Top 350 Louise Erdrich Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth.”

— Louise Erdrich

2. “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.”

— Louise Erdrich

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

3. “We do know that no one gets wise enough to really understand the heart of another, though it is the task of our life to try.”

— Louise Erdrich

4. “Things which do not grow and change are dead things.”

— Louise Erdrich

5. “Of course, English is a very powerful language, a colonizer’s language and a gift to a writer. English has destroyed and sucked up the languages of other cultures – its cruelty is its vitality.”

— Louise Erdrich

6. “Sorrow eats time. Be patient. Time eats sorrow.”

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

8. “An enemy has to be defeated in battle, but an adversary’s different. You must outwit an adversary.”

— Louise Erdrich

9. “We are so brief. A one-day dandelion. A seedpod skittering across the ice. We are a feather falling from the wing of a bird. I don’t know why it is given to us to be so mortal and to feel so much. It is a cruel trick, and glorious.”

— Louise Erdrich

10. “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.”

— Louise Erdrich

11. “Her clothes were filled with safety pins and hidden tears.”

— Louise Erdrich

12. “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.”

— Louise Erdrich

13. “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.”

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

15. “People forget the good, because the bad has more punch.”

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

18. “Here I am, where I ought to be. A writer must have a place where he or she feels this, the place to love and be irritated with.”

— Louise Erdrich

19. “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.”

— Louise Erdrich

20. “Columbus only discovered that he was in some new place. He didn’t discover America.”

— Louise Erdrich

21. “Lastly, if you should ever doubt that a series of dry words in a government document can shatter spirits and demolish lives, let this book erase that doubt. Conversely, if you should be of the conviction that we are powerless to change those dry words, let this book give you heart.”

— Louise Erdrich

22. “Our tribe unraveled like a coarse rope, frayed at either end as the old and new among us were taken.”

— Louise Erdrich

23. “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.”

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

25. “I think she is confused by the way I want her, which is like nobody else. I know this deep down. I want her in a new way, a way she’s never been told about.”

— Louise Erdrich

26. “The greatest wisdom doesn’t know itself. The richest plan is not to have one.”

— Louise Erdrich

27. “By the time I was done with the car it looked worse than any typical Indian car that has been driven all its life on reservation roads, which they always say are like government promises – full of holes.”

— Louise Erdrich

28. “While their moral standards for the rest of the world were rigid, they were always able to find excuses for their own shortcomings. It is these people really, said my father, small-time hypocrites, who may in special cases be capable of monstrous acts if given the chance.”

— Louise Erdrich

29. “In all, 113 tribal nations suffered the disaster of termination; 1.4 million acres of tribal land was lost. Wealth flowed to private corporations, while many people in terminated tribes died early, in poverty. Not one tribe profited. By the end, 78 tribal nations, including the Menominee, led by Ada Deer, regained federal recognition; 10 gained state but not federal recognition; 31 tribes are landless; 24 are considered extinct.”

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

31. “What I’m trying to say is that a certain sentence of the book – a written sentence, a very powerful sentence – killed Flora.’ Louise was silent. After a few moments she spoke. ‘I wish I could write a sentence like that.”

— Louise Erdrich

32. “In the newspapers, the author of the proposal had constructed a cloud of lofty words around this bill – emancipation, freedom, equality, success – that disguised its truth: termination. Termination. Missing only the prefix. The ex.”

— Louise Erdrich

33. “Sometimes it was exhilarating to be needed.”

— Louise Erdrich

34. “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.”

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

39. “Power travels in the bloodlines, handed out before birth.”

— Louise Erdrich

40. “We passed over in a sweep of sorrow that would persist into our small forever. We just keep going.”

— Louise Erdrich

41. “In order to purify yourself, you have to understand yourself, Father Trais went on. Everything out in the world is also in you. Good, bad, evil, perfection, death, everything. So we study our souls.”

— Louise Erdrich

42. “If life’s a joke, then suicide’s a bad punch line.”

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

44. “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.”

— Louise Erdrich

45. “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.”

— Louise Erdrich

46. “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.”

— Louise Erdrich

47. “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.”

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

49. “It was just enough to sit there without words.”

— Louise Erdrich

Featured in: Reading Quotes

50. “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.”

— Louise Erdrich