Quote

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

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Louise Erdrich
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: June 7
Novelist
Poet
Short Story Writer
Writer
Little Falls
Minnesota
Heart
Task
Trying
Tasks
Really
Gets
Life
Wise
Though
Understand
Another
Enough

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Being a girl didn't really affect me until I entered junior high and had to wear skirts, curl my hair, and even get used to panty hose. However, my hatred of panty hose helped make me a writer who only wears comfortable clothes. I've successfully avoided panty hose for most of my life.
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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.
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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.
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Her clothes were filled with safety pins and hidden tears.
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Here I am, where I ought to be. A writer must have a place where he or she feels this, the place to love and be irritated with.
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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.
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I feel myself becoming less a person than a place, inhabited, a foreign land.
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Can you stop your mother from singing to you? Who would do such a thing?
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I make very involved drawings, even little structures, and try using design to figure out the rhythm of a plot. If there are several narrators then a clue has to pop up in the first line. There have to be certain grammatical clues, or distinctive names.
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Every so often something shatters like ice and we are in the river of our existence. We are aware.
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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.
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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.
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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
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I got well by talking. Death could not get a word in edgewise, grew discouraged, and traveled on.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Sometimes a person's monstrosity seems superhuman.
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When women age into their power, no wind can upset them, no hand turn aside their knowledge, no fact can deflect their point of view.
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When every inch of the world is known, sleep may be the only wilderness that we have left.
Louise Erdrich