Quote

If only I had discipline, but alas, it is only an obsessive-compulsive trait and the beauty of habit that causes me to return again and again to my work.

Louise Erdrich

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Louise Erdrich
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: June 7
Novelist
Poet
Short Story Writer
Writer
Little Falls
Minnesota
Beauty
Trait
Work
Obsessive
Alas
Traits
Discipline
Habit
Return
Causes
Compulsive

More quotes by 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
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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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Veils of love which was only hate petrified by longing--that was me.
Louise Erdrich
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By writing I can live in ways that I could not survive.
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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The only time I see the truth is when I cross my eyes.
Louise Erdrich
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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.
Louise Erdrich
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He despised his body for its boring hungers, reflex anger its petty, obliterating rage. But now he'd become detached. He regarded his body with a tender regret. It was the thing his spirit had to haul.
Louise Erdrich
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I am at the bookstore a lot, but let my friends, the professional Birchbark Books staff, handle the day in and day out.
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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I knew each person's delusion, the places their records had scratched, where the sounds repeated.
Louise Erdrich
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Her clothes were filled with safety pins and hidden tears.
Louise Erdrich
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You never know where you're going to find the same thoughts in another brain, but when it happens you know it right off, just like you were connected by a small electrical wire that suddenly glows red hot and sparks.
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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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
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The length of sky is just about the size of my ignorance. Pure and wide.
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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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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Being a girl didn't really affect me until I entered junior high and had to wear skirts, curl my hair, and even get used to panty hose. However, my hatred of panty hose helped make me a writer who only wears comfortable clothes. I've successfully avoided panty hose for most of my life.
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