Quote

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

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
Beings
Unspeakable
Birth
Mortal
Creation
Seed
Death
Mortals
Action
Seeds
Children
Actions
Created
Promise
Undoing

More quotes by Louise Erdrich

Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
I got well by talking. Death could not get a word in edgewise, grew discouraged, and traveled on.
Louise Erdrich
Image
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
Image
The only time I see the truth is when I cross my eyes.
Louise Erdrich
Image
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
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
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
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
Image
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
Image
It is easy to take away the world that we think is so permanent and reliable.
Louise Erdrich
Image
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.
Louise Erdrich
Image
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
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
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
Image
The contents of a house can trigger all sorts of revisions to family history.
Louise Erdrich
Image
Here is the most telling fact: you wish to possess me. Here is another fact: I loved you and let you think you could.
Louise Erdrich
Image
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