Louise Erdrich
The length of sky is just about the size of my ignorance. Pure and wide.Collection: Ignorance
So what is wild? What is wilderness? What are dreams but an internal wilderness and what is desire but a wildness of the soul?Collection: Dream
Women without children are also the best of mothers,often, with the patience,interest, and saving grace that the constant relationship with children cannot always sustain. I come to crave our talk and our daughters gain precious aunts. Women who are not mothering their own children have the clarity and focus to see deeply into the character of children webbed by family. A child is fortuante who feels witnessed as a peron,outside relationships with parents by another adult.Collection: Daughter
Time is the water in which we live, and we breathe it like fish. ... Time pours into us and then pours out again. In between the two pourings we live our destiny.Collection: Time
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.Collection: Light
Women are strong, strong, terribly strong. We don't know how strong until we're pushing out our babies.Collection: Inspiring
I feel myself becoming less a person than a place, inhabited, a foreign land.Collection: Land
Money helps, though not so much as you think when you don't have it.Collection: Money
Power travels in the bloodlines, handed out before birth.Collection: Power
Numbers, time, inches, feet. All are just ploys for cutting nature down to size.Collection: Nature
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.Collection: Dog
We have a huge struggle for our sense of what a democracy is. We're not living in reality when we think we have some sort of democracy. We're really on the edge. We have two presidents who lost the popular vote but won the election. This is not working.Collection: Struggle
We all got holes in our lives. Nobody dies in a perfect garment.Collection: Life
Freedom, I found is not only in the running but in the heart, the mind, the hands.Collection: Running
There will never come a time when I will be able to resist my emotions.Collection: Able
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.Collection: Memories
All through my life I never did believe in human measurement. Numbers, time, inches, feet. All are just ploys for cutting nature down to size. I know the grand scheme of the world is beyond our brains to fathom, so I don't try, just let it in.Collection: Believe
We are conjured voiceless out of nothing and must return to an unknowing state. What happens in between is an uncontrolled dance, and what we ask for in love is no more than a momentary chance to get the steps right, to move in harmony until the music stops.Collection: Moving
Each life is one short word slowly uttered.Collection: Life
The universe is transformation.Collection: Transformation
...which causes me to wonder, my own purpose on so many days as humble as the spider's, what is beautiful that I make? What is elegant? What feeds the world?Collection: Beautiful
Women don't realize how much store men set on the regularity of their habits. We absorb their comings and goings into our bodies, their rhythms into our bones.Collection: Men
It didn't occur to me that my books would be widely read at all, and that enabled me to write anything I wanted to. And even once I realized that they were being read, I still wrote as if I were writing in secret. That's how one has to write anyway--in secret.Collection: Book
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.Collection: Hurt
When every inch of the world is known, sleep may be the only wilderness that we have left.Collection: Sleep
Love. The black hook. The spear singing through the mind.Collection: Love
I truly think that you can't go and stalk your material, you have to leave the door open and whatever chooses you, chooses you. You can't go and wrestle it to the ground.Collection: Thinking
...Grandpa's mind had left us, gone wild and wary. When I walked with him I could feel how strange it was. His thoughts swam between us, hidden under rocks, disappearing in weeds, and I was fishing for them, dangling my own words like baits and lures.Collection: Weed
Here I am, where I ought to be. A writer must have a place where he or she feels this, the place to love and be irritated with.Collection: Here I Am
We passed over in a sweep of sorrow that would persist into our small forever. We just keep going.Collection: Forever
The only time I see the truth is when I cross my eyes.Collection: Eye
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.Collection: Husband
There is no such thing as a complete lack of order, only a design so vast it appears unrepetitive up close.Collection: Order
There are ways of being abandoned even when your parents are right there.Collection: Parent
Sometimes a person's monstrosity seems superhuman.Collection: Sometimes
If life's a joke, then suicide's a bad punch line.Collection: Suicide
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.Collection: Powerful
He despised his body for its boring hungers, reflex anger; its petty, obliterating rage. But now he'd become detached. He regarded his body with a tender regret. It was the thing his spirit had to haul.Collection: Regret
All of our actions have in their doing the seed of their undoing.Collection: Our Actions
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.Collection: Father
What is this life but the sound of an appalling love.Collection: Sound
Here is the most telling fact: you wish to possess me. Here is another fact: I loved you and let you think you could.Collection: Thinking
Don't read anything except what destroys the insulation between yourself and your experience.Collection: Insulation
I did not choose solitude. Who would? It came on me like a kind of vocation, demanding an effort that married women can't picture.Collection: Effort
Can you stop your mother from singing to you? Who would do such a thing?Collection: Mother
How come we've got these bodies? They are frail supports for what we feel. There are times I get so hemmed in by my arms and legs I look forward to getting past them. As though death will set me free like a traveling cloud... I'll be out there as a piece of the endless body of the world feeling pleasures so much larger than skin and bones and blood.Collection: Past
As soon as there's a crisis, there are people who take charge and want to control others. Climate-change catastrophe and human migration and immigration are great for corporate and governmental control over people, and we have to contend with that. I should say, I see corporate control behind everything that the government is working on right now.Collection: People
Your life feels different on you, once you greet death and understand your heart's position.Collection: Death
It was just enough to sit there without words.Collection: Reading