Top 350 Louise Erdrich Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “Delight seems insubstantial; happiness feels more grounded; ecstasy is what I shoot for; satisfaction is hardest to attain.”

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

306. “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

307. “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

308. “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

309. “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

310. “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

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

— Louise Erdrich

312. “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

313. “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

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

— Louise Erdrich

315. “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

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

— Louise Erdrich

317. “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

318. “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

319. “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

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

— Louise Erdrich

321. “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

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

— Louise Erdrich

323. “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

324. “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

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

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

328. “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

329. “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

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

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

332. “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

333. “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

334. “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

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

— Louise Erdrich

336. “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

337. “The world was tender with significance.”

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

340. “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

341. “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

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

— 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 squeezed her hand. She squeezed his hand back. That’s how they sometimes talked.”

— Louise Erdrich

345. “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

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

— Louise Erdrich

347. “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

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

— Louise Erdrich

349. “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

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

— Louise Erdrich