Louise Erdrich
Louise Erdrich
Louise Erdrich is an Ojibwe writer of novels, poetry, and children's books featuring Native American characters and settings. She is an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, a band of the Anishinaabe...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionChildren's Author
Date of Birth7 June 1954
CountryUnited States of America
dog mad people
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.
mother singing
Can you stop your mother from singing to you? Who would do such a thing?
love-is healthy brain
We have these earthly bodies. We don't know what they want. Half the time, we pretend they are under our mental thumb, but that is the illusion of the healthy and the protected. Of sedate lovers. For the body has emotions it conceives and carries through without concern for anyone or anything else. Love is one of those, I guess. Going back to something very old knit into the brain as we were growing. Hopeless. Scorching. Ordinary.
romantic sky common-sense
some people meet the way the sky meets the earth, inevitably, and there is no stopping or holding back their love. It exists in a finished world, beyond the reach of common sense.
insulation
...don't read anything except what destroys the insulation between yourself and your experience...
strength love-you heart
You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart.
love going-away sides
Love won't be tampered with, love won't go away. Push it to one side and it creeps to the other.
song earth stones
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.
hurt years people
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.
powerful permanent
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.
women hands wind
When women age into their power, no wind can upset them, no hand turn aside their knowledge, no fact can deflect their point of view.
wise heart trying
We do know that no one gets wise enough to really understand the heart of another, though it is the task of our life to try.
prayer eye men
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. We mend. We women turn things inside out and set things right. We salvage what we can of human garments and piece the rest into blankets. Sometimes our stitches stutter and slow. Only a woman's eyes can tell. Other times, the tension in the stitches might be too tight because of tears, but only we know what emotion went into the making. Only women can hear the prayer.
grows
Things which do not grow and change are dead things.