Top 350 Louise Erdrich Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “The worst kind of loneliness gripped him. The kind you feel alongside another person.”

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

154. “I’ll be the night watchman,” said Patrice, and went out to get the ax.”

— Louise Erdrich

155. “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

156. “In The Sentence, books are matters of life and death, and readers reach through unknowable realms to maintain some connection to the written word. So with the bookstore.”

— Louise Erdrich

157. “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

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

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

160. “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

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

— Louise Erdrich

162. “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

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

— 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. “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

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

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

170. “Our baby gives herself to me completely. There is no hesitation, no reservation, no holding back, no coldness, no craft, no tremor or fear in her love. Although our relationship may encompass tears, frustration, even fury, it is an utterly reliable bond. As it grows, her love is literally unadulterated. Her love is wholly of the child, pure in its essence as children are in their direct passions. Children do not love wisely, but perhaps they love the best of all.”

— Louise Erdrich

171. “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

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

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

176. “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

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

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

179. “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

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

— Louise Erdrich

181. “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

182. “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

183. “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

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

— Louise Erdrich

185. “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

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

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

188. “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

189. “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

190. “It was Sister Hildegarde’s belief that good penmanship was the defining key to success in life.”

— Louise Erdrich

191. “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

192. “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

193. “She was a woman of reserve.”

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

195. “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

196. “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

197. “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

198. “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

199. “How close the dead are. One song away from the living.”

— Louise Erdrich

200. “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