Top 350 Louise Erdrich Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “You know, some people fall right through the hole in their lives. Its invisible, but they come to it after time, never knowing where.”

— Louise Erdrich

102. “Girls were not named for flowers, as flowers died so quickly. Girls were named for deathless things – forms of light, forms of cloud, shapes of stars, that which appears and disappears like an island on the horizon.”

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

104. “The only time I see the truth is when I cross my eyes.”

— Louise Erdrich

105. “When Thomas thought of his father, peace stole across his chest and covered him like sunlight.”

— Louise Erdrich

106. “Ravens are the birds I’ll miss most when I die. If only the darkness into which we must look were composed of the black light of their limber intelligence. If only we did not have to die at all. Instead, become ravens.”

— Louise Erdrich

107. “I relax into a black unconsciousness. I dive in, submerse, and breathe oblivion, my favorite element.”

— Louise Erdrich

108. “There is a legacy of violence against native women that has gotten worse and worse over time.”

— Louise Erdrich

109. “The universe is transformation.”

— Louise Erdrich

110. “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.”

— Louise Erdrich

111. “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.”

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

113. “Each life is one short word slowly uttered.”

— Louise Erdrich

114. “She slowed to pick her way through places where water was seeping up through the mats of dying grass. Rain tapping through the brilliant leaves the only sound. She stopped. The sense of something there, with her, all around her, swirling and seething with energy. How intimately the trees seized the earth. How exquisitely she was included. Patrice closed her eyes and felt a tug. Her spirit poured into the air like song.”

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

116. “Freedom, I found is not only in the running but in the heart, the mind, the hands.”

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

120. “How the flowers were fired and colored into the design. Perhaps this sort of gesture will be lost, perhaps it is a function of consciousness that we don’t need in order to survive. Perhaps this piece of evolution makes no sense – our hunger for everyday sorts of visual pleasure – but I don’t think so. I think we have survived because we love beauty and because we find each other beautiful. I think it may be our strongest quality.”

— Louise Erdrich

121. “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.”

— Louise Erdrich

122. “I want to see the story. More than anything, I am frustrated by the fact that I’ll never know how things turn out.”

— Louise Erdrich

123. “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.”

— Louise Erdrich

124. “If I am loved,” Father Damien went on, “it is a merciless and exacting love against which I have no defense. If I am not loved, then I am being pitilessly manipulated by a force I cannot withstand, either, and so it is all the same. I must do what I must do. Go in peace.”

— Louise Erdrich

125. “He despised his body for its boring hungers, reflex anger; its petty, obliterating rage. But now he’d become detached. He regarded his body with a tender regret. It was the thing his spirit had to haul.”

— Louise Erdrich

126. “Very little is needed to make a happy life, he said.”

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

128. “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.”

— Louise Erdrich

129. “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.”

— Louise Erdrich

130. “When small towns find they cannot harm the strangest of their members, when eccentrics show resilience, they are eventually embraced and even cherished.”

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

133. “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.”

— Louise Erdrich

134. “The thing is, most of us Indigenous people do have to consciously pull together our identities. We’ve endured centuries of being erased and sentenced to live in a replacement culture.”

— Louise Erdrich

135. “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. We mend. We women turn things inside out and set things right. We salvage what we can of human garments and piece the rest into blankets. Sometimes our stitches stutter and slow. Only a woman’s eyes can tell. Other times, the tension in the stitches might be too tight because of tears, but only we know what emotion went into the making. Only women can hear the prayer.”

— Louise Erdrich

136. “I knew each person’s delusion, the places their records had scratched, where the sounds repeated.”

— Louise Erdrich

137. “The moonless sky was a rich wild blackness of stars.”

— Louise Erdrich

138. “White people covered the earth like lice.”

— Louise Erdrich

139. “Information, long of reach, devastating, and as a side benefit, a substance with no serious legal repercussions, was superior to any other form of power.”

— Louise Erdrich

140. “His thoughts swam between us, hidden under rocks, disappearing in weeds, and I was fishing for them, dangling my own words like baits and lures.”

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

142. “My name is Lily Florabella Truax Beaupre, named after the woman who helped my mother, the woman who became my ghost.”

— Louise Erdrich

143. “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.”

— Louise Erdrich

144. “The whole time we made love, in deepening light, we watched each other’s faces as the expressions came and went. We saw the pleasure and the tenderness. We saw the helplessness deepen. We saw the need that was a beautiful sickness between us.”

— Louise Erdrich

145. “The music was more than music – at least what we are used to hearing. The music was feeling itself. The sound connected instantly with something deep and joyous.”

— Louise Erdrich

146. “For me, this is old. I probably know what is happening better than he does because I’ve tried over and over to wreck myself on another human, and always failed. I fail now. For it seems that my sorrow is deep in my bones and I’d have to break every single one to let it out.”

— Louise Erdrich

147. “The length of sky is just about the size of my ignorance. Pure and wide.”

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

149. “Whenever he thought he knew the truth it merged into another truth.”

— Louise Erdrich

150. “Why do the chimookomanag want us?” she growled. “They take all that makes us Anishinaabeg. Everything about us. First our land, then our trees. Now husbands, our wives, our children, our souls. Why do they want to capture every bit?”

— Louise Erdrich