Quotes from Louise Erdrich

We'd better get there soon, said Corwin. They're probably building new streets in Paris right this minute. What if I don't want to, being a lesbian? Corwin fell silent; after a while he spoke. So you think it might be permanent?

You cannot feel time grind against you. Time is nothing but everything, not the seconds, minutes, hours, days, years. Yet this substanceless substance, this bending and shaping, this warping, this is the way we understand our world.

Because we shared the loneliness that was one shape. Because I knew that in her old age she shared that same boat, where I had labored. She crested and sank in dark waves. Those waves were taking her onward, through night, through day, the water beating and slashing across her unknown path. She struggled to continue. She was traveling hard, and death was her light.

What I am doing now is for the future, though it may seem small, or trivial, or boring, to you.

How close the dead are. One song away from the living.

Perhaps you will know how to speak this language--perhaps it is a language we have forgotten in its present form. Perhaps you are dreaming in this language right now. And perhaps there is a word that has changed the course of human existence. A word written in the depth of things, in the quantum and genetic and synaptic codes, a word that told all beings and all life--enough.

Between these two, where was the real self? It came to her that both Sister Cecilia and then Agnes were as heavily manufactured of gesture and pose as was Father Damien. And within this, what sifting of identity was she? What mote? What nothing?

For you, not vaccinating me was a class thing. Upper-class delusionals can afford to indulge their paranoias only because the masses bear the so-called dangers of vaccinations.

The heavy winds couldn't blow her off course. She continued. Even when her heart clenched and her skin turned crackling cold it didn't matter, because the pure and naked part of her went on.

Loss, dislocation, disease, addiction, and just feeling like the tattered remnants of a people with a complex history. What was in that history? What sort of knowledge? Who had they been? What were they now? Why so much fucked-upness wherever you turned?

The whiskey had its own mind. Or spirit, he said. A cunning spirit. Sometimes it fooled him. Sometimes it set him free.

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

We all got holes in our lives. Nobody dies in a perfect garment.

To be of mixed blood is a great gift for a writer. I have one foot on tribal lands and one foot in middle-class life.

Each life is one short word slowly uttered.

My mother is Turtle Mountain Chippewa, and she lived on her home reservation. My father taught there. He had just been discharged from the Air Force. He went to school on the GI Bill and got his teaching credentials. He is adventurous - he worked his way through Alaska at age seventeen and paid for his living expenses by winning at the poker table.

The moonless sky was a rich wild blackness of stars.

Or maybe there was a god. Mine is the god of isolation, the god of the small voice, the god of the little spirit, of the earthworm and the friendly mouse, the hummingbird, the greenbottle fly and all things iridescent.

I saved myself by starting a story.... I fainted, lost breath, so that I could hardly keep moving my lips. But I did continue and recovered. I got well by talking. Death could not get a word in edgewise, grew discouraged, and traveled on.

Our baby gives herself to me completely. There is no hesitation, no reservation, no holding back, no coldness, no craft, no tremor or fear in her love. Although our relationship may encompass tears, frustration, even fury, it is an utterly reliable bond. As it grows, her love is literally unadulterated. Her love is wholly of the child, pure in its essence as children are in their direct passions. Children do not love wisely, but perhaps they love the best of all.

Getting out of bed, out of a chair, changing her position, was like moving furniture.

My petunias," she tells me in a flat voice, "are none of your business.

Delphine began to read with a mad attention when she wanted to talk to Clarisse. She saw that in her life there was a woman-shaped hole, a cutout that led to a mysterious place. Through it, her mother, then Eva, and now Clarisse had walked. If only she could plunge her arms through and drag them back.

Even the most traditional Indians, the ones who'd kept the old ceremonies alive in secret, either had Catholicism beaten into them in boarding school...or they had decided to hedge their bets by adding the saints to their love of the sacred pipe.