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Louise Erdrich Quotes

born 1964 United States

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.

United States
20th-century poets
Authors
Novelists

Random Louise Erdrich quote

41 quotes

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

LaRose (2016)

Sorrow eats time. Be patient. Time eats sorrow.

LaRose (2016)

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

The Blue Jay's Dance: A Birth Year (1996)

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

The Blue Jay's Dance: A Birth Year (1996)

Bits of narrative always cling to a title, like magnetism.

with The Paris Review (2010)

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

The Blue Jay's Dance: A Birth Year (1996)

If there is no laughter, the soul dies. (p186)

The Birch Bark House (1999)

English is a very powerful language, a colonizer’s language and a gift to a writer. English has destroyed and sucked up the languages of other cultures—its cruelty is its vitality.

with The Paris Review (2010)

The contents of a house can trigger all sorts of revisions to family history. (p29)

The Painted Drum (2005)

There are ways of being abandoned even when your parents are right there. (p203)

The Plague of Doves (2008)

All of our actions have in their doing the seed of their undoing. (p59)

The Antelope Wife (1998)

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

The Painted Drum (2005)

Laughter is our consolation prize for consciousness. (p81)

The Blue Jay's Dance: A Birth Year (1996)

I have never fully exorcised shames that struck me to the heart as a child except through written violence, shadowy caricature, and dark jokes.

with The Paris Review (2010)

The Ojibwe say that each word has a spirit.

with The Paris Review (2010)

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

The Bingo Palace (1994)

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

The Bingo Palace (1994)

"To love another human in all of her splendor and imperfect perfection, it is a magnificent task...tremendous and foolish and human." (p331)

The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (2001)

A woman's body is the gate to this life. A man's body is the gate to the next life. (p190)

The Antelope Wife (1998)

It was this immense resignation to the shape of his life that opened him every day to the experience of joy. (p140)

The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (2001)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Louise Erdrich (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.