Top 350 Louise Erdrich Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “Maybe this was what being in a pandemic brought forth. When everything big is out of control, you start taking charge of small things.”

— Louise Erdrich

252. “Thomas had tried to educate himself, mainly by reading everything he could find. When he needed to calm his mind, he opened a book. Any book. He had never failed to feel refreshed, even if the book was no good.”

— Louise Erdrich

253. “The only thing that God can do, and does all of the time, is to draw good from any evil situation.”

— Louise Erdrich

254. “Patrice had come to think that humans treated the concept of God, or Gizhe Manidoo, or the Holy Ghost, in a childish way. She was pretty sure that the rules and trappings of ritual had nothing to do with God, that they were ways for people to imagine they were doing things right in order to escape from punishment, or harm, like children.”

— Louise Erdrich

255. “In English there was a word for every object. In Ojibwe there was a word for every action. English had more shades of personal emotion, but Ojibwe had more shades of family relationships.”

— Louise Erdrich

256. “You know any Mormons?” asked Martin Cross. “I don’t think so.” “They haven’t got to you. They’ll come around yet. It’s in their religion to change Indians into whites.” “I thought that was a government job.” “It’s in their holy book. The more we pray, the lighter we get.” “I could stand to drop a few pounds.” “Not that kind of lighter,” Martin laughed. “They think if you follow their ways your skin will bleach out. They call it lightsome and gladsome.”

— Louise Erdrich

257. “To Delphine, the hesitation of March was cheering. March was all expectation, a gathering of power. Still cold but marginally warmer every day – a hopeful time of the year.”

— Louise Erdrich

258. “Things started going wrong, as far as Zhaanat was concerned, when places everywhere were named for people – political figures, priests, explorers – and not for the real things that happened in these places – the dreaming, the eating, the death, the appearance of animals.”

— Louise Erdrich

259. “An individual who drinks himself into a state of stuporous sickness runs the risk of succumbing to accidental death.”

— Louise Erdrich

260. “Joseph Smith and the early Mormons had tried their best to murder all Indians in their path across the country, but in the end did not quite succeed. Arthur V. Watkins decided to use the power of his office to finish what the prophet had started. He didn’t even have to get his hands bloody.”

— Louise Erdrich

261. “I was trying to contain a surprise bubble of exultation bobbing in the anger I have always tried to keep bottled up. Fury lived inside me under pressure. Now it all started going off inside my body like popped corks; the rage-champagne and feral glee were foaming out.”

— Louise Erdrich

262. “I already knew, too, that these questions would not change the facts. But they would inevitably change the way we sought justice.”

— Louise Erdrich

263. “The world can go on without me. Here I shall be held by love.”

— Louise Erdrich

264. “Harry lived with an ordinary-looking smart brown dog, named Edith. As happens when one person lives with one dog, the dog became psychic.”

— Louise Erdrich

265. “They stood inside their own quiet like a pocket.”

— Louise Erdrich

266. “On this stretch of highway he was afflicted. It felt as if his heart was being pierced by long sharp needles. He flashed on his father, the two of them sitting in late sunshine, gathering its fugitive warmth.”

— Louise Erdrich

267. “And so to be afraid of entering the cemetery by night was to fear not the loving ancestors who lay buried, but the gut kick of our history, which I was bracing to absorb. The old cemetery was filled with its complications.”

— Louise Erdrich

268. “How could Indians hold themselves apart, when the vanquishers sometimes held their arms out, to crush them to their hearts, with something like love?”

— Louise Erdrich

269. “That old buffalo woman gave Nanapush her views. She told him that he had survived by doing the opposite of all the others. Where they abandoned, he saved. Where they were cruel, he was kind. Where they betrayed, he was faithful. Nanapush then decided that in all things he would be unpredictable. As he had completely lost trust in authority, he decided to stay away from others and to think for himself, even to do the most ridiculous things that occurred to him.”

— Louise Erdrich

270. “Sometimes late at night the hospital emitted thin streams of mist from the cracks along its windows and between the bricks. They took the shapes of spirits freed from bodies. The world was filling with ghosts. We were a haunted country in a haunted world.”

— Louise Erdrich

271. “I had to get out of my surroundings the way I used to in prison. There, I had learned to read with a force that resembled insanity. Once free, I found that I could not read just any book. It had gotten so I could see through books – the little ruses, the hooks, the setup in the beginning, the looming weight of a tragic ending, the way at the last page the author could whisk out the carpet of sorrow and restore a favorite character.”

— Louise Erdrich

272. “Ever since I understood this life was to be mine, I have wanted only for it to continue in its precious routine.”

— Louise Erdrich

273. “I put her ashes in the Mississippi River not because she ever noticed the river or gave the slightest indication she wanted that, but because it was a way to think of her as she’d always been, wordless and inert, pulled along by a strong, hidden current.”

— Louise Erdrich

274. “You cannot feel time grind against you. Time is nothing but everything, not the seconds, minutes, hours, days, years. Yet this substanceless substance, this bending and shaping, this warping, this is the way we understand our world.”

— Louise Erdrich

275. “Watching him closely after he paid for the books and took the package into his hands, I saw his pupils dilate the way a diner’s do when food is brought to the table.”

— Louise Erdrich

276. “Temptation is a slower process and you’ll feel it more in the morning just after waking and in the evening, when you are at loose ends, tired, and yet not ready to fall asleep.”

— Louise Erdrich

277. “But every so often the government remembered about Indians. And when they did, they always tried to solve Indians, thought Thomas. They solve us by getting rid of us.”

— Louise Erdrich

278. “Pollux’s grandma had once told him dogs are so close with people that sometimes, when death shows up, the dog will step in and take the hit. Meaning, the dog would go off with death, taking their person’s place. I was pretty sure that Gary had done this for Roland and then visited the store to let me know.”

— Louise Erdrich

279. “Books contain everything worth knowing except what ultimately matters.”

— Louise Erdrich

280. “I love statistics because they place what happens to a scrap of humanity, like me, on a worldwide scale.”

— Louise Erdrich

281. “Why would she waste her time figuring out men when she was a person who had slept with a bear?”

— Louise Erdrich

282. “The rain was that endless, gray, pounding kind of rain that makes your house feel cold and sad even if your mother’s spirit isn’t dying upstairs.”

— Louise Erdrich

283. “Went outside to answer Snowy Owl’s question, Who? Owl not satisfied with answer.”

— Louise Erdrich

284. “I’ve been told by a couple of knowledgeable elders that you should not wear red at a funeral, or for a year after someone close to you dies. Red is the fire, the doorway to the spirit world. Who knows how long until they are done walking. When the dead see flashes of red as they pass on their journey, they are confused. They think a door is opening and it distracts them from their task, which is to reach a place where we are nothing to them.”

— Louise Erdrich

285. “Patrice leaned to one side and put her ear to the trunk of a birch tree. She could hear the humming rush of the tree drinking from the earth. She closed her eyes, went through the bark like water, and was sucked up off the bud tips into a cloud.”

— Louise Erdrich

286. “She had felt the movement of something vaster, impersonal yet personal, in her life. She thought that maybe people in contact with that nameless greatness had a way of catching at the edges, a way of being pulled along or even entering this thing beyond experience.”

— Louise Erdrich

287. “She turned to the window although it was dark now and the glass held only a tired ghost.”

— Louise Erdrich

288. “And so we sat there. Two haunted women. And one unhaunted baby trailing clouds of glory.”

— Louise Erdrich

289. “A little tap on the window-pane, as though something had struck it, followed by a plentiful light falling sound, as of grains of sand being sprinkled from a window overhead, gradually spreading, intensifying, acquiring a regular rhythm, becoming fluid, sonorous, musical, immeasurable, universal: it was the rain.”

— Louise Erdrich

290. “The tea was made from aromatic cedar fronds and melted snow. It was her favorite kind of tea. There was something about the water that was swirled through the heavens, frozen, scooped up, and boiled with cedar.”

— Louise Erdrich

291. “His father was so very old now that he slept most of the day. He was ninety-four. When Thomas thought of his father, peace stole across his chest and covered him like sunlight.”

— Louise Erdrich

292. “Thomas Wazhashk removed his thermos from his armpit and set it on the steel deck alongside his scuffed briefcase.”

— Louise Erdrich

293. “It was the kind of moment, I see now, that could have gone several ways. She could have laughed, she could have cried, she could have reached for him. Or he could have got down on his knees and pretended to have the heart attack that later killed him. She would have been jolted from her shock. Helped him. We would have cleared up the mess, made sandwiches for ourselves, and things would have gone on. If we’d sat down together that night, I do believe things would have gone on.”

— Louise Erdrich

294. “This confusion of the chimookomaanag between the timelessness of the earth and the short span here of mortals was typical of their arrogance.”

— Louise Erdrich

295. “I still had Grandma’s hankie in my pocket. The sun flared. I’d heard that this river was the last of an ancient ocean, miles deep, that once had covered the Dakotas and solved all our problems. It was easy to still imagine us beneath them vast unreasonable waves, but the truth is we live on dry land. I got inside. The morning was clear. A good road led on. So there was nothing to do but cross the water and bring her home.”

— Louise Erdrich

296. “The buffalo provided the fuel for fires that smoked their own meat.”

— Louise Erdrich

297. “Delight seems insubstantial; happiness feels more grounded; ecstasy is what I shoot for; satisfaction is hardest to attain.”

— Louise Erdrich

298. “Zhaanat’s knowledge was considered so important that she had been fiercely hidden away, guarded from going to boarding school. She had barely learned to read and write on the intermittent days she had attended reservation day school. She made baskets and beadwork to sell. But Zhaanat’s real job was passing on what she knew. People came from distances, often camped around their house, in order to learn.”

— Louise Erdrich

299. “Missing only the prefix. The ex.”

— Louise Erdrich

300. “Small bookstores have the romance of doomed intimate spaces about to be erased by unfettered capitalism.”

— Louise Erdrich