Louise Erdrich Quotes

writer from the United States

Add quote

Louise Erdrich (born Karen Louise Erdrich June 7, 1964) is an American author, novelist, poet, and children's author who features Native American themes in her writings. She is an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, a federally recognized tribe of Ojibwe people.

From: Wikiquote (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Alternative Names: Karen Louise Erdrich

From Wikidata (CC0)

...I let my thoughts run out like water from a dam. (p66)

The length of sky is just about the size of my ignorance. Pure and wide. (p40)

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)

But then as time passed, I learned the lesson that parents do early on. You fail sometimes. No matter how much you love your children, there are times you slip. There are moments you can't give, stutter, lose your temper, or simply lose face with the world, and you can't explain this to a child. (p236)

"Everything that ever happened to him in his life," she said, "all the things we said and did. Where did it go?" I didn't have an answer, so I just drove. Once I had caused a miracle by smashing my face on ice, but now I was an ordinary person. In the few miles we had left I could not help drawing out [her] strange idea in my mind. In my line of work I've seen thousands of brains that belonged to sheep, pork, steers. They were all gray lumps like ours. Where did everything go? What was really inside? The flat fields unfolded, the shallow ditches ran beside the road. I felt the live thoughts hum inside of me, and I pictured tiny bees, insects made of blue electricity, in a colony so fragile that it would scatter at the slightest touch. I imagined a blow, like a mallet to the sheep, or a stroke, and I saw the whole swarm vibrating out. Who could stop them? Who could catch them in their hands? (p203-4)

So that's how I came to Argus. I was the girl in the stiff coat. (first line)

Pain comes to us from deep back, from where it grew in the human body. Pain sucks more pain into it, we don't know why. It lives, and we harbor its weight. When the worst comes, we will not act the opposite. We will do what we were taught, we who learnt our lessons in the dead light. We pass them on. We hurt, and hurt others, in a circular motion. (p199)

We'll get to the truth quicker if we don't worry about logic. (p111)

[She] was one of those who took on too much in order to remain perpetually dissatisfied with herself. It worked — a plume of spent fuel trailed her days, headlong in concentration, and her nights were black. (p25)

You may be one kind of fool who never gets enough or another who gets too much. (p18)

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. (p6)

Each life is one short word slowly uttered. (p191)

When every inch of the world is known, sleep may be the only wilderness that we have left. (p190)

What are dreams but an internal wilderness and what is desire but a wildness of the soul? (p182)

Women who are not mothering their own children have the clarity and focus to see deeply into the character of children webbed by family. A child is fortunate who feels witnessed as a person, outside relationships with parent, by another adult." (p162)