Quotes by Louise Erdrich

“Love wont be tampered with, love wont go away. Push it to one side and it creeps to the other.”

“Columbus only discovered that he was in some new place. He didnt discover America.”

“Here I am, where I ought to be. A writer must have a place where he or she feels this, a place to love and be irritated with.”

“Hunger steals the memory”

“They were so strong in their beliefs that there came a time when it hardly mattered what exactly those beliefs were; they all fused into a single stubbornness”

“In our own beginnings, we are formed out of the bodys interior landscape, For a short while, our mothers bodies are the boundaries and personal geography which are all that we know of the world.”

“You know, some people fall right through the hole in their lives. Its invisible, but they come to it after time, never knowing where.”

“[She also tempers emotion with wry perspective. A woman driven to infamy by passion cannot have the man she loves.] As women have found since love began, ... she found she could live.”

“Youre talking about evolving a cuisine from a people whose cuisine has been whatever we could get for a long time.”

“It was enough just to sit there without words.”

Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone wont either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.

Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up.

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

For much of my life I was not acquainted with what may seem the obscure derivation of the adjective sincere. It is from two Latin words, sine, without, and cera, wax. What a rare thing it is to be treated without wax. My desire is always to conduct relationships based upon honest regard. As I sipped the last drops of beef tea I tried to enumerate moments stripped of pretense and all I could come up with was those efforts of mine, with brother-in-law, when he grasped my hand in desperate gratitude, unknowing, and allowed me to really see him. As I relived those moments of extremity, a strange thought met me unawares. Were I not to know him, or someone, some person, at this radical depth, I fear my time on earth would be hideous. I was surprised to think this. But it crossed my mind that to know others on a superficial level only is a desperate hell and life is worth living only if the veneer is stripped away, the polish, the wax, and we see the true grain of the other no matter how far less than perfect, even ugly, even savage at the heart.

Soon she cried and farted herself to sleep.

Freedom, I found is not only in the running but in the heart, the mind, the hands.

Snow stepped forward and slapped Josette, who slapped her back. Emmaline dropped the spoon and slapped them both - she had never slapped her child, or any child, before that moment. It happened so quickly - like a scene choreographed by the Three Stooges, which was what saved it. Emmaline started crying, then Snow. The three of them clung together.I want to cut off my hand, wept Emmaline. I never slapped you girls before.We should each cut our hands off, wailed Snow.Then making frybread two of us will have to stand together, you know, like each use our remaining hand, pat, pat. Josette and Snow demonstrated.Pat, pat, how pitiful, cry-laughed Emmaline.

To join the company of women, to be adults, we go through a period of proudly boasting of having survived our own mothers indifference, anger, overpowering love, the burden of her pain, her tendency to drink or teetotal, her warmth or coldness, praise or criticism, sexual confusions or embarrassing clarity. It isnt enough that she sweat, labored, bore her daughters howling or under total anesthesia or both. No. She must be responsible for our psychic weaknesses the rest of her life. It is alright to feel kinship with your father, to forgive. We all know that. But your mother is held to a standard so exacting that it has no principles. She simply must be to blame.

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

I shared with Fleur the mysterious self-contempt of the survivor. There were times we hated who we were, and who we had to become, in order not to follow those we loved into the next world. We grew hard. We became impenetrable, sparing of our pity. Sorrows that leveled other people were small to us. We made no move to avoid pain. Sometimes we even welcomed it--we were clumsy with knives, fire, boiling water, steel traps. Pain took our minds off the greater pain that was the mistake that we still existed.