Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Louise Erdrich
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: June 7
Novelist
Poet
Short Story Writer
Writer
Little Falls
Minnesota
Everything
Study
Good
Evil
World
Understand
Father
Death
Purify
Order
Souls
Also
Perfection
Soul
Went

More quotes by Louise Erdrich

Image
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
Image
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
Image
You really need to approach each book as if you have been a failure. . . . If you start to believe your flap-copy, you're finished as a writer.
Louise Erdrich
Image
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
Image
To think about love and passion and political correctness all together, it doesn't work. Art has to go way past the political to be effective.
Louise Erdrich
Image
A woman's body is the gate to this life. A man's body is the gate to the next life.
Louise Erdrich
Image
Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that.
Louise Erdrich
Image
Your life feels different on you, once you greet death and understand your heart's position.
Louise Erdrich
Image
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
Image
There is a legacy of violence against native women that has gotten worse and worse over time.
Louise Erdrich
Image
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
Image
Things which do not grow and change are dead things.
Louise Erdrich
Image
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
Image
Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart.
Louise Erdrich
Image
Life is made up of three kinds of people -- those who live it, those afraid to, those in between.
Louise Erdrich
Image
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
Image
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.
Louise Erdrich
Image
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
Image
I want to remember what bullshit looks like when weapons of mass destruction are diagrammed out and whacko intelligence is delivered in an ominous way to strike fear into people and especially to pull on the idealism and zeal of the young.
Louise Erdrich
Image
We all got holes in our lives. Nobody dies in a perfect garment.
Louise Erdrich