Louise Erdrich Quotes

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

Time was rushing around me like water around a big wet rock. The only difference is, I was not so durable as stones. Very quickly I would be smoothed away.

She was as sturdily made as a captain's chair, yet drew water with graceful wrists and ran dancing across the rutted road on curved white ankles.

In our own beginnings, we are formed out of the body's interior landscape. For a short while, our mothers' bodies are the boundaries and personal geography which are all that we know of the world ... Once we no longer live beneath our mother's heart, it is the earth with which we form the same dependent relationship, relying ... on its cycles and elements, helpless without its protective embrace.

Sorrow eats time. Be patient. Time eats sorrow.

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

Marshall vested absolute title to the land in the government and gave Indians nothing more than the right of occupancy, a right that could be taken away at any time.

My father could out-weather anybody. Like people anywhere, there were times when it was the only topic where people here felt comfortably expressive, and my father could go on earnestly, seemingly forever. When the current weather was exhausted, there was all the weather that had occurred in recorded history, weather lived through or witnessed by a relative, or even heard about on the news. Catastrophic weather of all types. And when that was done, there was all the weather that might possibly occur in the future. I'd even heard him speculate about weather in the afterlife.

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

When the first of us failed at growing or herding or plowing the fields, we were told that we could sign a piece of paper and get money for the land, without anyone taking it. Mortgage, this was called, a piece of banker's cleverness that sounded good to many. I spoke against this trick, but who listened to Nanapush? People signed the paper, got money, came home night after night full of whiskey and food. Suddenly the foreclosure notices were handed out and the land was barred. It belonged to someone else.

Other freshmen were already moving into their dormitory rooms when we arrived, with their parents helping haul. I saw boxes of paperbacks, stereo equipment, Dylan albums and varnished acoustic guitars, home-knitted afghans, none as brilliant as mine, Janis posters, Bowie posters, Day-Glo bedsheets, hacky sacks, stuffed bears. But as we carried my trunk up two flights of stairs terror invaded me. Although I was studying French because I dreamed of going to Paris, I actually dreaded leaving home, and in the end my parents did not want me to leave, either. But this is how children are sacrificed into their futures: I had to go, and here I was. We walked back down the stairs. I was too numb to cry, but I watched my mother and father as they stood beside the car and waved. That moment is a still image; I can call it up as if it were a photograph. My father, so thin and athletic, looked almost frail with shock, while my mother, whose beauty was still remarkable, and who was known on the reservation for her silence and reserve, had left off her characteristic gravity. Her face and my father's were naked with love. It wasn't something thatwe talked about - love. But they allowed me this one clear look at it. It blazed from them. And then they left.

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.

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? She was time. Mauser was time. I am a sorry bit of time myself. We are time's containers. Time pours into us and then pours out again. In between the two pourings we live our destiny.

Sometimes owls came near to warn of death. Sometimes they just asked people to be careful. Sometimes they were just owls.

Every so often something shatters like ice and we are in the river of our existence. We are aware.

The story comes around, pushing at our brains, and soon we are trying to ravel back to the beginning, trying to put families into order and make sense of things. But we start with one person, and soon another and another follows, and still another, until we are lost in the connections.

There are ways of being abandoned even when your parents are right there.

The family took all the seeds from the garden and then they buried Nokomis there, deeply, wrapped in her blanket with gifts and tobacco for the spirit world. They buried her simply. There was no stone, no grave house, nothing to mark where she lay except the exuberant and drying growth of her garden.
Nokomis had said:
I do not need a marker of my passage, for my creator knows where I am. I do not want anyone to cry. I lived a good life, my hair turned to snow, I saw my great grandchildren, I grew my garden. That is all.

From Mooshum to Sonja, back and forth. They wouldn't look at each other. I'm gonna ask you to leave in a nice way, Joe.

So I was, like most artists, deformed by my art.

Getting blown up happened in an instant; getting put together took the rest of your life.

She had lived among those oak and pine trees when their roots grew deep beneath her and their leaves thick above. Now he lived among them, too, only he lived among them cut and dead.

The world tips away when we look into our children's faces.

Snow stepped forward and slapped Josette, who slapped her back. Emmaline dropped the spoon and slapped them both - she had never slapped her child, or any child, before that moment. It happened so quickly - like a scene choreographed by the Three Stooges, which was what saved it. Emmaline started crying, then Snow. The three of them clung together.

I want to cut off my hand, wept Emmaline. I never slapped you girls before.

We should each cut our hands off, wailed Snow.

Then making frybread two of us will have to stand together, you know, like each use our remaining hand, pat, pat. Josette and Snow demonstrated.

Pat, pat, how pitiful, cry-laughed Emmaline.

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

When I moved to Minnesota, I found there was a thriving and determined movement, a grassroots movement, to revitalize the Ojibwe language. And I've never come to be a competent speaker. I have to say that right now. But even learning the amount of Ojibwe that one can at my age is a life-altering experience.

Plans sprang up. She would get fancier chickens.

Irene nodded. She couldn't say it but she knew she was destroying a world. A little culture. It was the known and safe way of behaving in the family. All the rituals, wrong or sick, it didn't matter, good or bad, would be useless. All the strategies. They knew the familiar treacheries, but now they would be open to new dangers.

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

The moonless sky was a rich wild blackness of stars.

When we're young, we think we are the only species worth knowing. But the more I come to know people, the better I like ravens.

Someone had cleared that hillside once to make an orchard that had fallen into ruin and was now only twisted silver branches and split trunks. I sat there and continued to watch the sky as, out of nowhere, great solid-looking clouds built hot stacks and cotton cones. I was sixteen years old.

So you see, once a person drops the scales of prejudiced certainty and doubts appear, there is no telling how far a heart can open.

I got well by talking. Death could not get a word in edgewise, grew discouraged, and traveled on.

They dance together in a line, murmuring in swift, low voices, smiling carefully as they are too proud to give away their beauty. They are light steppers with a gravity of sure grace.

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

If I die, don't take this too hard," she counseled them, "death is only part of things bigger than we can imagine. Our brains are just starting the greatness, to learn how to do things like flying. What next? You will see, and you will see that your mother is of the design. And I will always be made of things, and things will always be made of me. Nothing can get rid of me because I am already included into the pattern.

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.

To think about love and passion and political correctness all together, it doesn't work. Art has to go way past the political to be effective.

Life is made up of three kinds of people
those who live it, those afraid to, those in between.

You undergo your own incarceration. You may witness your demise piece by piece. You may be one kind of fool who never gets enough or another who gets too much.

For real food our people had traveled off reservation twenty miles or more to put our money in the pockets of store clerks who watched us with suspicion and took our money with contempt.

You said if they're assigned to Indian Country they are either rookies or have trouble with authority. Did

I've read that certain memories put down in agitation at a vulnerable age do not extinguish with time, but engrave ever deeper as they return and return.

In Erling Nicolai Rolfsrud's compendium of memorable women and men from North Dakota, "Mustache" Maude Black, for that was the name of my grandparents' benefactress, is described as not un-womanly, though she dressed mannishly, smoked, drank, was a crack shot and a hard-assed camp boss. These

The pleasure of this sort of life-bookish, she supposed it might be called, a reading life- had made her isolation into a rich and even subversive thing.

For as I am standing there I look closer into the grandstand and see that there is someone waiting. It is my mother, and all at once I cannot stop seeing her. Her skin is rough. Her whole face seems magnetized, like ore. Her deep brown eyes are circled with dark skin, but full of eagerness. In her eyes I see the force of her love. It is bulky and hard to carry, like a package that keeps untying. It is like this dress that no excuse accounts for. It is embarrassing. I walk to her, drawn by her, unable to help myself.

Here is the most telling fact: you wish to possess me.

Here is another fact: I loved you and let you think you could.

I spend most of my time writing.

I prefer to have some beliefs that don't make logical sense.

Columbus only discovered that he was in some new place. He didn't discover America.

Revenge is a sorrow for the person who has to take it on. And the person who is rash enough to think it's going to help a situation is always wrong.

She slowly became convinced…that at the center of the universe not God but a tremendous deadness reigned. The stillness of a drunk God, passed out cold…She had learned of it in that house…where the drunks crashed…Things had happened to her there. She was neither raped nor robbed, nor did she experience God's absence to any greater degree than other people did. She wasn't threatened or made to harm anyone against her will. She wasn't beaten, either, or deprived of speech or voice. It was, rather, the sad blubbering stories she heard in the house. Delphine witnessed awful things occurring to other humans. Worse than that, she was powerless to alter their fate. It would be that way all her life – disasters, falling like chairs all around her, falling so close they disarranged her hair, but not touching her.

What men call adventures usually consist of the stoical endurance of appalling daily misery.

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?

Numbers, time, inches, feet. All are just ploys for cutting nature down to size.

All through my life I never did believe in human measurement. Numbers, time, inches, feet. All are just ploys for cutting nature down to size. I know the grand scheme of the world is beyond our brains to fathom, so I don't try, just let it in.

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.

Her mind was present because she was always gone. Her hands were filled because they grasped the meaning of empty. Life was simple. Her husband returned and she served him with indifferent patience this time. When he asked what had happened to her heat for him, she gestured to the west.
The sun was setting. The sky was a body of fire.

What is this life but the sound of an appalling love.

When women age into their power, no wind can upset them, no hand turn aside their knowledge; no fact can deflect their point of view.

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.

I rarely step on sidewalk cracks. I don't wear a watch. I touch my favorite tree before going on long trips.

We are never so poor that we cannot bless another human being, are we? So it is that every evil, whether moral or material, results in good. You'll see.

Right and wrong were shades of meaning, not sides of a coin.

My father is my biggest literary influence. Recently, I've been looking through his letters. He was in the National Guard when I was a child, and whenever he left, he would write to me. He wrote letters to me all through college, and we still correspond. His letters, and my mother's, are one of my life's treasures.

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

[On her and husband Michael Dorris:] We both have title collections. I think a title is like a magnet. It begins to draw these scraps of experience or conversation or memory to it. Eventually, it collects a book.

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

There was a time when I wondered - do I really believe all of this? I'm half German. Rational! Does this make any sense? After a while, such questions stopped mattering. Believing or not believing, it was all the same. I found myself compelled to behave toward the world as it if contained sentient spiritual beings. The question of whether or not they actually existed became irrelevant. After I'd stopped thinking about it for a while, the ritual of offering tobacco became comforting and then necessary. Whenever I offered tobacco I was for that moment fully there, fully thinking, willing to address the mystery.

I did not choose solitude. Who would? It came on me like a kind of vocation, demanding an effort that married women can't picture.

By writing I can live in ways that I could not survive.

Gregory was in the walls, in the crawl space between the board floor of the cabin and the bitter ground. He was gone, but he was everywhere. He was on the small pantry shelf where canning was removed. The air of the cabin still held Gregory. He filled and expanded every dark corner, tight, to exploding. He was jammed between her legs so that no matter how she moved, he was inside of Agnes. She couldn't shake him from her vestments or burn him from the stove. He nested in the books, of course. She couldn't stand to touch their pages. He was in the sweet, fragrant wood Mary Kashpaw chopped, split, and piled. In the cloth of curtains, the clasp of doors, he waited. She turned the handle, let the light in, and he came, too, solid and good and alive.

Where was I?"
"A different island," said old Tallow. Her voice was stern, but there was an ache in her look that Omakayas had never before seen. "An island called Spirit Island where everyone but you died of the itching sickness- you were the toughest one, the littlest one, and you survived them all."
"You were sent here so you could save the others," she said. "Because you'd had the sickness, you were strong enough to nurse them through it. They did a good thing when they took you in, and you saved them for their good act. Now the circle that began when I found you is complete.

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A MAN FINDS happiness so fleetingly, like the petals melting off a prairie rose. Even as you touch that feeling it dries up, leaving only the dust of that emotion, a powder of hope.

Our songs travel the earth. We sing to one another. Not a single note is ever lost and no song is original. They all come from the same place and go back to a time when only the stones howled.

I imagined myself in some way defined by my relation to another creature.

Most writers have been influenced by Faulkner.

I spend my time dwelling on revenge and try to deal with the monsters crawling out of the ashes.

I have never seen the truth," said Damien, "without crossing my eyes. Life is crazy.

Be lovely and do no harm.

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

I want to hear what's happened to you," she said evenly after a while. she gestured in the direction, down river, of the butcher shop. "it's just that there is nowhere else to start," she said gently. "niether of us is the same. but i'm different because of small, good, manageable things. you're different because ... things i don't know.

People forget the good, because the bad has more punch.

Then his head tipped down on his chest and he fell into the instant sleep of the ancient and the very young.

Death is the least civilized rite of passage.

You see I thought love got easier over, the years so it didn't hurt so bad when it hurt, or feel so good when it felt good. I thought it smoothed out and old people hardly noticed it. I thought it curled up and died, I guess. Now I saw it rear up like a whip and lash. She loved him. She was jealous. She mourned him like the dead. And he just smiled into the air, trapped in the seams of his mind.

He gives very questioning sermons, Bazil. Sometimes I wonder if he's entirely stable, or then again, if he might be simply ... intelligent.

And here was the thing I didn't understand then but do now - the loneliness. I was right, in that there was just the three of us. Or the two of us. Nobody else, not Clemence, not even my mother herself, cared as much as we did about my mother. Nobody else thought night and day of her. Nobody else knew what was happening to her. Nobody else was as desperate as the two of us, my father and I, to get our life back. To return to the Before.

Eva sipped her coffee. Today, her hair was bound back in a singular knot, the sides rolled in smooth twists, the knot itself in the shape of the figure eight, which Delphine knew was the ancient sign for eternity. Eva rose and turned away, walked across the green squares of linoleum to punch some risen dough and cover it with towels. 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..

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

They're all the same
the cop, the criminal, the defense, the prosecutor
they all share a fundamental belief in the malleability of truth

We are conjured voiceless out of nothing and must return to an unknowing state. What happens in between is an uncontrolled dance, and what we ask for in love is no more than a momentary chance to get the steps right, to move in harmony until the music stops.

Her hands flew off the keyboard - she crouched as though she had been shot, saw yellow spots and then experienced a peaceful wave of oneness in which she entered pure communion. She was locked into the music, held there safely, entirely understood. Such was her innocence that she didn't know she was experiencing a sexual climax, but believed rather that what she felt was the natural outcome of this particular nocturne played to the utmost of her skills - and so it came to be. Chopin's spirit became her lover. His flats caressed her. His whole notes sank through her body like clear pebbles. His atmospheric trills were the flicker of a tongue. His pauses before the downward sweep of notes nearly drove her insane. The

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.

I have never fully exorcised shames that struck me to the heart as a child except through written violence, shadowy caricature, and dark jokes.

I grew up in Wahpeton, N.D., and I didn't leave until I was 18, and I've kept going back.

The only answer to this, and it isn't an entire answer, said Father Travis, is that God made human beings free agents. We are able to choose good over evil, but the opposite too. And in order to protect our human freedom, God doesn't often, very often at least, intervene. God can't do that without taking away our moral freedom. Do you see?
No. But yeah.
The only thing that God can do, and does all of the time, is to draw good from any evil situation.

This was our ritual. Our breaking break, our communion. and it all began with that trusting moment where my father walked up behind my mother and she smiled at his approach without turning. By now they stood staring at each other helplessly over the broken dish.

I write first drafts by hand. Never do I open an umbrella inside the house. I don't predict wins or losses. I used to stand on a certain piece of rug if my brothers and husband were watching football and their team got in trouble - but now the luck went out of that rug. If a circle is involved, I try to go clockwise.