Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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

More quotes by Louise Erdrich

Image
The greatest wisdom doesn't know itself. The richest plan is not to have one.
Louise Erdrich
Image
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
Image
I feel myself becoming less a person than a place, inhabited, a foreign land.
Louise Erdrich
Image
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
Image
I had a very free childhood and ranged around on my bicycle the way boys do. I had few restrictions.
Louise Erdrich
Image
Every so often something shatters like ice and we are in the river of our existence. We are aware.
Louise Erdrich
Image
What is this life but the sound of an appalling love.
Louise Erdrich
Image
Can you stop your mother from singing to you? Who would do such a thing?
Louise Erdrich
Image
I knew each person's delusion, the places their records had scratched, where the sounds repeated.
Louise Erdrich
Image
I don't pray. When I was young, I vowed I never would be caught begging God. If I want something I get it for myself. I go to church only to show the old hens they don't get me down.
Louise Erdrich
Image
Your life feels different on you, once you greet death and understand your heart's position.
Louise Erdrich
Image
Veils of love which was only hate petrified by longing--that was me.
Louise Erdrich
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Columbus only discovered that he was in some new place. He didn't discover America.
Louise Erdrich
Image
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
Image
Sometimes a person's monstrosity seems superhuman.
Louise Erdrich
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Freedom, I found is not only in the running but in the heart, the mind, the hands.
Louise Erdrich