Top 350 Louise Erdrich Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 4 of 8

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

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

153. “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

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

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

156. “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

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

— Louise Erdrich

158. “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

159. “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

160. “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

Featured in: Strong Quotes

161. “Juggie Blue: We don’t want to leave our homes We are poor, but even poor people can love their land. You do not need money to love your home.”

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

163. “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

164. “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

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

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

168. “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

169. “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

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

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

174. “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

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

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

177. “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

178. “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

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

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

181. “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

182. “When a baby falls asleep in your arms you are absolved. The purest creature alive has chosen you. There’s nothing else.”

— Louise Erdrich

183. “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

184. “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

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

— Louise Erdrich

186. “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

187. “I put my hand on my chest and closed my eyes. I have a dinosaur heart, cold, massive, indestructible, a thick meaty red. And I have a glass heart, tiny and pink, that can be shattered. The glass heart belongs to Pollux. There was a ping. To my surprise, it had developed a minute crack, nearly invisible. But it was there, and it hurt.”

— Louise Erdrich

188. “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.”

— Louise Erdrich

189. “There are people who are always, I think, going to remain people of the book, to use another author’s title, but people of the book, who really must be around.”

— Louise Erdrich

190. “They’d built that place to keep their people together and to ask for mercy from the Creator, since justice was so sketchily applied on earth. Hinsdale.”

— Louise Erdrich

191. “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

192. “On August 1, 1953, the United States Congress announced House Concurrent Resolution 108, a bill to abrogate nation-to-nation treaties, which had been made with American Indian Nations for “as long as the grass grows and the rivers flow.” The announcement called for the eventual termination of all tribes, and the immediate termination of five tribes, including the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa.”

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

194. “Because everything was alive, responsive in its own way, capable of being hurt in its own way, capable of punishment in its own way, Zhaanat’s thinking was built on treating everything around her with great care.”

— Louise Erdrich

195. “The first snow of the new year lifted my burdensome thoughts. The snow brightened and cleaned and filled the air with oxygen.”

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

197. “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

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

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

200. “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