Top 350 Louise Erdrich Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “The only thing that God can do, and does all of the time, is to draw good from any evil situation.”

— Louise Erdrich

252. “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

253. “The beauty of the sensation was so intense that fear dropped away. It felt like a kind of birth. She opened her eyes. Sunlight through a foggy window. A green plant on a shelf. The dim delicious fall air. She was a new baby – skin frail as paper, arms weak as milk, brain forming shapes into thought.”

— Louise Erdrich

254. “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

255. “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

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

— Louise Erdrich

257. “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

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

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

— Louise Erdrich

261. “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

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

— Louise Erdrich

263. “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

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

— Louise Erdrich

265. “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

266. “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

267. “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

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

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

270. “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

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

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

273. “The Larks are the sort of people who trot out their relationships with “good Indians,” whom they secretly despise and openly patronize, in order to prove their general love for Indians, whom they are engaged in cheating.”

— Louise Erdrich

274. “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

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

— Louise Erdrich

276. “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

277. “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

278. “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

279. “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

280. “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

281. “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

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

— Louise Erdrich

283. “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

284. “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

285. “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

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

— Louise Erdrich

288. “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

289. “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

290. “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

291. “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

292. “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

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

— Louise Erdrich

294. “He often devised sentences that began with his favorite capitals. Rs and Qs were his art.”

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

296. “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

297. “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

298. “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

299. “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

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

— Louise Erdrich