Louise Erdrich Quotes

By having children, I’ve both sabotaged and saved myself as a writer. I hate to ­pigeonhole myself as a writer, but being a female and a mother and a Native American are important aspects of my work, and even more than being mixed blood or Native, it’s difficult to be a mother and a writer...It’s because you’re ­always fighting sentiment. You’re fighting sentimentality all of the time ­because being a mother alerts you in such a primal way. You are alerted to any danger to your child, and by extension you become afraid of anybody getting hurt. This becomes the most powerful thing to you; it’s instinctual. Either you end up writing about terrible things happening to children—as if you could ward them off simply by writing about them—or you tie things up in easily opened packages, or you pull your punches as a writer. All deadfalls to watch for...having children has also made me this particular writer. Without my children, I’d have written with less fervor; I wouldn’t understand life in the same way. I’d write fewer comic scenes, which are the most challenging. I’d probably have become obsessively self-absorbed, or slacked off. Maybe I’d have become an alcoholic. Many of the writers I love most were alcoholics. I’ve made my choice, I sometimes think: Wonderful children instead of hard liquor.

The only answer to this, and it isn't an entire answer, said Father Travis, is that God made human beings free agents. We are able to choose good over evil, but the opposite too. And in order to protect our human freedom, God doesn't often, very often at least, intervene. God can't do that without taking away our moral freedom. Do you see?

No. But yeah.

The only thing that God can do, and does all of the time, is to draw good from any evil situation.

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

(BM: Your cultures, plural, keep competing within your imagination, don’t they?...Where do your ideas come from, if you have this constant interplay between these many cultures?) LE: You know, I live on the margin of just about everything. I’m a marginal person, and I think that is where I’ve become comfortable. I’m marginally there in my native life. I can do as much as I can, but I’m always German too, you know, and I’m always a mother. That’s my first identity, but I’m always a writer too. I have to write. I have to be an artist. You know, I have a very fractured inner life, I think.

I need a word, a sentence. The door is open. Go.

Ever since I understood this life was to be mine, I have wanted only for it to continue in its precious routine.

You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart.

There is very little said about how repetitious grief is. (p64)

one explanation did not rule out the other, that charged electrons could be spirits, that nothing ruled out anything else, that mathematics was a rigorous form of madness,

There’s a word for your impulse, Louise. Cacoëthes, I said to her. The urge to do something somewhat wrong. Not something unspeakable or horrific. Just something you know is a bad idea.

Any good business is about its people.

All that held him together now was the crowd, and when the parade was finally over and they drew apart he would disperse, too, in so many pieces that not even the work of his own clever hands could shape him back the way he was. (p315)

Exactly right — folded quietly and knitted in right along with the working DNA there is a shadow self. This won’t surprise poets. We carry our own genetic doubles, at least in part.

"After a while, I asked who was in charge. Phil said God. I said that was the most terrifying thing I'd ever heard and he said, "Yeah, me too. That's why I bought the Bushmaster.

...don't read anything except what destroys the insulation between yourself and your experience...