Louise Erdrich

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. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.

We started dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall.

I was in love with the whole world and all that lived in its rainy arms.

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.

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.

Time was rushing around me like water around a big wet rock. The only difference is, I was not so

If life’s a joke, then suicide’s a bad punch line.

Numbers, time, inches, feet. All are just ploys for cutting nature down to size.

“Clutch your chest. Fall off that horse,” they directed. That was it. Death was the extent of Indian acting in the movie theater.

Money helps, though not so much as you think when you don’t have it.

Love. The black hook. The spear singing through the mind.

We all got holes in our lives. Nobody dies in a perfect garment.

The length of sky is just about the size of my ignorance. Pure and wide.

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.

People forget the good, because the bad has more punch.

I thought how we might have to yell to be heard by Higher Power, but that’s not saying it’s not there. And that is faith for you. It’s belief even when the gods don’t deliver.

Your life feels different on you, once you greet death and understand your heart’s position.

Love won't be tampered with; love won't go away. Push it to one side and it creeps to the other.

Love must not touch the marrow of the soul. Our affections must be breakable chains that we can cast them off or tighten them.

They were so strong in their beliefs that there came a time when it hardly mattered what exactly those beliefs were; they all fused into a single stubbornness.

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.

When every inch of the world is known, sleep may be the only wilderness that we have left.

Louise Erdrich

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