LELouise Erdrich

59 collected words

Louise Erdrich

Dates not recorded

Name supplied in the contributor-provided quotation collection. Basic attribution label; identity, lifetime and quotation authenticity have not been independently verified.

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Quotations and sayings

01Undated

He had a thousand-year-old stare.

Louise Erdrich / quote

02Undated

A woman's body is the gate to this life. A man's body is the gate to the next life.

Louise Erdrich / quote

03Undated

I think she is confused by the way I want her, which is like nobody else. I know this deep down. I want her in a new way, a way she's never been told about.

Louise Erdrich / quote

04Undated

The pattern glitters with cruelty. The blue beads are colored with fish blood, the reds with powdered heart. The beads collect in borders of mercy. The yellows are dyed with the ocher of silence. There is no telling which twin will fall asleep first, allowing the other's colors to dominate, for how long. The design grows, the overlay deepens. The beaders have no other order at the heart of their being. Do you know that the beads are sewn onto the fabric of the earth with endless strands of human muscle, human sinew, human hair? We are as crucial to this making as other animals. No more and no less important than the deer.

Louise Erdrich / quote

05Undated

Delphine witnessed awful things occurring to other humans. Worse than that, she was powerless to alter their fate. It would be that way all her life--disasters, falling like chairs all around her, falling so close they disarranged her hair, but not touching her.

Louise Erdrich / quote

06Undated

Old love, middle love, the kind of love that knows itself and knows that nothing lasts, is a desperate shared wildness.

Louise Erdrich / quote

07Undated

If, as I suspect, my body survives by uttering itself over and over again, then I have some questions. If [I] am one word, so are my daughters, so are all of us in strings and loops. Each life is one short word slowly uttered.

Louise Erdrich / quote

08Undated

Of course, English is a very powerful language, a colonizer's language and a gift to a writer. English has destroyed and sucked up the languages of other cultures - its cruelty is its vitality.

Louise Erdrich / quote

09Undated

For it was through books that she felt her life to be unjudged Look at all of the great mix-ups, messes, confinement, and double-dealings in Shakespeare, she thought.Identities disguised continually, in a combative dance of illusion and discovery.

Louise Erdrich / quote

10Undated

She gave her husband such a night of sexual pleasure that his eyes followed her constantly after that, narrow and hot. He grew molten when she passed near other men, and at night they made their own shaking tent. They got teased too much and moved farther off, into the brush, into the nesting ground of shy and holy loons. There, no one could hear them. In solitude they made love until they became gaunt and hungry, pale windigos with aching eyes, tongues of flame.

Louise Erdrich / quote

11Undated

Upon walking into Eva's kitchen, something profound happened to Delphine. She experienced a fabulous expansion of being. Light-headed, she felt a swooping sensation and then a quiet, as though she'd settled like a bird.

Louise Erdrich / quote

12Undated

And it occurred to me how even pulling trees that day, just months ago, I was in heaven. Unaware. I had known nothing even as the evil was occurring, I hadn't been touched yet.

Louise Erdrich / quote

13Undated

When small towns find they cannot harm the strangest of their members, when eccentrics show resilience, they are eventually embraced and even cherished.

Louise Erdrich / quote

14Undated

Then his head tipped down on his chest and he fell into the instant sleep of the ancient and the very young.

Louise Erdrich / quote

15Undated

White people covered the earth like lice.

Louise Erdrich / quote

16Undated

And how funny, strange, that a thing can grow so powerful even when planted in the wrong place. Ideas too, I muttered. Ideas.

Louise Erdrich / quote

17Undated

There will never come a time when I will be able to resist my emotions.

Louise Erdrich / quote

18Undated

Her mind was present because she was always gone. Her hands were filled because they grasped the meaning of empty. Life was simple. Her husband returned and she served him with indifferent patience this time. When he asked what had happened to her heat for him, she gestured to the west.The sun was setting. The sky was a body of fire.

Louise Erdrich / quote

19Undated

Emotions unreel in her like spools of cotton.

Louise Erdrich / quote

20Undated

Ravens are the birds I'll miss most when I die. If only the darkness into which we must look were composed of the black light of their limber intelligence. If only we did not have to die at all. Instead, become ravens.

Louise Erdrich / quote

21Undated

Life seems to flood by, taking our loves quickly in its flow. In the growth of children, in the aging of beloved parents, time's chart is magnified, shown in its particularity, focused, so that with each celebration of maturity there is also a pang of loss. This is our human problem, one common to parents, sons and daughters, too - how to let go while holding tight, how to simultaneously cherish the closeness and intricacy of the bond while at the same time letting out the raveling string, the red yarn that ties our hearts.

Louise Erdrich / quote

22Undated

I tried to get away from him, to get to that door, but instead I backed up against the wall and was stuck there in that white, white room.

Louise Erdrich / quote

23Undated

I stood there in the shadowed doorway thinking with my tears. Yes, tears can be thoughts, why not?

Louise Erdrich / quote

24Undated

I look down at my black Diablo, head on his paws. He is at my feet. He knows that he must trust to my forgiveness for his daily meat. So he wags his plumed tail and noses at my foot and I pat him gently. Affection, I tell him, is how a dog survives. Knowing how to exist without it is how a woman wrests her life into her own hands. But then it comes, it takes one by surprise. Affection and freedom and the will to risk. Everything that happened since I answered the door to Fleur was leading up to this.

Louise Erdrich / quote