Louise Erdrich Quotes

“some people meet the way the sky meets the earth, inevitably, and there is no stopping or holding back their love. It exists in a finished world, beyond the reach of common sense.”

“To love another human in all of her splendor and imperfect perfection, it is a magnificent task… tremendous and foolish and human.”

“We started dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall.”

“… don't read anything except what destroys the insulation between yourself and your experience…”

“Love won't be tampered with, love won't go away. Push it to one side and it creeps to the other.”

“Society is like this card game here, cousin. We got dealt our hand before we were even born, and as we grow we have to play as best as we can.”

“When we are young, the words are scattered all around us. As they are assembled by experience, so also are we, sentence by sentence, until the story takes shape.”

“We do know that no one gets wise enough to really understand the heart of another, though it is the task of our life to try.”

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

“Things which do not grow and change are dead things.”

“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.”

“What happens when you let an unsatisfactory present go on long enough? It becomes your entire history.”

“Now that I knew fear, I also knew it was not permanent. As powerful as it was, its grip on me would loosen. It would pass.”

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

“When every inch of the world is known, sleep may be the only wilderness that we have left.”

“… which causes me to wonder, my own purpose on so many days as humble as the spider's, what is beautiful that I make? What is elegant? What feeds the world?”

“Her clothes were filled with safety pins and hidden tears.”

“The only time I see the truth is when I cross my eyes.”

“We are never so poor that we cannot bless another human being, are we? So it is that every evil, whether moral or material, results in good. You'll see.”

“Our songs travel the earth. We sing to one another. Not a single note is ever lost and no song is original. They all come from the same place and go back to a time when only the stones howled.”

“Women don't realize how much store men set on the regularity of their habits. We absorb their comings and goings into our bodies, their rhythms into our bones.”

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

“What is this life but the sound of an appalling love.”