110+ Louise Erdrich Quotes On Friendship, Education And Writing

Louise Erdrich is an American writer of novels, poetry, and children's books featuring Native American characters and settings. She is an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, a federally recognized tribe of the Anishinaabe (also known as Ojibwe and Chippewa). Erdrich has received numerous awards for her writing, including the National Book Award for Fiction in 2012. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Louise Erdrich on life, love, friendship.

Top 10 Louise Erdrich Quotes

1. What happens when you let an unsatisfactory present go on long enough? It becomes your entire history.
2. Things which do not grow and change are dead things.
3. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart.
4. some people meet the way the sky meets the earth, inevitably, and there is no stopping or holding back their love. It exists in a finished world, beyond the reach of common sense.
5. Love won't be tampered with, love won't go away. Push it to one side and it creeps to the other.
6. So what is wild? What is wilderness? What are dreams but an internal wilderness and what is desire but a wildness of the soul?
7. Columbus only discovered that he was in some new place. He didn't discover America.
8. It's impossible to write about Native life without humor-that's how people maintain sanity.
9. I was in love with the whole world and all that lived in its rainy arms.
10. Women are strong, strong, terribly strong. We don't know how strong until we're pushing out our babies.

Louise Erdrich Short Quotes

• There are ways of being abandoned even when your parents are right there.
• I feel myself becoming less a person than a place, inhabited, a foreign land.
• The greatest wisdom doesn't know itself. The richest plan is not to have one.
• It was just enough to sit there without words.
• I tried out the unfamiliar syllables. They fit. They cracked in my ears like a fist through ice.
• People forget the good, because the bad has more punch.
• Life is made up of three kinds of people -- those who live it, those afraid to, those in between.
• All of our actions have in their doing the seed of their undoing.
• Sometimes a person's monstrosity seems superhuman.
• Numbers, time, inches, feet. All are just ploys for cutting nature down to size.

Louise Erdrich Quotes About Life

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. — Louise Erdrich

To be of mixed blood is a great gift for a writer. I have one foot on tribal lands and one foot in middle-class life. — Louise Erdrich

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. — Louise Erdrich

Each life is one short word slowly uttered. — Louise Erdrich

Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that. — Louise Erdrich

What is this life but the sound of an appalling love. — Louise Erdrich

If life's a joke, then suicide's a bad punch line. — Louise Erdrich

A woman's body is the gate to this life. A man's body is the gate to the next life. — Louise Erdrich

We all got holes in our lives. Nobody dies in a perfect garment. — Louise Erdrich

By the time I was done with the car it looked worse than any typical Indian car that has been driven all its life on reservation roads, which they always say are like government promises - full of holes. — Louise Erdrich

Louise Erdrich Quotes About Love

You see I thought love got easier over the years so it didn't hurt so bad when it hurt, or feel so good when it felt good. I thought it smoothed out and old people hardly noticed it. I thought it curled up and died, I guess. Now I saw it rear up like a whip and lash. — Louise Erdrich

We are conjured voiceless out of nothing and must return to an unknowing state. What happens in between is an uncontrolled dance, and what we ask for in love is no more than a momentary chance to get the steps right, to move in harmony until the music stops. — Louise Erdrich

Love. The black hook. The spear singing through the mind. — Louise Erdrich

To think about love and passion and political correctness all together, it doesn't work. Art has to go way past the political to be effective. — Louise Erdrich

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. — Louise Erdrich

Here I am, where I ought to be. A writer must have a place where he or she feels this, a place to love and be irritated with. — Louise Erdrich

Be lovely and do no harm. — Louise Erdrich

Old love, middle love, the kind of love that knows itself and knows that nothing lasts, is a desperate shared wildness. — Louise Erdrich

Veils of love which was only hate petrified by longing--that was me. — Louise Erdrich

To love another another human in all of her splendor and imperfect perfection , it is a magnificent task...tremendous and foolish and human. — Louise Erdrich

Louise Erdrich Quotes About Writing

It kills your writing if you try to manipulate it with crude politics. — Louise Erdrich

I spend most of my time writing. — Louise Erdrich

I have brothers and was a tomboy, if that's still a designation. It wasn't a stretch for me to think and write as a 13-year-old boy - it is freeing. — Louise Erdrich

By writing I can live in ways that I could not survive. — Louise Erdrich

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. — Louise Erdrich

Louise Erdrich Quotes About Death

I got well by talking. Death could not get a word in edgewise, grew discouraged, and traveled on. — Louise Erdrich

All of our actions have in their doing the seed of their undoing. ... That in her creation of her children there should be the unspeakable promise of their death, for by their birth she had created mortal beings. — Louise Erdrich

Death is the least civilized rite of passage. — Louise Erdrich

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. — Louise Erdrich

Your life feels different on you, once you greet death and understand your heart's position. — Louise Erdrich

Louise Erdrich Famous Quotes And Sayings

Cold sinks in, there to stay. And people, they'll leave you, sure. There's no return to what was and no way back. There's just emptiness all around, and you in it, like singing up from the bottom of a well, like nothing else, until you harm yourself, until you are a mad dog biting yourself for sympathy. Because there is no relenting. — Louise Erdrich

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 are here 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 near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could. — Louise Erdrich

Ravens are the birds I'll miss most when I die. If only the darkness into which we must look were composed of the black light of their limber intelligence. If only we did not have to die at all. Instead, become ravens. — Louise Erdrich

Her mind was present because she was always gone. Her hands were filled because they grasped the meaning of empty. Life was simple. Her husband returned and she served him with indifferent patience this time. When he asked what had happened to her heat for him, she gestured to the west. The sun was setting. The sky was a body of fire. — Louise Erdrich

I can't imagine a home without an overflow of books. The point of books is to have way too many but to always feel you never have enough, or the right one at the right moment, but then sometimes to find you'd longed to fall asleep reading the Aspern Papers, and there it is. — Louise Erdrich

You never know where you're going to find the same thoughts in another brain, but when it happens you know it right off, just like you were connected by a small electrical wire that suddenly glows red hot and sparks. — Louise Erdrich

Women are strong, strong, terribly strong. We don't know how strong until we are pushing out our babies. We are too often treated like babies having babies when we should be in training, like acolytes, novices to high priestesshood, like serious applicants for the space program. — Louise Erdrich

They were so strong in their beliefs that there came a time when it hardly mattered what exactly those beliefs were; they all fused into a single stubbornness. — Louise Erdrich

...Grandpa's mind had left us, gone wild and wary. When I walked with him I could feel how strange it was. 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. — Louise Erdrich

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. — Louise Erdrich

my mind ran over scenes of Shesheeb seducing Margaret until I was a wagon dragged by the runaway horses of my jealousy. — Louise Erdrich

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. — Louise Erdrich

I have always kept notebooks and I go back to them over and over. They are my compost pile of ideas. — Louise Erdrich

The length of sky is just about the size of my ignorance. Pure and wide. — Louise Erdrich

I am at the bookstore a lot, but let my friends, the professional Birchbark Books staff, handle the day in and day out. — Louise Erdrich

I want to remember what bullshit looks like when weapons of mass destruction are diagrammed out and whacko "intelligence" is delivered in an ominous way to strike fear into people and especially to pull on the idealism and zeal of the young. — Louise Erdrich

The music was more than music - at least what we are used to hearing. The music was feeling itself. The sound connected instantly with something deep and joyous. — Louise Erdrich

He had a thousand-year-old stare. — Louise Erdrich

I had a very free childhood and ranged around on my bicycle the way boys do. I had few restrictions. — Louise Erdrich

The world tips away when we look into our children's faces. — Louise Erdrich

I always have some way of putting the stories together that works for the book. I've always switched points of view in my books. I'm a Gemini. — Louise Erdrich

At times the whole sky was ringed in shooting points and puckers of light gathering and falling, pulsing, fading, rhythmical as breathing. All of a piece. As if the sky were a pattern of nerves and our thought and memories traveled across it. As if the sky were one gigantic memory for us all. — Louise Erdrich

I work really out of mythology, so often I work out of a story that has remained lodged inside somehow, or I work out of history, you know, out of a sense of historical inevitability with characters. — Louise Erdrich

What men call adventures usually consist of the stoical endurance of appalling daily misery. — Louise Erdrich

Right and wrong were shades of meaning, not sides of a coin. — Louise Erdrich

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. — Louise Erdrich

I truly think that you can't go and stalk your material, you have to leave the door open and whatever chooses you, chooses you. You can't go and wrestle it to the ground. — Louise Erdrich

The contents of a house can trigger all sorts of revisions to family history. — Louise Erdrich

Her clothes were filled with safety pins and hidden tears. — Louise Erdrich

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

We have these earthly bodies. We don't know what they want. Half the time, we pretend they are under our mental thumb, but that is the illusion of the healthy and the protected. Of sedate lovers. For the body has emotions it conceives and carries through without concern for anyone or anything else. Love is one of those, I guess. Going back to something very old knit into the brain as we were growing. Hopeless. Scorching. Ordinary. — Louise Erdrich

To sew is to pray. Men don't understand this. They see the whole but they don't see the stitches. They don't see the speech of the creator in the work of the needle. — Louise Erdrich

...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? — Louise Erdrich

Our tribe unraveled like a coarse rope, frayed at either end as the old and new among us were taken. — Louise Erdrich

There are people who are always, I think, going to remain people of the book, to use another author's title, but people of the book, who really must be around. — Louise Erdrich

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. — Louise Erdrich

History works itself out in the living. — Louise Erdrich

How come we've got these bodies? They are frail supports for what we feel. There are times I get so hemmed in by my arms and legs I look forward to getting past them. As though death will set me free like a traveling cloud... I'll be out there as a piece of the endless body of the world feeling pleasures so much larger than skin and bones and blood. — Louise Erdrich

i want to hear what's happened to you," she said evenly after a while. she gestured in the direction, down river, of the butcher shop. "it's just that there is nowhere else to start," she said gently. "niether of us is the same. but i'm different because of small, good, manageable things. you're different because ... things i don't know. — Louise Erdrich

Our songs travel the earth. We sing to one another. Not a single note is ever lost and no song is original. They all come from the same place and go back to a time when only the stones howled. — Louise Erdrich

I think one of the reasons to be here on earth is to finally be who we are, at all times - to know and be predictable to ourselves. — Louise Erdrich

There is no such thing as a complete lack of order, only a design so vast it appears unrepetitive up close. — Louise Erdrich

...whom he had saved from a life of excessive freedom — Louise Erdrich

This so gnawed at him on some nights that he lay awake wondering just how many unknown and similarly inconsequential accidents and bits of happenstance were at this moment occurring or failing to occur in order to ensure he took his next breath, and the next. — Louise Erdrich

I am part of what she thinks is her illness, a symptom of which she thinks she has been cured. She, on the other hand, is what I was looking for. — Louise Erdrich

If only I had discipline, but alas, it is only an obsessive-compulsive trait and the beauty of habit that causes me to return again and again to my work. — Louise Erdrich

Women don't realize how much store men set on the regularity of their habits. We absorb their comings and goings into our bodies, their rhythms into our bones. — Louise Erdrich

The story comes around, pushing at our brains, and soon we are trying to ravel back to the beginning, trying to put families into order and make sense of things. But we start with one person, and soon another and another follows, and still another, until we are lost in the connections. — Louise Erdrich

We started dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall. — Louise Erdrich

Freedom, I found is not only in the running but in the heart, the mind, the hands. — Louise Erdrich

Can you stop your mother from singing to you? Who would do such a thing? — Louise Erdrich

I was the sort of kid who spent a Sunday afternoon prying little trees out of the foundation of his parents' house. I should have given in to the inevitable truth that this was the sort of person I would become, in the end, but I kept fighting it. — Louise Erdrich

Don't read anything except what destroys the insulation between yourself and your experience. — Louise Erdrich

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. — Louise Erdrich

You know, some people fall right through the hole in their lives. Its invisible, but they come to it after time, never knowing where. — Louise Erdrich

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. — Louise Erdrich

Every so often something shatters like ice and we are in the river of our existence. We are aware. — Louise Erdrich

When small towns find they cannot harm the strangest of their members, when eccentrics show resilience, they are eventually embraced and even cherished. — Louise Erdrich

Power travels in the bloodlines, handed out before birth. — Louise Erdrich

There is a legacy of violence against native women that has gotten worse and worse over time. — Louise Erdrich

There will never come a time when I will be able to resist my emotions. — Louise Erdrich

I spend my time dwelling on revenge and try to deal with the monsters crawling out of the ashes. — Louise Erdrich

In our own beginnings, we are formed out of the body's interior landscape. For a short while, our mothers' bodies are the boundaries and personal geography which are all that we know of the world...Once we no longer live beneath our mother's heart, it is the earth with which we form the same dependent relationship, relying...on its cycles and elements, helpless without its protective embrace. — Louise Erdrich

Hunger steals the memory — Louise Erdrich

The universe is transformation. — Louise Erdrich

When every inch of the world is known, sleep may be the only wilderness that we have left. — Louise Erdrich

Life Lessons by Louise Erdrich

1. Louise Erdrich's work emphasizes the importance of understanding and respecting Indigenous cultures and histories.
2. Her work also highlights the power of storytelling and how it can be used to connect with others and celebrate the beauty of life.
3. Finally, Erdrich's work is a reminder of the resiliency of Indigenous people and their ability to survive and thrive despite the many challenges they face.