359 Quotes by Louise Erdrich

The buffalo were taking leave of the earth and all they loved,” said the old chiefs and hunters after years had passed and they could tell what split their hearts. “The buffalo went crazy with grief to see the end of things. Like us, they saw the end of things and like many of us, many today, they did not care to live.

Just as he dropped with a jerk into the pit of unconsciousness, he thought how odd it was that he was falling asleep in his sleep. When he entered the dream that he was dreaming, later, it was a dream within the dream he dreamed originally when he lay down in his bed.

TO LOVE Nanapush, to love at all, is like trying to remember the tune and words to a song that the spirits have given you in your sleep. Some days, I knew exactly how the song went and some days I couldn’t even hum the first line.

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.

They dance together in a line, murmuring in swift, low voices, smiling carefully as they are too proud to give away their beauty. They are light steppers with a gravity of sure grace.

What I am doing now is for the future, though it may seem small, or trivial, or boring, to you.

In the darkness, she wound herself into the blanket still more tightly. She was swaddled, confined, protected from herself – as in a very exclusively privately run mental hospital devoted solely to the care of one person: Nola. She fell asleep bothered only by the nagging thought that she would have to start all over in the morning. Existence whined in her head like a mosquito. Then she swatted it. Rode the tide of her comfort down into the earth.

I thought how we might have to yell to be heard by Higher Power, but that’s not saying it’s not there. And that is faith for you. It’s belief even when the gods don’t deliver.

We Anishinaabeg are the keepers of the names of the earth. And unless the earth is called by the names it gave us humans, won’t it cease to love us? And isn’t it true that if the earth stops loving us, everyone, not just the Anishinaabeg, will cease to exist? That is why we all must speak our language, nindinawemagonidok, and call everything we see by the name of its spirit. Even the chimookomanag, who are trying to destroy us, are depending upon us to remember. Mi’sago’i.