Top 350 Louise Erdrich Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “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

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

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

254. “No. I don’t see,” said Patrice flatly. But she did see. Jack would have tampered with her slightly, just enough so that when somebody else came along she’d have that shame, then more shame, until she got lost in shame and wasn’t herself.”

— Louise Erdrich

255. “Words The word used for ejaculation – baashkizige – is also used for shooting off a gun. The word used for condom – biinda’oojigan – means gun case. Millie entered these words into her notebook. Fascinating.”

— Louise Erdrich

256. “White double bloodroot and blue scilla covered yards on my path to the store. The leather knuckles of milkweed were pushing from the earth. Dark hemlocks and pine were tipped with tiny tender green needles. People wandered about like toddlers, bending over to look at last year’s dried grass. They watched the sky and examined the tags of newly planted city trees. And the air – it was a clean cold food.”

— Louise Erdrich

257. “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

258. “Any power she owned lay in her feigned indifference.”

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

260. “And so when they tell you that I was heartless, a shameless man-chaser, don’t ever forget this: I loved what I saw. And yes, it is true that I’ve done all the things they say. That’s not what gets them. What aggravates them is I’ve never shed one solitary tear. I’m not sorry. That’s unnatural. As we all know, a woman is supposed to cry.”

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

262. “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

263. “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

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

— Louise Erdrich

266. “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

267. “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

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

— Louise Erdrich

269. “Small bookstores have the romance of doomed intimate spaces about to be erased by unfettered capitalism. A lot of people fall in love here. We’ve even had a few proposals.”

— Louise Erdrich

270. “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

271. “We’re from here,” said Thomas. He thought awhile, drank some tea. “Think about this. If we Indians had picked up and gone over there and killed most of you and took over your land, what about that? Say you had a big farm in England. We camp there and kick you off. What do you say?”

— Louise Erdrich

272. “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

273. “This time, the rapids sent them through a dark tunnel that seemed timeless, blind, malevolent. A yawning throat of water.”

— Louise Erdrich

274. “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

275. “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

276. “So as usual, by getting rid of us, the Indian problem would be solved. Overnight the tribal chairman job had turned into a struggle to remain a problem. To not be solved.”

— Louise Erdrich

277. “The world was filling with ghosts. We were a haunted country in a haunted world.”

— Louise Erdrich

278. “This whole book was an excuse to get rid of Indians,” said Thomas.”

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

283. “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

284. “They both started laughing in that desperate high-pitched way people laugh when their hearts are broken.”

— Louise Erdrich

285. “She died instantly, said Kateri, implying she’d not had time to use a bookmark.”

— Louise Erdrich

286. “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

287. “The cold sap was a spring tonic. When you drank it, you shared the genius of the woods.”

— Louise Erdrich

288. “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

289. “It seemed to Thomas that the stars were drumming in the moonless deep.”

— Louise Erdrich

290. “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

291. “My dying tree reached toward the sky from its back down on earth. Its branches were like beseeching arms. It takes a while for life to leave green wood. I felt the helplessness, the lack of agency, the frustration of the tree. Severed from its roots, unable to taste the starlight.”

— Louise Erdrich

292. “You can never get enough of the ones you love, thought Thomas, rubbing his chest slowly, to vanquish the pains. “Here I have Biboon with me to this great old age, but I am greedy. I want him longer.”

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

294. “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

295. “The black sky was a poem beyond meaning.”

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

297. “The world was tender with significance. “Onizhishin, so beautiful,” Patrice murmured.”

— Louise Erdrich

298. “And yet deeper, far deeper, below those beings, there was the fire of creation, which had been buried at the center of the earth by stars.”

— Louise Erdrich

299. “I reached over and held Pollux’s wide hand as we slowly drove along. There was a slick of rain on the empty, peaceful streets. ‘Why can’t it always be this way?’ I asked Pollux. He gave me an odd look. I turned aside. The empty street swished beneath the tires. Perhaps I should have been ashamed. Why was it that I felt this was the world I’d always waited for?”

— Louise Erdrich

300. “If I stepped off a cliff in that heart of his, he’d catch me. He’d put me back in the sun.”

— Louise Erdrich