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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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Louise Erdrich
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: June 7
Novelist
Poet
Short Story Writer
Writer
Little Falls
Minnesota
Indian
Humor
Impossible
Write
Without
Writing
Sanity
Life
Maintain
People
Native

More quotes by Louise Erdrich

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We all got holes in our lives. Nobody dies in a perfect garment.
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People forget the good, because the bad has more punch.
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When small towns find they cannot harm the strangest of their members, when eccentrics show resilience, they are eventually embraced and even cherished.
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Her clothes were filled with safety pins and hidden tears.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Numbers, time, inches, feet. All are just ploys for cutting nature down to size.
Louise Erdrich
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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
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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.
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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.
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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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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
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I think one of the most fertile, unexplored areas for poets and fiction writers is the world of science. I become overwhelmed by the science world.
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 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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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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Add there was that moment when my mother and father walked in the door disguised as old people. I thought the miles in the car had bent them, dulled their eyes, even grayed and whitened their hair and caused their hands and voices to tremble. At the same time, I found, as I rose form the chair, I'd gotten old along with them.
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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