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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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Louise Erdrich
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: June 7
Novelist
Poet
Short Story Writer
Writer
Little Falls
Minnesota
Born
Card
Hands
Cards
Best
Grow
Play
Game
Even
Hand
Like
Grows
Games
Dealt
Society
Cousin

More quotes by 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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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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I knew each person's delusion, the places their records had scratched, where the sounds repeated.
Louise Erdrich
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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
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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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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
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You really need to approach each book as if you have been a failure. . . . If you start to believe your flap-copy, you're finished as a writer.
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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I have brothers and was a tomboy, if that's still a designation. It wasn't a stretch for me to think and write as a 13-year-old boy - it is freeing.
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
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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
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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
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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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When every inch of the world is known, sleep may be the only wilderness that we have left.
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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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
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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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Her clothes were filled with safety pins and hidden tears.
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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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