My dying tree reached toward the sky from its back down on earth. Its branches were like beseeching arms. It takes a while for life to leave green wood. I felt the helplessness, the lack of agency, the frustration of the tree. Severed from its roots, unable to taste the starlight.

— Louise Erdrich

Louise Erdrich Quotes

I’ll be the night watchman,” said Patrice, and went out to get the ax.

— Louise Erdrich

On this stretch of highway he was afflicted. It felt as if his heart was being pierced by long sharp needles. He flashed on his father, the two of them sitting in late sunshine, gathering its fugitive warmth.

— Louise Erdrich

The black sky was a poem beyond meaning.

— Louise Erdrich

Patrice had come to think that humans treated the concept of God, or Gizhe Manidoo, or the Holy Ghost, in a childish way. She was pretty sure that the rules and trappings of ritual had nothing to do with God, that they were ways for people to imagine they were doing things right in order to escape from punishment, or harm, like children.

— Louise Erdrich

You know any Mormons?” asked Martin Cross. “I don’t think so.” “They haven’t got to you. They’ll come around yet. It’s in their religion to change Indians into whites.” “I thought that was a government job.” “It’s in their holy book. The more we pray, the lighter we get.” “I could stand to drop a few pounds.” “Not that kind of lighter,” Martin laughed. “They think if you follow their ways your skin will bleach out. They call it lightsome and gladsome.

— Louise Erdrich

And now we’re putting another man in the earth. Maybe a drunk, but he wasn’t always a drunk.

— Louise Erdrich

I was trying to contain a surprise bubble of exultation bobbing in the anger I have always tried to keep bottled up. Fury lived inside me under pressure. Now it all started going off inside my body like popped corks; the rage-champagne and feral glee were foaming out.

— Louise Erdrich

He wondered if he would ever see the inside of one of those houses whose great windows blared sheaves of light. They made huge blurred spears that reached out into the balmy spring darkness.

— Louise Erdrich

How could Indians hold themselves apart, when the vanquishers sometimes held their arms out, to crush them to their hearts, with something like love?

— Louise Erdrich

The thing is, most of us Indigenous people do have to consciously pull together our identities. We’ve endured centuries of being erased and sentenced to live in a replacement culture.

— Louise Erdrich

Sometimes it was exhilarating to be needed.

— Louise Erdrich

A little tap on the window-pane, as though something had struck it, followed by a plentiful light falling sound, as of grains of sand being sprinkled from a window overhead, gradually spreading, intensifying, acquiring a regular rhythm, becoming fluid, sonorous, musical, immeasurable, universal: it was the rain.

— Louise Erdrich

On August 1, 1953, the United States Congress announced House Concurrent Resolution 108, a bill to abrogate nation-to-nation treaties, which had been made with American Indian Nations for “as long as the grass grows and the rivers flow.” The announcement called for the eventual termination of all tribes, and the immediate termination of five tribes, including the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa.

— Louise Erdrich

If I stepped off a cliff in that heart of his, he’d catch me. He’d put me back in the sun.

— Louise Erdrich

Everyone seems to have within themselves a collection of poems.

— Louise Erdrich

So along with the whiskey and perfume and smoke, she often exuded faint undertones of hay, dust, and the fragrance of horse, which once you smell it you always miss it. Humans were meant to live with the horse.

— Louise Erdrich

It was always what my father called the last leg of the journey. But we did not stop this time. We passed over in a sweep of sorrow that would persist into our small forever. We just kept going.

— Louise Erdrich

Ugh. I stayed up to all hours,’ she said, sliding a book across the floor. Sometimes Jackie resented a perfectly good book because it ‘forced’ her to stay up all night. I was used to this. It was usually a sign of a literary page-turner – whether spy, sea, or horror – my favorite sort of book. She’d made me read Dennis Lehane, Donna Tartt, Stephen Graham Jones, Marcie R. Rendon, Kate Atkinson. She gave me The Death of the Heart and said, ‘It’s extremely good. Keep it.

— Louise Erdrich

An individual who drinks himself into a state of stuporous sickness runs the risk of succumbing to accidental death.

— Louise Erdrich

It was like he’d been mildly puzzled to death.

— Louise Erdrich
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