We passed over in a sweep of sorrow that would persist into our small forever. We just keep going.
Louise ErdrichCold 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.
Louise ErdrichShe had always been a readerโฆ but now she was obsessed. Since her discovery of the book hoard downstairs from her job, sheโd been caught up in one such collection of people and their doings after the nextโฆThe pleasure of this sort of life โ bookish, she supposed it might be called, a reading life โ had made her isolation into a rich and even subversive thing. She inhabited one consoling or horrifying persona after anotherโฆThat she was childless and husbandless and poor meant less once she picked up a book. Her mistakes disappeared into it. She lived with an invented force.
Louise ErdrichIf, as I suspect, my body survives by uttering itself over and over again, then I have some questions. If [I] am one word, so are my daughters, so are all of us in strings and loops. Each life is one short word slowly uttered.
Louise ErdrichComing down off the trail, I am lost in my own thoughts and unprepared when a bear chugs across the path just before it gives out on the gravel road. I am so distracted that I keep walking towards the bear. I only stop when it rears, stands on hind legs, and stares at me, sensitive nose pressed into the air, weak eyes searching. I have never been this close to a wild bear before, but I am not frightened. There is no menace in its stance; it is not even curious. The bear seems to know who or what I am. The bear is not impressed.
Louise Erdrich