Louise Erdrich famous quotes

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. 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.
-- Louise Erdrich

#Love #Life #Strength

Things which do not grow and change are dead things.
-- Louise Erdrich

#Grows

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.
-- Louise Erdrich

#Wise #Heart #Trying

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.
-- Louise Erdrich

#Love You #Solitude #Earth

some people meet the way the sky meets the earth, inevitably, and there is no stopping or holding back their love. It exists in a finished world, beyond the reach of common sense.
-- Louise Erdrich

#Romantic #Sky #People

Love won't be tampered with, love won't go away. Push it to one side and it creeps to the other.
-- Louise Erdrich

#Love #Going Away #Sides

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

#Love You #Heart #Risk

Every so often something shatters like ice and we are in the river of our existence. We are aware.
-- Louise Erdrich

#Ice #Rivers #Chaos

I was in love with the whole world and all that lived in its rainy arms.
-- Louise Erdrich

#Rain #World #Arms

What happens when you let an unsatisfactory present go on long enough? It becomes your entire history.
-- Louise Erdrich

#Long #Goes On #Enough

Women are strong, strong, terribly strong. We don't know how strong until we are pushing out our babies. We are too often treated like babies having babies when we should be in training, like acolytes, novices to high priestesshood, like serious applicants for the space program.
-- Louise Erdrich

#Baby #Strong #Space

Women are strong, strong, terribly strong. We don't know how strong until we're pushing out our babies.
-- Louise Erdrich

#Baby #Strong #Pregnancy

Cold sinks in, there to stay. And people, they'll leave you, sure. There's no return to what was and no way back. There's just emptiness all around, and you in it, like singing up from the bottom of a well, like nothing else, until you harm yourself, until you are a mad dog biting yourself for sympathy. Because there is no relenting.
-- Louise Erdrich

#Dog #People #Mad

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

#Beautiful #Humble #Causes

So what is wild? What is wilderness? What are dreams but an internal wilderness and what is desire but a wildness of the soul?
-- Louise Erdrich

#Dream #Soul #Desire

Columbus only discovered that he was in some new place. He didn't discover America.
-- Louise Erdrich

#America #Columbus

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

#Perfection #Splendor #Tasks

We started dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall.
-- Louise Erdrich

#Fall #Snow #Dying

...Grandpa's mind had left us, gone wild and wary. When I walked with him I could feel how strange it was. His thoughts swam between us, hidden under rocks, disappearing in weeds, and I was fishing for them, dangling my own words like baits and lures.
-- Louise Erdrich

#Weed #Rocks #Fishing

How come we've got these bodies? They are frail supports for what we feel. There are times I get so hemmed in by my arms and legs I look forward to getting past them. As though death will set me free like a traveling cloud... I'll be out there as a piece of the endless body of the world feeling pleasures so much larger than skin and bones and blood.
-- Louise Erdrich

#Past #Clouds #Blood

Society is like this card game here, cousin. We got dealt our hand before we were even born, and as we grow we have to play as best as we can.
-- Louise Erdrich

#Cousin #Hands #Games

Women don't realize how much store men set on the regularity of their habits. We absorb their comings and goings into our bodies, their rhythms into our bones.
-- Louise Erdrich

#Men #Body #Realizing

Ravens are the birds I'll miss most when I die. If only the darkness into which we must look were composed of the black light of their limber intelligence. If only we did not have to die at all. Instead, become ravens.
-- Louise Erdrich

#Light #Ravens #Missing

When small towns find they cannot harm the strangest of their members, when eccentrics show resilience, they are eventually embraced and even cherished.
-- Louise Erdrich

#Resilience #Towns #Small Town

Your life feels different on you, once you greet death and understand your heart's position. You wear your life like a garment from the mission bundle sale ever after - lightly because you realize you never paid nothing for it, cherishing because you know you won't ever come by such a bargain again.
-- Louise Erdrich

#Live Life #Heart #Different

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

#Insulation

When we are young, the words are scattered all around us. As they are assembled by experience, so also are we, sentence by sentence, until the story takes shape.
-- Louise Erdrich

#Stories #Shapes #Young

To sew is to pray. Men don't understand this. They see the whole but they don't see the stitches. They don't see the speech of the creator in the work of the needle. We mend. We women turn things inside out and set things right. We salvage what we can of human garments and piece the rest into blankets. Sometimes our stitches stutter and slow. Only a woman's eyes can tell. Other times, the tension in the stitches might be too tight because of tears, but only we know what emotion went into the making. Only women can hear the prayer.
-- Louise Erdrich

#Prayer #Eye #Men

When every inch of the world is known, sleep may be the only wilderness that we have left.
-- Louise Erdrich

#Sleep #World #May

The greatest wisdom doesn't know itself. The richest plan is not to have one.
-- Louise Erdrich

#Plans #Greatest Wisdom

The world tips away when we look into our children's faces.
-- Louise Erdrich

#Children #Looks #World

So many things in the world have happened before. But it's like they never did. Every new thing that happens to a person, it's a first... In that night I felt expansion, as if the world was branching out in shoots and growing faster than the eye could see. I felt smallness, how the earth divided into bits and kept dividing. I felt stars.
-- Louise Erdrich

#Stars #Eye #Night

By the time I was done with the car it looked worse than any typical Indian car that has been driven all its life on reservation roads, which they always say are like government promises - full of holes.
-- Louise Erdrich

#Government #Car #Promise

A woman's body is the gate to this life. A man's body is the gate to the next life.
-- Louise Erdrich

#Men #Body #Next

We are never so poor that we cannot bless another human being, are we? So it is that every evil, whether moral or material, results in good. You'll see.
-- Louise Erdrich

#Evil #Moral #Poor

If life's a joke, then suicide's a bad punch line.
-- Louise Erdrich

#Suicide #Lines #Jokes

Numbers, time, inches, feet. All are just ploys for cutting nature down to size.
-- Louise Erdrich

#Nature #Cutting #Feet

Money helps, though not so much as you think when you don't have it.
-- Louise Erdrich

#Money #Thinking #Helping

Life is made up of three kinds of people -- those who live it, those afraid to, those in between.
-- Louise Erdrich

#Life #People #Three

At times the whole sky was ringed in shooting points and puckers of light gathering and falling, pulsing, fading, rhythmical as breathing. All of a piece. As if the sky were a pattern of nerves and our thought and memories traveled across it. As if the sky were one gigantic memory for us all.
-- Louise Erdrich

#Memories #Fall #Light

What men call adventures usually consist of the stoical endurance of appalling daily misery.
-- Louise Erdrich

#Adventure #Men #Endurance

Love. The black hook. The spear singing through the mind.
-- Louise Erdrich

#Love #Black #Mind

Veils of love which was only hate petrified by longing--that was me.
-- Louise Erdrich

#Hate #Veils #Longing