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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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Louise Erdrich
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: June 7
Novelist
Poet
Short Story Writer
Writer
Little Falls
Minnesota
Matter
Simply
Fail
Sometimes
Parent
Lessons
Stutter
Giving
Child
Early
Slip
Children
Face
Failing
Slips
Much
Faces
Parents
Temper
Time
Times
Lose
Lesson
Love
Moments
Learned
Passed
World
Give
Loses
Explain

More quotes by 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 feel myself becoming less a person than a place, inhabited, a foreign land.
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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He despised his body for its boring hungers, reflex anger its petty, obliterating rage. But now he'd become detached. He regarded his body with a tender regret. It was the thing his spirit had to haul.
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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We all got holes in our lives. Nobody dies in a perfect garment.
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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We do know that no one gets wise enough to really understand the heart of another, though it is the task of our life to try.
Louise Erdrich
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Her mind was present because she was always gone. Her hands were filled because they grasped the meaning of empty. Life was simple. Her husband returned and she served him with indifferent patience this time. When he asked what had happened to her heat for him, she gestured to the west. The sun was setting. The sky was a body of fire.
Louise Erdrich
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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
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The story comes around, pushing at our brains, and soon we are trying to ravel back to the beginning, trying to put families into order and make sense of things. But we start with one person, and soon another and another follows, and still another, until we are lost in the connections.
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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Your life feels different on you, once you greet death and understand your heart's position.
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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Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that.
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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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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What happens when you let an unsatisfactory present go on long enough? It becomes your entire history.
Louise Erdrich
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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
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Her clothes were filled with safety pins and hidden tears.
Louise Erdrich