Louise Erdrich

"Getting blown up happened in an instant; getting put together took the rest of your life."

"In order to purify yourself, you have to understand yourself, Father Trais went on. Everything out in the world is also in you. Good, bad, evil, perfection, death, everything. So we study our souls. (p381)"

"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. (p384)"

"Now that I knew fear, I also knew it was not permanent. As powerful as it was, its grip on me would loosen. It would pass. (p400)"

"Any judge knows there are many kinds of justice—for instance, ideal justice as opposed to the best-we-can-do justice, which is what we end up with in making so many of our decisions. (p463)"

"When we're young, we think we are the only species worth knowing. But the more I come to know people, the better I like ravens. ("Revival Road")"

"Earth and sky touch everywhere and nowhere, like sex between two strangers. There is no definition and no union for sure. ("The Antelope Wife")"

"He also found that white people are good witnesses to have on your side since they have names, addresses, social security numbers, and work phones. But they are terrible witnesses to have against you, almost as bad as having Indians witness for you. ("Scales")"

"There are ways of being abandoned even when your parents are right there. (p203)"

"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. (p268)"

"We never talked about the future anymore — she refused to, and I had to accept that. The present was enough, though my work in the cemetery told me every day what happens when you let an unsatisfactory present go on long enough: it becomes your entire history. (p282)"

"When we’re young, we think we are the only species worth knowing. But the more I come to know people, the better I like ravens. (p15)"

"It is difficult for a woman to admit that she gets along with her own mother — somehow it seems a form of betrayal, at least, it used to among other women in my generation. To join the company of women, to be adults, we go through a period of proudly boasting of having survived our own mother's indifference, anger, overpowering love, the burden of her pain, her tendency to drink or teetotal, her warmth or coldness, praise or criticism, sexual confusions or embarrassing clarity. It isn't enough that she sweat, labored, bore her daughters howling or under total anesthesia or both. No. She must be responsible for our psychic weaknesses the rest of her life. It is alright to feel kinship with your father, to forgive. We all know that. But your mother is held to a standard so exacting that it has no principles. She simply must be to blame. (p20)"

"The contents of a house can trigger all sorts of revisions to family history. (p29)"

"There is very little said about how repetitious grief is. (p64)"

"They are patient with the gravity of their intent. Of their means of survival they've made these elegant webs, their beauty a by-product of their purpose. 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? (p77)"

"That's what the drum is about - it gathers people in and holds them. It looks after them. But like a person, things can go wrong in spite of all the best care. And this drum had its own history and sorrow. (p180)"

"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 have 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 too near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself that you tasted as many as you could. (p274)"

"Time is the water in which we live, and we breathe it like fish. It’s hard to swim against the current. Onrushing, inevitable, carried like a leaf, Fleur fooled herself in thinking she could choose her direction. But time is an element no human has mastered, and Fleur was bound to go where she was sent. Maybe in those long nights as she watched the crack of light beneath the door, she had an inkling. She thought revenge was behind that door, and satisfaction. Maybe she began to realize that she was wrong. There was only time. For what is a man, what are we all, but bits of time caught for a moment in a tangle of blood, bones, skin, and brain? She was time. Mauser was time. I am a sorry bit of time myself. We are time’s containers. Time pours into us and then pours out again. In between the two pourings we live our destiny. (p28)"

"And that was where the whiskey got hold of her. As it has with so many of us, even myself, the liquor sneaked up and grabbed her, got into her mind and talked to her, fooled her into thinking she was thinking for herself when really it was the whiskey thinking whiskey thoughts. (p75)"

"once a person drops the scales of prejudiced certainty and doubts appear, there is no telling how far a heart can open. (p98)"

"A man finds happiness so fleetingly, like the petals melting off a prairie rose. Even as you touch that feeling it dries up, leaving only the dust of that emotion, a powder of hope. (chapter 9, p99)"

"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. (p182)"

"Spent, she thought that there was no place as unknown as grief. (p38)"

""I have never seen the truth...without crossing my eyes. Life is crazy." (p135)"

"It was this immense resignation to the shape of his life that opened him every day to the experience of joy. (p140)"

"...comfort is not security and money in the hand disappears. He could have told her that only the land matters and never to let go of the papers, the titles, the tracks of the words, all those things that his ancestors never understood how the vital relationship to the dirt and grass under their feet. (p171)"

"Slowly and inevitably, she fell in love with each person in the family, only she didn’t know what to call it. She simply found herself related. (p184)"

"For it was through books that she felt her life to be unjudged Look at all of the great mix-ups, messes, confinement, and double-dealings in Shakespeare, she thought. Identities disguised continually, in a combative dance of illusion and discovery. Hers was hardly the most sinful, tragic, or bizarre. (p199)"

""What is the question we spend our entire lives asking? Our question is this: Are we loved? I don’t mean by one another. Are we loved by the one who made us? Constantly, we look for evidence. In the gifts we are given—children, good weather, money, a happy marriage perhaps—we find assurance. In contrast, our pains, illnesses, the deaths of those we love, our poverty, our innocent misfortunes—those we take as signs that God has somehow turned away. But, my friends, what exactly is love here? How to define it? Does God’s love have anything at all to do with the lack or plethora of good fortune at work in our lives? Or is God’s love, perhaps, something very different from what we think we know?...If I am loved, it is a merciless and exacting love against which I have no defense. If I am not loved, then I am being pitilessly manipulated by a force I cannot withstand, either, and so it is all the same. I must do what I must do. Go in peace." (p227)"

"Whenever he thought he knew the truth it merged into another truth. (p327)"

""To love another human in all of her splendor and imperfect perfection, it is a magnificent task...tremendous and foolish and human." (p331)"

"The only person left alive on the island was a baby girl. (first line)"

"If there is no laughter, the soul dies. (p186)"

"Although spring, with all the force of its poised new growth, called to her, although the tender new buds, opening magically, touched her heart, there would always be a shadow to her laughter, a corner of sadness in her smile. (p221)"

"Effortless. Easy. The lack of trying is what makes them lovely. We all try too hard. Striving wears down our edges, dulls the best of us. (p23)"

"I think she is confused by the way I want her, which is like nobody else. I know this deep down. I want her in a new way, a way she's never been told about. (p28)"

"All of our actions have in their doing the seed of their undoing. (p59)"

"[He] was a slim and handsome boy when he left, but his look when he returned was reeling and deathly. His face was puffed up and his eyes, they were like pits in his face. He had a thousand-year-old stare. (p131)"

"A woman's body is the gate to this life. A man's body is the gate to the next life. (p190)"

"...the world of grass was never meant to be shortened to a carpet so that the outdoors is like one big wall-to-wall room. (p225)"

"We live and work with a divided consciousness. It is a beautiful enough shock to fall in love with another adult, to feel the possibility of unbearable sorrow at the loss of that other, essential, personality, expressed just so, that particular touch. But love of an infant is of a different order. It is twinned love, all absorbing, a blur of boundaries and messages. It is uncomfortably close to self-erasure, and in the face of it one's fat ambitions, desperations, private icons, and urges fall away into a dreamlike before that haunts and forces itself into the present with tough persistence. (p4)"

"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. (p4)"

"Organized Christian religion is more often about denying the body when what we profoundly need are rituals that regard the blood, the shock, the heat, the shit, the anguish, the glory, the earnestness of the female body. (p47)"

"Life seems to flood by, taking our loves quickly in its flow. In the growth of children, in the aging of beloved parents, time's chart is magnified, shown in its particularity, focused, so that with each celebration of maturity there is also a pang of loss. This is our human problem, one common to parents, sons and daughters, too - how to let go while holding tight, how to simultaneously cherish the closeness and intricacy of the bond while at the same time letting out the raveling string, the red yarn that ties our hearts. (p69)"

"Laughter is our consolation prize for consciousness. (p81)"

"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 fortunate who feels witnessed as a person, outside relationships with parent, by another adult." (p162)"

"What are dreams but an internal wilderness and what is desire but a wildness of the soul? (p182)"

"When every inch of the world is known, sleep may be the only wilderness that we have left. (p190)"

"Sorrow eats time. Be patient. Time eats sorrow."