Quote

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

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
Like
Grows
Games
Dealt
Society
Cousin
Born
Card
Hands
Cards
Best
Grow
Play
Game
Even
Hand

More quotes by Louise Erdrich

Image
Right and wrong were shades of meaning, not sides of a coin.
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
The contents of a house can trigger all sorts of revisions to family history.
Louise Erdrich
Image
I thought how we might have to yell to be heard by Higher Power, but that's not saying it's not there. And that is faith for you. It's belief even when the gods don't deliver.
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
Image
Freedom, I found is not only in the running but in the heart, the mind, the hands.
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
We all got holes in our lives. Nobody dies in a perfect garment.
Louise Erdrich
Image
To love another another human in all of her splendor and imperfect perfection , it is a magnificent task...tremendous and foolish and human.
Louise Erdrich
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Life is made up of three kinds of people -- those who live it, those afraid to, those in between.
Louise Erdrich
Image
Columbus only discovered that he was in some new place. He didn't discover America.
Louise Erdrich
Image
I might not be able to use the word hope, but I could certainly use the word optimism. I'm very optimistic. I don't feel that it helps to be pessimistic. At some point in my life I made a conscious decision that I would try to be optimistic - not blind to anything at all - but to always hear the way that had the best chance for happiness.
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 be of mixed blood is a great gift for a writer. I have one foot on tribal lands and one foot in middle-class life.
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
Your life feels different on you, once you greet death and understand your heart's position. You wear your life like a garment from the mission bundle sale ever after - lightly because you realize you never paid nothing for it, cherishing because you know you won't ever come by such a bargain again.
Louise Erdrich
Image
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.
Louise Erdrich
Image
We passed over in a sweep of sorrow that would persist into our small forever. We just keep going.
Louise Erdrich