Quotes from Louise Erdrich

As Delphine watched, into her head there popped a strange notion: the idea that perhaps strongly experienced moments, as when Eva turned and the sun met her hair and for that one instant the symbol blazed out, those particular moments were eternal. Those moments actually went somewhere. Into a file of moments that existed out of time's range and could not be pilfered by God.

Maybe this was what being in a pandemic brought forth. When everything big is out of control, you start taking charge of small things.

I need a word, a sentence. The door is open. Go.

If, as I suspect, my body survives by uttering itself over and over again, then I have some questions. If [I] am one word, so are my daughters, so are all of us in strings and loops. Each life is one short word slowly uttered.

The Creator made us for each other. Me here. Zelia there. Space was put between us by human error. But our hearts listened to divine will.

The present was enough, though my work in the cemetery told me every day what happens when you let an unsatisfactory present go on long enough: it becomes your entire history.

The world can go on without me. Here I shall be held by love.

one explanation did not rule out the other, that charged electrons could be spirits, that nothing ruled out anything else, that mathematics was a rigorous form of madness

To fly from one tree to another, the raven hangs itself, hawklike, on the air. I hang myself that same way in sleep, between one day and the next.

Emotions unreel in her like spools of cotton.

What are you?' he [Nanapush] said to Damien, who was deep in a meditation over his [chess] bishop's trajectory. 'A priest' said Father Damien 'A man priest or a woman priest?'... ...'I am a priest', she whispered, hoarsely, fierce. 'Why' said Nanapush kindly, as though Father Damien hadn't answered, to put the question to rest, 'are you pretending to be a man priest?

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

haunted by image after image. People kneeling, beaten. People singing, beaten. Mothers, beaten. Fathers, beaten. Young, beaten. Old, knocked down or beaten. If you approached the police, beaten. If you ran away, kettled, then beaten. Pollux had known good people, seen lives saved by his fellow patrol officers. So who was doing the beating? The uniforms or those inside them? How was it that protests against police violence showed how violent police really

After a while, I asked who was in charge. Phil said God. I said that was the most terrifying thing I'd ever heard and he said, Yeah, me too. That's why I bought the Bushmaster.

Short Perfect Novels Too Loud a Solitude, by Bohumil Hrabel Train Dreams, by Denis Johnson Sula, by Toni Morrison The Shadow-Line, by Joseph Conrad The All of It, by Jeannette Haine 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 Mrs. Dalloway, by Virginia Woolf Waiting for the Barbarians, by J. M. Coetzee Fire on the Mountain, by Anita Desai

Every world-destroying project disrupts something intimate, tangible, and Indigenous

I'm still not strictly rational. How could I be? I sell books.

This is how the world ends, I think, everything crazy yet people doing normal things.

White people covered the earth like lice.

Don't you want to be a U.S. citizen?" "What?" said Thomas. "We are citizens." "Vote? You already can vote?" "Sure, back in 1924 we got the vote. After the black man, after the women. But we got the vote.

She told him that he had survived by doing the opposite of all the others. Where they abandoned, he saved. Where they were cruel, he was kind. Where they betrayed, he was faithful.

I love plants. For the longest time I thought that they died without pain. But of course after I had argued with Mary she showed me clippings on how plants went into shock when pulled up by their roots, and even uttered something indescribable, like panic, a drawn-out vowel only registered on special instruments. Still, I love their habit of constant return. I don't like cut flowers. Only the ones that grow in the ground.

Once we were a people who left no tracks. Now we are different. We print ourselves deeply on the earth. We build roads. The ruts and skids of our wheels bite deep and the bush recedes. We make foundations for our buildings and sink wells beside our houses. Our shoes are hard and where we go it is easy to follow. I have left my own tracks, too. I have left behind these words.

There were no colors. Everything was neutral. From this I know that hell is not black or fiery. It is an unvaried gray without promise.