Louise Erdrich Quotes

"Sita closed her eyes and breathed into her cupped hands. Before she left, she had remembered to perfume her wrist with Muguet.
The faint odor of that flower, so pure and close to the earth, was comforting. She had planted real lilies of the valley because she liked them so much as a perfume.
Just last fall, before the hard freeze, when she was feeling back to normal, the pips had arrived in a little white box. Her order from a nursery company. She'd put on her deerskin gloves and, on her knees, using a hand trowel, dug a shallow trench along the border of her blue Dwarf iris. Then one by one she'd planted the pips. They looked like shelled acorns, only tinier. "To be planted points upward," said a leaflet in the directions. They came up early in the spring. The tiny spears of their leaves would be showing soon.
Lying there, sleepless, she imaged their white venous roots, a mass of them fastening together, forming new shoots below the earth, unfurling their stiff leaves. She saw herself touching their tiny bells, waxed white, fluted, and breathing the ravishing fragrance they gave off because Louis had absently walked through her border again, dragging his shovel, crushing them with his big, careless feet.
It seemed as though hours of imaginary gardening passed before Mrs. Waldvogel tiptoed in without turning on the light."

once a person drops the scales of prejudiced certainty and doubts appear, there is no telling how far a heart can open. (p98)

The self will not be forced under, nor will the baby's needs gracefully retreat. The world tips away when we look into our children's faces. (p4)

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.

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

I hold his name close as my own blood and I will never let it out. I only spoke it that once so he would know he was alive.

...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?

I have always kept notebooks—I have an obsessive devotion to them—and I go back to them over and over. They are my compost pile of ideas.

"What is the question we spend our entire lives asking? Our question is this: Are we loved? I don’t mean by one another. Are we loved by the one who made us? Constantly, we look for evidence. In the gifts we are given—children, good weather, money, a happy marriage perhaps—we find assurance. In contrast, our pains, illnesses, the deaths of those we love, our poverty, our innocent misfortunes—those we take as signs that God has somehow turned away. But, my friends, what exactly is love here? How to define it? Does God’s love have anything at all to do with the lack or plethora of good fortune at work in our lives? Or is God’s love, perhaps, something very different from what we think we know?...If I am loved, it is a merciless and exacting love against which I have no defense. If I am not loved, then I am being pitilessly manipulated by a force I cannot withstand, either, and so it is all the same. I must do what I must do. Go in peace." (p227)

"You know any Mormons?" asked Martin Cross
"I don't think so."
"They haven't got to you. They'll come around yet. It's in their religion to change Indians into whites."
"I thought that was a government job."

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

There are ways of being abandoned even when your parents are right there.

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

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.

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.