Top 350 Louise Erdrich Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “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.”

— Louise Erdrich

52. “I was not prepared to think of the people I had lost, or to speak of them, although we did, carefully, without letting their names loose in the wind that would reach their ears. We feared that they would hear us and never rest, come back out of pity for the loneliness we felt.”

— Louise Erdrich

53. “Your life feels different on you, once you greet death and understand your heart’s position.”

— Louise Erdrich

54. “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.”

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

56. “To sew is to pray. Men don’t understand this. They see the whole but they don’t see the stitches. They don’t see the speech of the creator in the work of the needle.”

— Louise Erdrich

57. “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

58. “The buffalo were taking leave of the earth and all they loved,” said the old chiefs and hunters after years had passed and they could tell what split their hearts. “The buffalo went crazy with grief to see the end of things. Like us, they saw the end of things and like many of us, many today, they did not care to live.”

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

60. “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.”

— Louise Erdrich

61. “I don’t pray. When I was young, I vowed I never would be caught begging God. If I want something I get it for myself. I go to church only to show the old hens they don’t get me down.”

— Louise Erdrich

62. “I feel myself becoming less a person than a place, inhabited, a foreign land.”

— Louise Erdrich

63. “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.”

— Louise Erdrich

64. “And so, you see, her absence stopped time. What.”

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

67. “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.”

— Louise Erdrich

68. “The average man is proof the average woman can take a joke,” he said.”

— Louise Erdrich

69. “The first thing that happens at the end of the world is that we don’t know what is happening.”

— Louise Erdrich

70. “History works itself out in the living.”

— Louise Erdrich

71. “I was in love with the whole world and all that lived in its rainy arms.”

— Louise Erdrich

72. “Where will you be my darling, the last time it snows on earth?”

— Louise Erdrich

73. “I prefer to have some beliefs that don’t make logical sense.”

— Louise Erdrich

74. “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?”

— Louise Erdrich

75. “Old love, middle love, the kind of love that knows itself and knows that nothing lasts, is a desperate shared wildness.”

— Louise Erdrich

76. “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.”

— Louise Erdrich

77. “Hunger steals the memory.”

— Louise Erdrich

78. “All of our actions have in their doing the seed of their undoing.”

— Louise Erdrich

79. “TO LOVE Nanapush, to love at all, is like trying to remember the tune and words to a song that the spirits have given you in your sleep. Some days, I knew exactly how the song went and some days I couldn’t even hum the first line.”

— Louise Erdrich

80. “A smile of remembrance of lost times.”

— Louise Erdrich

81. “Veils of love which was only hate petrified by longing – that was me.”

— Louise Erdrich

82. “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.”

— Louise Erdrich

83. “They moved in dance steps too intricate for the noninitiated eye to imitate or understand. Clearly they were of one soul. Handsome, rangy, wildly various, they were bound in total loyalty, not by oath, but by the simple, unquestioning belongingness of part of one organism.”

— Louise Erdrich

84. “We Anishinaabeg are the keepers of the names of the earth. And unless the earth is called by the names it gave us humans, won’t it cease to love us? And isn’t it true that if the earth stops loving us, everyone, not just the Anishinaabeg, will cease to exist? That is why we all must speak our language, nindinawemagonidok, and call everything we see by the name of its spirit. Even the chimookomanag, who are trying to destroy us, are depending upon us to remember. Mi’sago’i.”

— Louise Erdrich

85. “There will never come a time when I will be able to resist my emotions.”

— Louise Erdrich

86. “I thought how we might have to yell to be heard by Higher Power, but that’s not saying it’s not there. And that is faith for you. It’s belief even when the gods don’t deliver.”

— Louise Erdrich

87. “The world tips away when we look into our children’s faces.”

— Louise Erdrich

88. “I think about seventy percent of my depression was my seventeenth-century warrior trying to get out.”

— Louise Erdrich

89. “You never know where you’re going to find the same thoughts in another brain, but when it happens you know it right off, just like you were connected by a small electrical wire that suddenly glows red hot and sparks.”

— Louise Erdrich

90. “We would all be together on the journey then, our destination the village at the end of the road where people gamble day and night but never lose their money, eat but never fill their stomachs, drink but never leave their minds.”

— Louise Erdrich

91. “Women are strong, strong, terribly strong. We don’t know how strong until we’re pushing out our babies.”

— Louise Erdrich

92. “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.”

— Louise Erdrich

93. “I tried out the unfamiliar syllables. They fit. They cracked in my ears like a fist through ice.”

— Louise Erdrich

94. “How come we’ve got these bodies? They are frail supports for what we feel. There are times I get so hemmed in by my arms and legs. I look forward to getting past them. As though death will set me free like a traveling cloud. I’ll get past the ragged leaves that dead bum of my youth looked into. I’ll be out there as a piece of the endless body of the world feeling pleasures so much larger than skin and bones and blood.”

— Louise Erdrich

95. “Be lovely and do no harm.”

— Louise Erdrich

96. “He said that while Clemence adored the sacrament, he meditated on how it could be possible that humans had evolved out of apes only to sit gaping at a round white cracker.”

— Louise Erdrich

97. “He had a thousand-year-old stare.”

— Louise Erdrich

98. “We are never so poor that we cannot bless another human, are we?”

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

100. “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.”

— Louise Erdrich