Quote

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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Louise Erdrich
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: June 7
Novelist
Poet
Short Story Writer
Writer
Little Falls
Minnesota
Thought
Hardly
Smoothed
Feel
Guess
Lash
Feels
Died
Curled
Years
Saws
Rear
Good
Easier
Lashes
Love
Hurt
Whip
Like
Felt
Whips
People
Didn
Noticed

More quotes by Louise Erdrich

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Numbers, time, inches, feet. All are just ploys for cutting nature down to size.
Louise Erdrich
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You know, some people fall right through the hole in their lives. Its invisible, but they come to it after time, never knowing where.
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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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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The Internet, which seems now so embedded and personal and crucial to our lives, isn't at all - we really shouldn't think of it that way.
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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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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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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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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But if there was embellishment, it only had to do with the facts.
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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Sometimes a person's monstrosity seems superhuman.
Louise Erdrich
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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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What happens when you let an unsatisfactory present go on long enough? It becomes your entire history.
Louise Erdrich
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Women are strong, strong, terribly strong. We don't know how strong until we're pushing out our babies.
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 greatest wisdom doesn't know itself. The richest plan is not to have one.
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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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