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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
Stories
Sentences
Also
Shape
Young
Shapes
Takes
Story
Words
Assembled
Experience
Scattered
Around
Sentence

More quotes by 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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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.
Louise Erdrich
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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
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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.
Louise Erdrich
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The greatest wisdom doesn't know itself. The richest plan is not to have one.
Louise Erdrich
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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
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I think she is confused by the way I want her, which is like nobody else. I know this deep down. I want her in a new way, a way she's never been told about.
Louise Erdrich
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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.
Louise Erdrich
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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.
Louise Erdrich
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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
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The universe is transformation.
Louise Erdrich
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But if there was embellishment, it only had to do with the facts.
Louise Erdrich
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When every inch of the world is known, sleep may be the only wilderness that we have left.
Louise Erdrich
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Her clothes were filled with safety pins and hidden tears.
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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The length of sky is just about the size of my ignorance. Pure and wide.
Louise Erdrich
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Every so often something shatters like ice and we are in the river of our existence. We are aware.
Louise Erdrich
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Right and wrong were shades of meaning, not sides of a coin.
Louise Erdrich
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We are never so poor that we cannot bless another human being, are we? So it is that every evil, whether moral or material, results in good. You'll see.
Louise Erdrich
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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.
Louise Erdrich