Top 350 Louise Erdrich Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “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

302. “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

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

— Louise Erdrich

304. “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

305. “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

306. “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

307. “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

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

— Louise Erdrich

309. “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

310. “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

311. “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

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

— Louise Erdrich

313. “It was like he’d been mildly puzzled to death.”

— Louise Erdrich

314. “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

315. “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

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

— Louise Erdrich

317. “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

318. “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

319. “I’m still not strictly rational. How could I be? I sell books.”

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

321. “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

322. “You’re not very trusting. Are you sure you haven’t been around here before?” “My dad is a drunk.” “Oh, I get it,” said Jack. “Mine was too.”

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

325. “Sometimes I dream I am a man,” said Millie, which was the sort of statement neither of them could meet with a response.”

— Louise Erdrich

326. “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

327. “Did he like celery?’ ‘Does anybody?”

— Louise Erdrich

328. “And Patrice thought another thing her mother said was definitely true – you never really knew a man until you told him you didn’t love him.”

— Louise Erdrich

329. “With a lot of boiling, you could eat them.”

— Louise Erdrich

330. “So along with the whiskey and perfume and smoke, she often exuded faint undertones of hay, dust, and the fragrance of horse, which once you smell it you always miss it. Humans were meant to live with the horse.”

— Louise Erdrich

331. “These official men with their satisfied soft faces. He hated their approval just as much as he hated their condescension. And yet this truth was buried so deep inside him that its expression only emerged, in their presence, as a friendly smile.”

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

333. “Sometimes it was exhilarating to be needed.”

— Louise Erdrich

334. “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

335. “The world was tender with significance.”

— Louise Erdrich

336. “The jittery focus, the devastated shelves, a couple of fights breaking out over paper towels, a swarm descending on an employee trying to restock toilet paper, madness in people’s eyes – it was like the beginning of every show where the streets empty and some grotesque majestic entity emerges from mist or fire.”

— Louise Erdrich

337. “And now we’re putting another man in the earth. Maybe a drunk, but he wasn’t always a drunk.”

— Louise Erdrich

338. “That’s what a drum is all about – it gathers people in and holds them.”

— Louise Erdrich

339. “There are Indian grandmas who get too much church and Indian grandmas where the church doesn’t take, and who are let loose in their old age to shock the young. Zack had one of those last sort.”

— Louise Erdrich

340. “He squeezed her hand. She squeezed his hand back. That’s how they sometimes talked.”

— Louise Erdrich

341. “The snow had come down in the night, heavily, covering everything. Millie knew the moment she opened her eyes. The air inside was different, filled with a cold radiance. It was a struggle to leave her bed beside the radiator.”

— Louise Erdrich

342. “What we’re living through is either unreal or too real.”

— Louise Erdrich

343. “The piano had taken a year or more to make of woods, she knew, collected and seasoned by the craftsmen, each type destined for a different piece of the sounding board and trim. Time was in the wood. Time was in the hammers. Time was the existence of the piano. Time was the human who had voiced the piano, who had balanced the keys, shaped, hardened, softened each hammer.”

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

346. “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

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

— Louise Erdrich

348. “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

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

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich