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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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Louise Erdrich
Age: 70
Born: 1954
Born: June 7
Novelist
Poet
Short Story Writer
Writer
Little Falls
Minnesota
History
Inevitability
Often
Remained
Sense
Mythology
Stories
Somehow
Character
Historical
Work
Characters
Really
Inside
Story
Lodged
More quotes by Louise Erdrich
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
Numbers, time, inches, feet. All are just ploys for cutting nature down to size.
Louise Erdrich
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
What is this life but the sound of an appalling love.
Louise Erdrich
I make very involved drawings, even little structures, and try using design to figure out the rhythm of a plot. If there are several narrators then a clue has to pop up in the first line. There have to be certain grammatical clues, or distinctive names.
Louise Erdrich
People forget the good, because the bad has more punch.
Louise Erdrich
I have brothers and was a tomboy, if that's still a designation. It wasn't a stretch for me to think and write as a 13-year-old boy - it is freeing.
Louise Erdrich
History works itself out in the living.
Louise Erdrich
If life's a joke, then suicide's a bad punch line.
Louise Erdrich
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
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
Society is like this card game here, cousin. We got dealt our hand before we were even born, and as we grow we have to play as best as we can.
Louise Erdrich
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
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
I spend my time dwelling on revenge and try to deal with the monsters crawling out of the ashes.
Louise Erdrich
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
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
I had a very free childhood and ranged around on my bicycle the way boys do. I had few restrictions.
Louise Erdrich
The story comes around, pushing at our brains, and soon we are trying to ravel back to the beginning, trying to put families into order and make sense of things. But we start with one person, and soon another and another follows, and still another, until we are lost in the connections.
Louise Erdrich
I got well by talking. Death could not get a word in edgewise, grew discouraged, and traveled on.
Louise Erdrich
