Words matter. These are the best Louise Erdrich Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I have never fully exorcised shames that struck me to the heart as a child except through written violence, shadowy caricature, and dark jokes.
Nothing I write ever has a moral. If it seems to a reader that there is one, that is unintentional.
Here I am, where I ought to be. A writer must have a place where he or she feels this, a place to love and be irritated with.
You know, some people fall right through the hole in their lives. It’s invisible, but they come to it after time, never knowing where.
My parents’ marriage is a gift to everyone around them – 60 years of making their kids laugh. How many parents are actually funny?
My grandfather was a persuasive man who made friends with people at every level of influence. In order to fight against our tribe’s termination, he went to newspapers and politicians and urged them to advocate for our tribe in Washington. He also supported his family through the Depression as a truck farmer.
There are several kinds of land on reservations. And all of these pieces of land have different entities who are in charge of enforcing laws on this land.
Revenge is a sorrow for the person who has to take it on. And the person who is rash enough to think it’s going to help a situation is always wrong.
Nothing I force myself to write about ever turns out well, and so I’ve learned to wait for the voice, the incident, the image that reverberates.
I live on the margin of just about everything. I’m a marginal person, and I think that is where I’ve become comfortable. I’m marginally there in my native life. I can do as much as I can, but I’m always German, too, you know, and I’m always a mother. That’s my first identity, but I’m always a writer, too.
My father is my biggest literary influence. Recently, I’ve been looking through his letters. He was in the National Guard when I was a child, and whenever he left, he would write to me. He wrote letters to me all through college, and we still correspond. His letters, and my mother’s, are one of my life’s treasures.
Most writers have been influenced by Faulkner.
Love won’t be tampered with, love won’t go away. Push it to one side and it creeps to the other.
I’d love to meet my ancestors. I’d love to be able to speak to them.
I got well by talking. Death could not get a word in edgewise, grew discouraged, and traveled on.
I grew up in Wahpeton, N.D., and I didn’t leave until I was 18, and I’ve kept going back.
It was enough just to sit there without words.
On any state elections map, the reservations are blue places. Native people are most often progressives, Democrats, and by no means gun-toting vigilantes.
I grew up in North Dakota around Dakota and Ojibwe people, and also small-town people in Wahpeton. Writers make few choices, really, about their material. We have to write about what comes naturally and what interests us – so I do.
Talking about how I might write the next book is like talking about whether or not to have sex. Any dithering ruins it.
