359 Quotes by Louise Erdrich

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

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.

The self will not be forced under, nor will the baby's needs gracefully retreat. The world tips away when we look into our children's faces.

Old love, middle love, the kind of love that knows itself and knows that nothing lasts, is a desperate shared wildness.

Soon she cried and farted herself to sleep.

Women without children are also the best of mothers,often, with the patience,interest, and saving grace that the constant relationship with children cannot always sustain. I come to crave our talk and our daughters gain precious aunts. 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 fortuante who feels witnessed as a peron,outside relationships with parents by another adult.

Only when you are secure enough not to fear immediate survival can you display creative intelligence in anything you do.

I did not choose solitude. Who would? It came on me like a kind of vocation, demanding an effort that married women can’t picture. Sometimes, even now, I look on the married girls the way a wild dog might look through the window at tame ones, envying the regularity of their lives but also despising the low pleasure they get from the master’s touch.

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