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What happens when you let an unsatisfactory present go on long enough? It becomes your entire history.

Louise Erdrich

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Louise Erdrich
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: June 7
Novelist
Poet
Short Story Writer
Writer
Little Falls
Minnesota
Life
Entire
Becomes
Present
History
Happens
Past
Unsatisfactory
Enough
Unsatisfied
Long
Novelists

More quotes by Louise Erdrich

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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
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People forget the good, because the bad has more punch.
Louise Erdrich
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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
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The universe is transformation.
Louise Erdrich
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You know, some people fall right through the hole in their lives. Its invisible, but they come to it after time, never knowing where.
Louise Erdrich
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Time is the water in which we live, and we breathe it like fish. ... Time pours into us and then pours out again. In between the two pourings we live our destiny.
Louise Erdrich
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Life is made up of three kinds of people -- those who live it, those afraid to, those in between.
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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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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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
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The contents of a house can trigger all sorts of revisions to family history.
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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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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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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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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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
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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
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There is a legacy of violence against native women that has gotten worse and worse over time.
Louise Erdrich
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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
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Ravens are the birds I'll miss most when I die. If only the darkness into which we must look were composed of the black light of their limber intelligence. If only we did not have to die at all. Instead, become ravens.
Louise Erdrich