Top 350 Louise Erdrich Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “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

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

— Louise Erdrich

253. “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

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

— Louise Erdrich

255. “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

256. “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

257. “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

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

— Louise Erdrich

259. “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

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

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

262. “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

263. “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

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

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

267. “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

268. “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

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

— Louise Erdrich

270. “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

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. “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

273. “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

274. “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

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

— Louise Erdrich

276. “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

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

— Louise Erdrich

278. “These are the decisions that I and many other tribal judges try to make. Solid decisions with no scattershot opinions attached. Everything we do, no matter how trivial, must be crafted keenly. We are trying to build a solid base here for our sovereignty.”

— Louise Erdrich

279. “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

280. “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

281. “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

282. “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

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

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

285. “One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh, but the earth abideth forever.”

— Louise Erdrich

286. “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

287. “The trees were having a last bedtime drink of the great waters that flowed along down there. Like him, before they went to sleep. Beneath that layer of water he sensed beings. They moved so slowly that humans were usually not aware of their existence. But he did feel their movements down in those regions. 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

288. “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

289. “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

290. “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

291. “So Patrice continued to ponder her feelings. She wasn’t, as she’d heard in a movie, swept away. But she didn’t want to live her life by movie examples.”

— Louise Erdrich

292. “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

293. “The services that the government provides to Indians might be likened to rent. The rent for use of the entire country of the United States.”

— Louise Erdrich

294. “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

295. “I heard your looking for your sis. My cousin lives in the Cities. She saw her and wrote to you – with her L hand because she broke her R finger pointing out my faults. That’s Genevieve for you. Watch the mail.”

— Louise Erdrich

296. “Everyone seems to have within themselves a collection of poems.”

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

298. “She slept hot just the way her words sometimes blew hot.”

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

300. “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