359 Quotes by Louise Erdrich

I prefer to have some beliefs that don't make logical sense.

I don't pray. When I was young, I vowed I never would be caught begging God. If I want something I get it for myself. I go to church only to show the old hens they don't get me down.

Time is the water in which we live, and we breathe it like fish. ... Time pours into us and then pours out again. In between the two pourings we live our destiny.

But if there was embellishment, it only had to do with the facts.

Power travels in the bloodlines, handed out before birth.

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.

Her clothes were filled with safety pins and hidden tears.

It didn't occur to me that my books would be widely read at all, and that enabled me to write anything I wanted to. And even once I realized that they were being read, I still wrote as if I were writing in secret. That's how one has to write anyway--in secret.

You really need to approach each book as if you have been a failure. . . . If you start to believe your flap-copy, you're finished as a writer.