Top 350 Louise Erdrich Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “Ugh. I stayed up to all hours,’ she said, sliding a book across the floor. Sometimes Jackie resented a perfectly good book because it ‘forced’ her to stay up all night. I was used to this. It was usually a sign of a literary page-turner – whether spy, sea, or horror – my favorite sort of book. She’d made me read Dennis Lehane, Donna Tartt, Stephen Graham Jones, Marcie R. Rendon, Kate Atkinson. She gave me The Death of the Heart and said, ‘It’s extremely good. Keep it.”

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

303. “Nothing makes Penstemon happier than handing a favorite book to someone who wants to read it. I’m the same. I suppose you could say this delights us although ‘delight’ is a word I rarely use. Delight seems insubstantial; happiness feels more grounded; ecstasy is what I shoot for; satisfaction is hardest to attain.”

— Louise Erdrich

304. “You’re forgetting. A people who see themselves primarily as victims are doomed. And we’re not doomed, are we?”

— Louise Erdrich

305. “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

306. “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

307. “He wondered if he would ever see the inside of one of those houses whose great windows blared sheaves of light. They made huge blurred spears that reached out into the balmy spring darkness.”

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

309. “She felt no guilt, and so concluded that if God sent none she would not invent any. She decided to miss Agnes as she would a beloved sister, to make of Father Damien her creation. He would be loving, protective, remote, and immensely disciplined. He would be Agnes’s twin, her masterwork, her brother.”

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

311. “With the postwar housing boom, the fabulous Klamath and Menominee forests were especially coveted. It is no coincidence that those tribes were among the first five slated for termination.”

— Louise Erdrich

312. “I suppose you could say this delights us although ‘delight’ is a word I rarely use. Delight seems insubstantial; happiness feels more grounded; ecstasy is what I shoot for; satisfaction is hardest to attain.”

— Louise Erdrich

313. “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

314. “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

315. “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

316. “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

317. “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

318. “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

319. “Roderick had never had so much company. And they were glad for somebody new. Glad he stayed behind. They argued with him. Why go back there? Who’s waiting for you?”

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

321. “Why couldn’t he bear down and concentrate? Because he was scared, that’s why.”

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

324. “She didn’t use any makeup but lipstick, a bright carmine red that emphasized everything she said.”

— Louise Erdrich

325. “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

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

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

328. “Barnes spent a lot of time driving the boys to matches with other towns – off-reservation towns where the crowds broke out fake war whoops and jeers when their hometown favorite lost.”

— Louise Erdrich

329. “As they plodded along, the golden radiance intensified until it seemed to emanate from every feature of the land.”

— Louise Erdrich

330. “I bounced around on top naturally. But that belly, yai! It grew big as a hill and I couldn’t see over it. I’d call out, Are you still back there? Holler to me! Like most fat Indians he did have a skinny butt. Man, those muscles in his back cheeks were powerful, too. He swung me around like a circus act. So I enjoyed him real well, those times were good. Awee, said Mooshum. His voice was wistful.”

— Louise Erdrich

331. “I love a good relish plate,” Wood Mountain said sincerely.”

— Louise Erdrich

332. “The warm metal, the gentle ridges, the rounded feminine base of the cap, were pleasant to hold.”

— Louise Erdrich

333. “Eau de Better Than Manure,” said Doris. “The farm girl’s friend.”

— Louise Erdrich

334. “We stayed away from the fact of Lark’s existence, or anything to do with our actual thoughts.”

— Louise Erdrich

335. “Budgie lay slack-jawed on stained pillows, squinting in perplexity at the stack of plastic containers in one corner. It was like he’d been mildly puzzled to death.”

— Louise Erdrich

336. “Betty thought the latch had popped by itself until someone outside said, “Could I have a minute of your time to tell you about the Lord’s plan for your soul?”

— Louise Erdrich

337. “When overcome with laughter, they lost all dignity, however, and choked, snorted, burped, wheezed, even farted, which made them ever more hysterical.”

— Louise Erdrich

338. “She was just glad he hadn’t come back to life, which did make her sad. How sad it was not to be sad.”

— Louise Erdrich

339. “They were sitting where Barnes always sat when he drove his boxers home and was asked, inevitably, in for a visit – the table central to eating, cooking, canning, drying, and processing foods, also playing pinochle and cribbage, bathing babies in dishpans, and visiting.”

— Louise Erdrich

340. “She gave him a look that would’ve shaved his face if he had whiskers.”

— Louise Erdrich

341. “Millie was talking about the classes she would take next semester. Patrice was listening to the titles of the classes. “What do I have to do to become a lawyer?” asked Patrice. Millie told her.”

— Louise Erdrich

342. “We try to press against the boundaries of what we are allowed, walk a step past the edge. Our records will be scrutinized by Congress one day and decisions on whether to enlarge our jurisdiction will be made.”

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

344. “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

345. “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

346. “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

347. “Marshall vested absolute title to the land in the government and gave Indians nothing more than the right of occupancy, a right that could be taken away at any time.”

— Louise Erdrich

348. “It had excited him enormously to be on fire.”

— Louise Erdrich

349. “We looked out over the lake. The sun was shards of brilliance. ‘It’s a poem out there,’ I said for some reason. ‘You should write it, Tookie. It’s yours.”

— Louise Erdrich

350. “Her voice was often heavy with dismissed hope.”

— Louise Erdrich