359 Quotes by Louise Erdrich

Girls were not named for flowers, as flowers died so quickly. Girls were named for deathless things – forms of light, forms of cloud, shapes of stars, that which appears and disappears like an island on the horizon.

Because everything was alive, responsive in its own way, capable of being hurt in its own way, capable of punishment in its own way, Zhaanat’s thinking was built on treating everything around her with great care.

Why do the chimookomanag want us?” she growled. “They take all that makes us Anishinaabeg. Everything about us. First our land, then our trees. Now husbands, our wives, our children, our souls. Why do they want to capture every bit?

The gun jammed on the last shot and the baby stood holding the crib rail, eyes wild, bawling.

The whiskey had its own mind. Or spirit, he said. A cunning spirit. Sometimes it fooled him. Sometimes it set him free.

I think about seventy percent of my depression was my seventeenth-century warrior trying to get out.

She slowed to pick her way through places where water was seeping up through the mats of dying grass. Rain tapping through the brilliant leaves the only sound. She stopped. The sense of something there, with her, all around her, swirling and seething with energy. How intimately the trees seized the earth. How exquisitely she was included. Patrice closed her eyes and felt a tug. Her spirit poured into the air like song.

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.

The heavy winds couldn’t blow her off course. She continued. Even when her heart clenched and her skin turned crackling cold it didn’t matter, because the pure and naked part of her went on.