I make very involved drawings, even little structures, and try using design to figure out the rhythm of a plot. If there are several narrators then a clue has to pop up in the first line. There have to be certain grammatical clues, or distinctive names.
Louise ErdrichLife 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.
Louise ErdrichWhere was I?""A different island," said old Tallow. Her voice was stern, but there was an ache in her look that Omakayas had never before seen. "An island called Spirit Island where everyone but you died of the itching sickness- you were the toughest one, the littlest one, and you survived them all.""You were sent here so you could save the others," she said. "Because you'd had the sickness, you were strong enough to nurse them through it. They did a good thing when they took you in, and you saved them for their good act. Now the circle that began when I found you is complete.
Louise ErdrichTo be of mixed blood is a great gift for a writer. I have one foot on tribal lands and one foot in middle-class life.
Louise ErdrichYour life feels different on you, once you greet death and understand your heart's position.
Louise ErdrichOur 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.
Louise ErdrichThis so gnawed at him on some nights that he lay awake wondering just how many unknown and similarly inconsequential accidents and bits of happenstance were at this moment occurring or failing to occur in order to ensure he took his next breath, and the next.
Louise ErdrichHe 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.
Louise ErdrichIt 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.
Louise ErdrichI had a very free childhood and ranged around on my bicycle the way boys do. I had few restrictions.
Louise ErdrichI might not be able to use the word "hope," but I could certainly use the word "optimism." I'm very optimistic. I don't feel that it helps to be pessimistic. At some point in my life I made a conscious decision that I would try to be optimistic - not blind to anything at all - but to always hear the way that had the best chance for happiness.
Louise ErdrichThey 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.
Louise ErdrichIf only I had discipline, but alas, it is only an obsessive-compulsive trait and the beauty of habit that causes me to return again and again to my work.
Louise ErdrichI have always kept notebooks and I go back to them over and over. They are my compost pile of ideas.
Louise ErdrichThere is a legacy of violence against native women that has gotten worse and worse over time.
Louise ErdrichI 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.
Louise ErdrichI am at the bookstore a lot, but let my friends, the professional Birchbark Books staff, handle the day in and day out.
Louise ErdrichI want to remember what bullshit looks like when weapons of mass destruction are diagrammed out and whacko "intelligence" is delivered in an ominous way to strike fear into people and especially to pull on the idealism and zeal of the young.
Louise ErdrichWomen are strong, strong, terribly strong. We don't know how strong until we are pushing out our babies. We are too often treated like babies having babies when we should be in training, like acolytes, novices to high priestesshood, like serious applicants for the space program.
Louise ErdrichI think one of the most fertile, unexplored areas for poets and fiction writers is the world of science. I become overwhelmed by the science world.
Louise ErdrichLooking at the shape of the world, I see how we're in a time where women are the subject of hatred, fear, and we have to fight that all the time. I feel that there are fights we take for granted. When I look at the world, I see that women are subject to cruelty. And that's why the global gag rule means so much to me, that the United States wouldn't stand up for the rights and health of women.
Louise ErdrichI tried out the unfamiliar syllables. They fit. They cracked in my ears like a fist through ice.
Louise ErdrichHer 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.
Louise ErdrichSociety is like this card game here, cousin. We got dealt our hand before we were even born, and as we grow we have to play as best as we can.
Louise ErdrichLove won't be tampered with, love won't go away. Push it to one side and it creeps to the other.
Louise ErdrichBy the time I was done with the car it looked worse than any typical Indian car that has been driven all its life on reservation roads, which they always say are like government promises - full of holes.
Louise ErdrichAt 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.
Louise ErdrichOld love, middle love, the kind of love that knows itself and knows that nothing lasts, is a desperate shared wildness.
Louise ErdrichLife 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.
Louise ErdrichOur tribe unraveled like a coarse rope, frayed at either end as the old and new among us were taken.
Louise ErdrichWe 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.
Louise ErdrichWhat happens when you let an unsatisfactory present go on long enough? It becomes your entire history.
Louise Erdrich