Louise Erdrich

"Each life is one short word slowly uttered. (p191)"

"We do know that no one gets wise enough to really understand the heart of another, though it is the task of our life to try. (p6)"

"You may be one kind of fool who never gets enough or another who gets too much. (p18)"

"[She] was one of those who took on too much in order to remain perpetually dissatisfied with herself. It worked — a plume of spent fuel trailed her days, headlong in concentration, and her nights were black. (p25)"

"We'll get to the truth quicker if we don't worry about logic. (p111)"

"Pain comes to us from deep back, from where it grew in the human body. Pain sucks more pain into it, we don't know why. It lives, and we harbor its weight. When the worst comes, we will not act the opposite. We will do what we were taught, we who learnt our lessons in the dead light. We pass them on. We hurt, and hurt others, in a circular motion. (p199)"

"So that's how I came to Argus. I was the girl in the stiff coat. (first line)"

""Everything that ever happened to him in his life," she said, "all the things we said and did. Where did it go?" I didn't have an answer, so I just drove. Once I had caused a miracle by smashing my face on ice, but now I was an ordinary person. In the few miles we had left I could not help drawing out [her] strange idea in my mind. In my line of work I've seen thousands of brains that belonged to sheep, pork, steers. They were all gray lumps like ours. Where did everything go? What was really inside? The flat fields unfolded, the shallow ditches ran beside the road. I felt the live thoughts hum inside of me, and I pictured tiny bees, insects made of blue electricity, in a colony so fragile that it would scatter at the slightest touch. I imagined a blow, like a mallet to the sheep, or a stroke, and I saw the whole swarm vibrating out. Who could stop them? Who could catch them in their hands? (p203-4)"

"But then as time passed, I learned the lesson that parents do early on. You fail sometimes. No matter how much you love your children, there are times you slip. There are moments you can't give, stutter, lose your temper, or simply lose face with the world, and you can't explain this to a child. (p236)"

"All that held him together now was the crowd, and when the parade was finally over and they drew apart he would disperse, too, in so many pieces that not even the work of his own clever hands could shape him back the way he was. (p315)"

"The length of sky is just about the size of my ignorance. Pure and wide. (p40)"

"...I let my thoughts run out like water from a dam. (p66)"

"Time was rushing around me like water around a big wet rock. The only difference is, I was not so durable as stones. Very quickly I would be smoothed away. It was happening already. (p94)"

"You know, some people fall right through the hole in their lives. It's invisible, but they come to it after time, never knowing where. (p190)"

"I had gotten humble in the past week, not just losing the touch but getting jolted into the understanding that would prey on me from here on out. Your life feels different on you, once you greet death and understand your heart's position. You wear your life like a garment from the mission bundle sale ever after -- lightly because you realize you never paid nothing for it, cherishing because you know you won't ever come by such a bargain again. Also, you have the feeling someone wore it before you and someone will after. I can't explain that, not yet, but I'm putting my mind to it. (p213)"

"And so when they tell you that I was heartless, a shameless man-chaser, don't ever forget this: I loved what I saw. And yes, it is true that I've done all the things they say. That's not what gets them. What aggravates them is I've never shed one solitary tear. I'm not sorry. (p217)"

"All through my life I never did believe in human measurement. Numbers, time, inches, feet. All are just ploys for cutting nature down to size. I know the grand scheme of the world is beyond our brains to fathom, so I don't try, just let it in. (p221)"

""...Society is like this card game here, cousin. We got dealt our hand before we were even born, and as we grow we have to play as best as we can." (p263)"

"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. To be a son of a father was like that. 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 the stars. I felt them roosting on my shoulders with his hand. The moon came up red and warm. (p271)"

"(Did you feel you weren't finding yourself in the books you read?) LE: Perhaps that's why I was drawn to science fiction. If you don't see yourself reflected, you can travel to another world. I suppose that was probably what drew me to the captivity narrative. This idea that this was telling me something about my family."

"I started Future Home of the Living God sometime after the 2000 U.S. election. I was furious and worried. I saw the results of electing George W. Bush as a disaster for reproductive rights. Sure enough, he began by reinstating the global gag rule, which cuts international funding for contraceptives if abortion is mentioned. This, when we face overpopulation."

"(What moves you most in a work of literature?) Reading about an ordinary person who behaves with integrity in a terrifying situation. (2016)"

"Nothing. I was a model child. It was the teacher’s mistake I am sure. The box was drawn on the blackboard and the names of misbehaving children were written in it. As I adored my teacher, Miss Smith, I was destroyed to see my name appear. This was just the first of the many humiliations of my youth that I’ve tried to revenge through my writing. I have never fully exorcised shames that struck me to the heart as a child except through written violence, shadowy caricature, and dark jokes."

"These treaties had been made since the beginning of our country on a nation-to-nation basis with every tribe. And they all contain these words, as long as the grass grows, as long as the rivers flow."

"I'm a very mixed person. And yet, being a citizen of a nation within our nation gives one a certain sense of - it changes your life. It means that I care deeply about my people, my mother's people."

"The reasoning behind the best schools being far away was to assimilate native children, to train them to live in a culture that was very different from their parents. So that when they came home, often children couldn't speak the language that their parents were speaking. I have to say right here that boarding schools are often characterized in sort of a lump definition, but they were all very different. And the government had secular boarding schools which underwent a real sea change in the 1930s and became much more supportive of native culture, while many of the boarding schools which were run by religious groups did not and remained hostile to native religion and native culture."

"I've been asked by people, well, why wasn't that great? Why didn't people just want to move away from their reservation and become like everybody else? You know, I've been asked that question. It's a fair question. And the answer is because native people aren't like everybody else, and native people want to stay who we are, right? And that's because the government made a very firm decision not to put money into the infrastructure on reservations, not to keep the treaties. The treaties stated that they would provide for health, education and the general welfare of native people as they struggled into this new form of existence. And that was basically rent for all that the rest of the country enjoys; all of the lands, all of the rivers, all of the places that no longer belonged to Native Americans."

"Now there is a lot more awareness about missing and murdered Indigenous women. And it hasn't - of course, it hasn't stopped. It's probably gotten worse."

"If you should ever doubt that a series of dry words in a government document can shatter spirits and demolish lives, let this book (The Night Watchman) erase that doubt. Conversely, if you should be of the conviction that we are powerless to change those dry words, let this book give you heart."

"I have never fully exorcised shames that struck me to the heart as a child except through written violence, shadowy caricature, and dark jokes."

"The Ojibwe say that each word has a spirit."

"English is a very powerful language, a colonizer’s language and a gift to a writer. English has destroyed and sucked up the languages of other cultures—its cruelty is its vitality."

"I’ve come to love the traditional Ojibwe ceremonies, and some rituals, but I hate religious rules. They are usually about controlling women. On Sundays when other people go to wood-and-stone churches, I like to take my daughters into the woods. Or at least work in the garden and be outside. Any god we have is out there. I’d hate to be certain that there was nothing. When it comes to God, I cherish doubt."

"People assume there is just one sort of Native experience. No."

"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."

"I suppose one develops a number of personas and hides them away, then they pop up during writing. The exertion of control comes later. I take great pleasure in writing when I get a real voice going and I’m able to follow the voice and the character. It’s like being in a trance state. Once that had happened a few times, I knew I needed to write for the rest of my life. I began to crave the trance state. I would be able to return to the story anytime, and it would play out in front of me, almost effortlessly."

"All of the books will be connected somehow—by history and blood and by something I have no control over, which is the writing itself. The writing is going to connect where it wants to, and I will have to try and follow along."

"By having children, I’ve both sabotaged and saved myself as a writer. I hate to ­pigeonhole myself as a writer, but being a female and a mother and a Native American are important aspects of my work, and even more than being mixed blood or Native, it’s difficult to be a mother and a writer...It’s because you’re ­always fighting sentiment. You’re fighting sentimentality all of the time ­because being a mother alerts you in such a primal way. You are alerted to any danger to your child, and by extension you become afraid of anybody getting hurt. This becomes the most powerful thing to you; it’s instinctual. Either you end up writing about terrible things happening to children—as if you could ward them off simply by writing about them—or you tie things up in easily opened packages, or you pull your punches as a writer. All deadfalls to watch for...having children has also made me this particular writer. Without my children, I’d have written with less fervor; I wouldn’t understand life in the same way. I’d write fewer comic scenes, which are the most challenging. I’d probably have become obsessively self-absorbed, or slacked off. Maybe I’d have become an alcoholic. Many of the writers I love most were alcoholics. I’ve made my choice, I sometimes think: Wonderful children instead of hard liquor."

"Bits of narrative always cling to a title, like magnetism."

"I have always kept notebooks—I have an obsessive devotion to them—and I go back to them over and over. They are my compost pile of ideas."

"(A journalist once asked you what advice you would give someone trying to write a novel. You said, “Don’t take the project too seriously.” Is that what you would say today?) LE: I think I meant that grand ideas kill first efforts. Begin with something in your range. Then write it as a secret. I’d be paralyzed if I thought I had to write a great novel, and no matter how good I think a book is on one day, I know now that a time will come when I will look upon it as a failure. The gratification has to come from the effort itself. I try not to look back. I approach the work as though, in truth, I’m nothing and the words are everything. Then I write to save my life. If you are a writer, that will be true. Writing has saved my life...I needed a way to go at life. I needed meaning. I might have chosen something more self-destructive had I not found writing."

"If I am writing a novel, it casts an aura around me and I get ideas for it, descriptions, words, phrases, at all times. I’m always jotting in notebooks I keep with me. That delight of immersion in a book is as good as a trance. For a while, the book is so powerful that I can follow the thread even through my chaotic daily existence, with children at all hours, school, dinner, long calls to my daughters, my ever-demanding house, barking dogs, and the bookstore."

"Any good business is about its people."

"People need bookstores and need other readers. We need the intimate communication with others who love books. We don’t really think we do, because of the ease that the Internet has introduced, but we still need the physical world more than we know."

"There’s something very wrong in our country—and not just in the book business. We now see what barely fettered capitalism looks like. We are killing the small and the intimate. We all feel it and we don’t know quite why everything is beginning to look the same. The central cores of large cities can still sustain interesting places. But all across our country we are intent on developing chain after chain with no character and employees who work for barely livable wages. We are losing our individuality. Killing the soul of our landscape. Yet we’re supposed to be the most individualistic of countries. I feel the sadness of it every time I go through cities like Fargo and Minneapolis and walk the wonderful old Main Streets and then go out to the edges and wander through acres of concrete boxes. Our country is starting to look like Legoland."

"(Is writing a lonely life for you?) LE: Strangely, I think it is. I am surrounded by an abundance of family and friends, and yet I am alone with the writing. And that is perfect."

"When I moved to Minnesota, I found there was a thriving and determined movement, a grassroots movement, to revitalize the Ojibwe language. And I’ve never come to be a competent speaker, I have to say that right now. But even learning the amount of Ojibwe that one can at my age is a life-altering experience. (BM: How so?) LE: You see the world in a different way. And to be told that you’re working in a language in which there is a spirit behind this language. I think it has to do with this being one of the indigenous languages of this continent. In which, as you look around, you see the forms of things that were named long, long ago. And you see the forms of things that have been named relatively recently. You know, this is…"

"(BM: Your cultures, plural, keep competing within your imagination, don’t they?...Where do your ideas come from, if you have this constant interplay between these many cultures?) LE: You know, I live on the margin of just about everything. I’m a marginal person, and I think that is where I’ve become comfortable. I’m marginally there in my native life. I can do as much as I can, but I’m always German too, you know, and I’m always a mother. That’s my first identity, but I’m always a writer too. I have to write. I have to be an artist. You know, I have a very fractured inner life, I think."

"…we rationalize ourselves out of shame. We can rationalize anything away as we get older and older, but a child hasn’t that capacity yet. And so when the shame hits, it’s being knocked over. And it’s the truth of shame. And it’s what comes back to us. Sometimes when we are—and it—this is what happens to everybody. There’s going to be a time, no matter who we are, that we participate in the very oldest of human sorrows. We are at one with other people in our loss, in our shame, and we come to the very limit of who we are as people. We face that part of ourselves that we never wanted to look at. And then we experience shame the way a child experiences it…It’s pure. It’s pure and that moment and other moments like it link us with other human beings, I think."

"a mother is a frayed net, you know. We stretch ourselves over everything we can. But there’s holes all over the place where things get through and we do everything we can and fathers and—you know, as parents, we try so hard. But we can’t do it all. We can’t completely protect. I think in a very odd sense, I want things to be in ordinary for my children, routine. I want things to be simple, you know, for them to cope with. But that’s not what the world is like. And that’s not even what they want. They want to grow. They want to grow in every way that they possibly can and that’s going to involve pain."