Quote

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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Louise Erdrich
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: June 7
Novelist
Poet
Short Story Writer
Writer
Little Falls
Minnesota
Hands
Husband
Heat
Body
Meaning
Patience
Mind
Asked
Setting
Gestured
Always
Present
Sky
Grasped
Time
Fire
West
Returned
Life
Happened
Sun
Served
Gone
Filled
Indifferent
Simple
Empty
Settings

More quotes by Louise Erdrich

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The greatest wisdom doesn't know itself. The richest plan is not to have one.
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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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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It is easy to take away the world that we think is so permanent and reliable.
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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Freedom, I found is not only in the running but in the heart, the mind, the hands.
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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Time was rushing around me like water around a big wet rock. The only difference is, I was not so durable as stones. Very quickly I would be smoothed away.
Louise Erdrich
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Be lovely and do no harm.
Louise Erdrich
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When we are young, the words are scattered all around us. As they are assembled by experience, so also are we, sentence by sentence, until the story takes shape.
Louise Erdrich
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But if there was embellishment, it only had to do with the facts.
Louise Erdrich
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I stood there in the shadowed doorway thinking with my tears. Yes, tears can be thoughts, why not?
Louise Erdrich
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History works itself out in the living.
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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In order to purify yourself, you have to understand yourself, Father Trais went on. Everything out in the world is also in you. Good, bad, evil, perfection, death, everything. So we study our souls.
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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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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By writing I can live in ways that I could not survive.
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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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