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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

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Louise Erdrich
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: June 7
Novelist
Poet
Short Story Writer
Writer
Little Falls
Minnesota
Approach
Writer
Start
Book
Flap
Need
Copy
Needs
Copies
Believe
Finished
Really
Failure

More quotes by 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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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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I knew each person's delusion, the places their records had scratched, where the sounds repeated.
Louise Erdrich
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Women are strong, strong, terribly strong. We don't know how strong until we are pushing out our babies. We are too often treated like babies having babies when we should be in training, like acolytes, novices to high priestesshood, like serious applicants for the space program.
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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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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We are never so poor that we cannot bless another human being, are we? So it is that every evil, whether moral or material, results in good. You'll see.
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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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 is this life but the sound of an appalling love.
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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Sometimes a person's monstrosity seems superhuman.
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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I spend my time dwelling on revenge and try to deal with the monsters crawling out of the ashes.
Louise Erdrich
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I got well by talking. Death could not get a word in edgewise, grew discouraged, and traveled on.
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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If life's a joke, then suicide's a bad punch line.
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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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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At times the whole sky was ringed in shooting points and puckers of light gathering and falling, pulsing, fading, rhythmical as breathing. All of a piece. As if the sky were a pattern of nerves and our thought and memories traveled across it. As if the sky were one gigantic memory for us all.
Louise Erdrich