Top 350 Louise Erdrich Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “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

152. “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

153. “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

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

— Louise Erdrich

155. “I love plants. For the longest time I thought that they died without pain. But of course after I had argued with Mary she showed me clippings on how plants went into shock when pulled up by their roots, and even uttered something indescribable, like panic, a drawn-out vowel only registered on special instruments. Still, I love their habit of constant return. I don’t like cut flowers. Only the ones that grow in the ground.”

— Louise Erdrich

156. “The worst kind of loneliness gripped him. The kind you feel alongside another person.”

— Louise Erdrich

157. “I have always kept notebooks and I go back to them over and over. They are my compost pile of ideas.”

— Louise Erdrich

158. “Can you stop your mother from singing to you? Who would do such a thing?”

— Louise Erdrich

159. “It was as though her soul were neatly removed by a drinking straw and siphoned into the green pool of quiet that lay beneath the rippling cascade of notes.”

— Louise Erdrich

160. “The snow fell deeper that Easter than it had in forty years, but June walked over it like water and came home.”

— Louise Erdrich

161. “They were so strong in their beliefs that there came a time when it hardly mattered what exactly those beliefs were; they all fused into a single stubbornness.”

— Louise Erdrich

162. “He always had trouble opening his heart. Tonight it was stuck again. It was a wooden chest secured by locked iron bands. An army duffel, rusted zipper. Kitchen cupboards glued shut. Tabernacle. Desk. Closet. He had to wedge apart doors, lift covers. He was always disappointed to find a drab or menacing interior. To make a welcoming place of his heart was mentally slippery work. Sometimes cleaning was involved, rearrangements. He had to dust. He had to throw out old junk to make room.”

— Louise Erdrich

163. “A woman’s body is the gate to this life. A man’s body is the gate to the next life.”

— Louise Erdrich

164. “You can’t assimilate Indian ghosts. It’s too late!”

— Louise Erdrich

165. “Money helps, though not so much as you think when you don’t have it.”

— Louise Erdrich

166. “Minute by minute, a day passed.”

— Louise Erdrich

167. “Where are we bound? Is it any different, in fact, from where we were going in the first place? Perhaps all of creation from the coddling moth to the elephant was just a grandly detailed thought that God was engrossed in elaborating upon, when suddenly God fell asleep. We are an idea, then. Maybe God has decided that we are not an idea worth thinking anymore.”

— Louise Erdrich

168. “Love. The black hook. The spear singing through the mind.”

— Louise Erdrich

169. “It’s impossible to write about Native life without humor-that’s how people maintain sanity.”

— Louise Erdrich

170. “Just as he dropped with a jerk into the pit of unconsciousness, he thought how odd it was that he was falling asleep in his sleep. When he entered the dream that he was dreaming, later, it was a dream within the dream he dreamed originally when he lay down in his bed.”

— Louise Erdrich

171. “It kills your writing if you try to manipulate it with crude politics.”

— Louise Erdrich

172. “Now that she was conscious there was no end to her questions and exclamations, for Dot was a born traveler, meant to go places, unlike us.”

— Louise Erdrich

173. “There was the unspeakable neatness of military preparation for violence.”

— Louise Erdrich

174. “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.”

— Louise Erdrich

175. “A newborn baby has a powerful effect on character. But so does a toddler. A child. A preteen. A teenager. A mother changes with every stage. Some stages are within a mother’s skill set. Some stages are like being told to scale a cliff using a rope attached to nothing.”

— Louise Erdrich

176. “I am part of what she thinks is her illness, a symptom of which she thinks she has been cured. She, on the other hand, is what I was looking for.”

— Louise Erdrich

177. “He was not all good, would never be; yet there were slender threads of okay.”

— Louise Erdrich

178. “I don’t know why they want me here on earth, the little rocks. I don’t know why they care about me as they do. I only know that by the time I reached the tree I had no choice but to fling the rope away from myself. I turned back, my fingers rubbing the little agate. All the way back to the store not a single rock slipped underfoot.”

— Louise Erdrich

179. “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.”

— Louise Erdrich

180. “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.”

— Louise Erdrich

181. “Nector got even by the use of penmanship.”

— Louise Erdrich

182. “Soon she cried and farted herself to sleep.”

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

185. “Hildegarde stood, scratched her nose, an act for which she must later say a penance.”

— Louise Erdrich

186. “I truly think that you can’t go and stalk your material, you have to leave the door open and whatever chooses you, chooses you. You can’t go and wrestle it to the ground.”

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

188. “Funny how often the Will of God puts a dollar in a pocket, said Dr. Ames.”

— Louise Erdrich

189. “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.”

— Louise Erdrich

190. “I think one of the reasons to be here on earth is to finally be who we are, at all times – to know and be predictable to ourselves.”

— Louise Erdrich

191. “Only when you are secure enough not to fear immediate survival can you display creative intelligence in anything you do.”

— Louise Erdrich

192. “She compares the deepest wells of depression to gestation, to a time enclosed, a secluded lightlessness in which, unknown and unforced, we grow.”

— Louise Erdrich

193. “Exactly right – folded quietly and knitted in right along with the working DNA there is a shadow self. This won’t surprise poets. We carry our own genetic doubles, at least in part.”

— Louise Erdrich

194. “As animals subject to the laws of earth, we think time is experience. But time is more a substance, like air, only of course not air. It is in fact a holy element.”

— Louise Erdrich

195. “She was a woman of reserve.”

— Louise Erdrich

196. “Now is it time to burn the house?”

— Louise Erdrich

197. “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.”

— Louise Erdrich

198. “At any rate those two, one the shadow of a shadow in the hall and the other a shadow also, an imitation of the ruthless man who’d stolen from the world with careless ease, both poised, caught in time.”

— Louise Erdrich

199. “She smelled of Marlboros, Aviance Night Musk, and her first drink of the late afternoon.”

— Louise Erdrich

200. “Who but an NDN would know that some days truth is a ghost who shouts in the voice of no one in particular and other days it is a secret nostalgia poured into the coffee cups of the living?”

— Louise Erdrich