Getting blown up happened in an instant; getting put together took the rest of your life. - Louise Erdrich

I love statistics because they place what happens to a scrap of humanity, like me, on a worldwide scale.

What I’m trying to say is that a certain sentence of the book — a written sentence, a very powerful sentence — killed Flora.’ Louise was silent. After a few moments she spoke. ‘I wish I could write a sentence like that.

a mother is a frayed net, you know. We stretch ourselves over everything we can. But there’s holes all over the place where things get through and we do everything we can and fathers and—you know, as parents, we try so hard. But we can’t do it all. We can’t completely protect. I think in a very odd sense, I want things to be in ordinary for my children, routine. I want things to be simple, you know, for them to cope with. But that’s not what the world is like. And that’s not even what they want. They want to grow. They want to grow in every way that they possibly can and that’s going to involve pain.