Top 350 Louise Erdrich Quotes (2026 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. “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

303. “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

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

— Louise Erdrich

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

— 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. “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

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

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

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

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

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

314. “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

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. “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

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

— Louise Erdrich

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

— 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. “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

321. “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

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

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

325. “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

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

— Louise Erdrich

327. “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

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

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

330. “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

331. “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

332. “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

333. “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

334. “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

335. “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

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

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

338. “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

339. “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

340. “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

341. “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

342. “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

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

— Louise Erdrich

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

— Louise Erdrich

345. “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

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

— Louise Erdrich

347. “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

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

— Louise Erdrich

349. “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

350. “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