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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
Impossible
Write
Without
Writing
Sanity
Life
Maintain
People
Native
Indian
Humor

More quotes by 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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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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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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Your life feels different on you, once you greet death and understand your heart's position. You wear your life like a garment from the mission bundle sale ever after - lightly because you realize you never paid nothing for it, cherishing because you know you won't ever come by such a bargain again.
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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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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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.
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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We passed over in a sweep of sorrow that would persist into our small forever. We just keep going.
Louise Erdrich
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I work really out of mythology, so often I work out of a story that has remained lodged inside somehow, or I work out of history, you know, out of a sense of historical inevitability with characters.
Louise Erdrich
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I don't pray. When I was young, I vowed I never would be caught begging God. If I want something I get it for myself. I go to church only to show the old hens they don't get me down.
Louise Erdrich
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Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that.
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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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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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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A woman's body is the gate to this life. A man's body is the gate to the next life.
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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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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I thought how we might have to yell to be heard by Higher Power, but that's not saying it's not there. And that is faith for you. It's belief even when the gods don't deliver.
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