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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.

Louise Erdrich

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Louise Erdrich
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: June 7
Novelist
Poet
Short Story Writer
Writer
Little Falls
Minnesota
Also
Shape
Young
Shapes
Takes
Story
Words
Assembled
Experience
Scattered
Around
Sentence
Stories
Sentences

More quotes by Louise Erdrich

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Life is made up of three kinds of people -- those who live it, those afraid to, those in between.
Louise Erdrich
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I stood there in the shadowed doorway thinking with my tears. Yes, tears can be thoughts, why not?
Louise Erdrich
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Columbus only discovered that he was in some new place. He didn't discover America.
Louise Erdrich
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Your life feels different on you, once you greet death and understand your heart's position.
Louise Erdrich
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I think one of the most fertile, unexplored areas for poets and fiction writers is the world of science. I become overwhelmed by the science world.
Louise Erdrich
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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.
Louise Erdrich
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What happens when you let an unsatisfactory present go on long enough? It becomes your entire history.
Louise Erdrich
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Numbers, time, inches, feet. All are just ploys for cutting nature down to size.
Louise Erdrich
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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
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The only time I see the truth is when I cross my eyes.
Louise Erdrich
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Add there was that moment when my mother and father walked in the door disguised as old people. I thought the miles in the car had bent them, dulled their eyes, even grayed and whitened their hair and caused their hands and voices to tremble. At the same time, I found, as I rose form the chair, I'd gotten old along with them.
Louise Erdrich
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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.
Louise Erdrich
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It's impossible to write about Native life without humor-that's how people maintain sanity.
Louise Erdrich
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Can you stop your mother from singing to you? Who would do such a thing?
Louise Erdrich
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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.
Louise Erdrich
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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
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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.
Louise Erdrich
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I had a very free childhood and ranged around on my bicycle the way boys do. I had few restrictions.
Louise Erdrich
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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
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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.
Louise Erdrich