poets. We carry our own genetic doubles, at least in part.

You know any Mormons? asked Martin Cross I don't think so. They haven't got to you. They'll come around yet. It's in their religion to change Indians into whites. I thought that was a government job.

She died instantly, said Kateri, implying she'd not had time to use a bookmark.