Louise Erdrich

Louise Erdrich (born Karen Louise Erdrich June 7, 1964) is an American author, novelist, poet, and children's author who features Native American themes in her writings. She is an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, a federally recognized tribe of Ojibwe people.

Louise Erdrich in 2015

Quotes

• Sorrow eats time. Be patient. Time eats sorrow.
  • LaRose (2016)

• Getting blown up happened in an instant; getting put together took the rest of your life.
  • LaRose (2016)

The Round House (2012)

• 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. (p381)

• We are never so poor that we cannot bless another human being, are we? So it is that every evil, whether moral or material, results in good. You'll see. (p384)

• 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. (p400)

• Any judge knows there are many kinds of justice—for instance, ideal justice as opposed to the best-we-can-do justice, which is what we end up with in making so many of our decisions. (p463)

The Red Convertible: Selected and New Stories, 1978-2008

• When we're young, we think we are the only species worth knowing. But the more I come to know people, the better I like ravens. ("Revival Road")

• Earth and sky touch everywhere and nowhere, like sex between two strangers. There is no definition and no union for sure. ("The Antelope Wife")

• He also found that white people are good witnesses to have on your side since they have names, addresses, social security numbers, and work phones. But they are terrible witnesses to have against you, almost as bad as having Indians witness for you. ("Scales")

The Plague of Doves (2008)

• There are ways of being abandoned even when your parents are right there. (p203)

• When we are young, the words are scattered all around us. As they are assembled by experience, so also are we, sentence by sentence, until the story takes shape. (p268)

• We never talked about the future anymore — she refused to, and I had to accept that. The present was enough, though my work in the cemetery told me every day what happens when you let an unsatisfactory present go on long enough: it becomes your entire history. (p282)

The Painted Drum (2005)

• When we’re young, we think we are the only species worth knowing. But the more I come to know people, the better I like ravens. (p15)

• It is difficult for a woman to admit that she gets along with her own mother — somehow it seems a form of betrayal, at least, it used to among other women in my generation. To join the company of women, to be adults, we go through a period of proudly boasting of having survived our own mother's indifference, anger, overpowering love, the burden of her pain, her tendency to drink or teetotal, her warmth or coldness, praise or criticism, sexual confusions or embarrassing clarity. It isn't enough that she sweat, labored, bore her daughters howling or under total anesthesia or both. No. She must be responsible for our psychic weaknesses the rest of her life. It is alright to feel kinship with your father, to forgive. We all know that. But your mother is held to a standard so exacting that it has no principles. She simply must be to blame. (p20)

• The contents of a house can trigger all sorts of revisions to family history. (p29)

• There is very little said about how repetitious grief is. (p64)

• They are patient with the gravity of their intent. Of their means of survival they've made these elegant webs, their beauty a by-product of their purpose. 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? (p77)

• That's what the drum is about - it gathers people in and holds them. It looks after them. But like a person, things can go wrong in spite of all the best care. And this drum had its own history and sorrow. (p180)

• Life 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 have to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes too near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself that you tasted as many as you could. (p274)

Four Souls (2004)

• Time is the water in which we live, and we breathe it like fish. It’s hard to swim against the current. Onrushing, inevitable, carried like a leaf, Fleur fooled herself in thinking she could choose her direction. But time is an element no human has mastered, and Fleur was bound to go where she was sent. Maybe in those long nights as she watched the crack of light beneath the door, she had an inkling. She thought revenge was behind that door, and satisfaction. Maybe she began to realize that she was wrong. There was only time. For what is a man, what are we all, but bits of time caught for a moment in a tangle of blood, bones, skin, and brain? She was time. Mauser was time. I am a sorry bit of time myself. We are time’s containers. Time pours into us and then pours out again. In between the two pourings we live our destiny. (p28)

• And that was where the whiskey got hold of her. As it has with so many of us, even myself, the liquor sneaked up and grabbed her, got into her mind and talked to her, fooled her into thinking she was thinking for herself when really it was the whiskey thinking whiskey thoughts. (p75)

• once a person drops the scales of prejudiced certainty and doubts appear, there is no telling how far a heart can open. (p98)

• A man finds happiness so fleetingly, like the petals melting off a prairie rose. Even as you touch that feeling it dries up, leaving only the dust of that emotion, a powder of hope. (chapter 9, p99)

• To love Nanapush, to love at all, is like trying to remember the tune and words to a song that the spirits have given you in your sleep. Some days, I knew exactly how the song went and some days I couldn’t even hum the first line. (p182)

The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (2001)

page numbers to HarperCollins 2001 edition

• Spent, she thought that there was no place as unknown as grief. (p38)

• "I have never seen the truth...without crossing my eyes. Life is crazy." (p135)

• It was this immense resignation to the shape of his life that opened him every day to the experience of joy. (p140)

• ...comfort is not security and money in the hand disappears. He could have told her that only the land matters and never to let go of the papers, the titles, the tracks of the words, all those things that his ancestors never understood how the vital relationship to the dirt and grass under their feet. (p171)

• Slowly and inevitably, she fell in love with each person in the family, only she didn’t know what to call it. She simply found herself related. (p184)

• For it was through books that she felt her life to be unjudged Look at all of the great mix-ups, messes, confinement, and double-dealings in Shakespeare, she thought. Identities disguised continually, in a combative dance of illusion and discovery. Hers was hardly the most sinful, tragic, or bizarre. (p199)

• "What is the question we spend our entire lives asking? Our question is this: Are we loved? I don’t mean by one another. Are we loved by the one who made us? Constantly, we look for evidence. In the gifts we are given—children, good weather, money, a happy marriage perhaps—we find assurance. In contrast, our pains, illnesses, the deaths of those we love, our poverty, our innocent misfortunes—those we take as signs that God has somehow turned away. But, my friends, what exactly is love here? How to define it? Does God’s love have anything at all to do with the lack or plethora of good fortune at work in our lives? Or is God’s love, perhaps, something very different from what we think we know?...If I am loved, it is a merciless and exacting love against which I have no defense. If I am not loved, then I am being pitilessly manipulated by a force I cannot withstand, either, and so it is all the same. I must do what I must do. Go in peace." (p227)

• Whenever he thought he knew the truth it merged into another truth. (p327)

• "To love another human in all of her splendor and imperfect perfection, it is a magnificent task...tremendous and foolish and human." (p331)

The Birch Bark House (1999)

• The only person left alive on the island was a baby girl. (first line)

• If there is no laughter, the soul dies. (p186)

• Although spring, with all the force of its poised new growth, called to her, although the tender new buds, opening magically, touched her heart, there would always be a shadow to her laughter, a corner of sadness in her smile. (p221)

The Antelope Wife (1998)

• Effortless. Easy. The lack of trying is what makes them lovely. We all try too hard. Striving wears down our edges, dulls the best of us. (p23)

• I think she is confused by the way I want her, which is like nobody else. I know this deep down. I want her in a new way, a way she's never been told about. (p28)

• All of our actions have in their doing the seed of their undoing. (p59)

• [He] was a slim and handsome boy when he left, but his look when he returned was reeling and deathly. His face was puffed up and his eyes, they were like pits in his face. He had a thousand-year-old stare. (p131)

• A woman's body is the gate to this life. A man's body is the gate to the next life. (p190)

• ...the world of grass was never meant to be shortened to a carpet so that the outdoors is like one big wall-to-wall room. (p225)

The Blue Jay's Dance: A Birth Year (1996)

• We live and work with a divided consciousness. It is a beautiful enough shock to fall in love with another adult, to feel the possibility of unbearable sorrow at the loss of that other, essential, personality, expressed just so, that particular touch. But love of an infant is of a different order. It is twinned love, all absorbing, a blur of boundaries and messages. It is uncomfortably close to self-erasure, and in the face of it one's fat ambitions, desperations, private icons, and urges fall away into a dreamlike before that haunts and forces itself into the present with tough persistence. (p4)

• The self will not be forced under, nor will the baby's needs gracefully retreat. The world tips away when we look into our children's faces. (p4)

• Organized Christian religion is more often about denying the body when what we profoundly need are rituals that regard the blood, the shock, the heat, the shit, the anguish, the glory, the earnestness of the female body. (p47)

• Life seems to flood by, taking our loves quickly in its flow. In the growth of children, in the aging of beloved parents, time's chart is magnified, shown in its particularity, focused, so that with each celebration of maturity there is also a pang of loss. This is our human problem, one common to parents, sons and daughters, too - how to let go while holding tight, how to simultaneously cherish the closeness and intricacy of the bond while at the same time letting out the raveling string, the red yarn that ties our hearts. (p69)

• Laughter is our consolation prize for consciousness. (p81)

• 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 fortunate who feels witnessed as a person, outside relationships with parent, by another adult." (p162)

• What are dreams but an internal wilderness and what is desire but a wildness of the soul? (p182)

• When every inch of the world is known, sleep may be the only wilderness that we have left. (p190)

• Each life is one short word slowly uttered. (p191)

The Bingo Palace (1994)

• We do know that no one gets wise enough to really understand the heart of another, though it is the task of our life to try. (p6)

• You may be one kind of fool who never gets enough or another who gets too much. (p18)

• [She] was one of those who took on too much in order to remain perpetually dissatisfied with herself. It worked — a plume of spent fuel trailed her days, headlong in concentration, and her nights were black. (p25)

• We'll get to the truth quicker if we don't worry about logic. (p111)

• Pain comes to us from deep back, from where it grew in the human body. Pain sucks more pain into it, we don't know why. It lives, and we harbor its weight. When the worst comes, we will not act the opposite. We will do what we were taught, we who learnt our lessons in the dead light. We pass them on. We hurt, and hurt others, in a circular motion. (p199)

The Beet Queen (1986)

• So that's how I came to Argus. I was the girl in the stiff coat. (first line)

• "Everything that ever happened to him in his life," she said, "all the things we said and did. Where did it go?" I didn't have an answer, so I just drove. Once I had caused a miracle by smashing my face on ice, but now I was an ordinary person. In the few miles we had left I could not help drawing out [her] strange idea in my mind. In my line of work I've seen thousands of brains that belonged to sheep, pork, steers. They were all gray lumps like ours. Where did everything go? What was really inside? The flat fields unfolded, the shallow ditches ran beside the road. I felt the live thoughts hum inside of me, and I pictured tiny bees, insects made of blue electricity, in a colony so fragile that it would scatter at the slightest touch. I imagined a blow, like a mallet to the sheep, or a stroke, and I saw the whole swarm vibrating out. Who could stop them? Who could catch them in their hands? (p203-4)

• But then as time passed, I learned the lesson that parents do early on. You fail sometimes. No matter how much you love your children, there are times you slip. There are moments you can't give, stutter, lose your temper, or simply lose face with the world, and you can't explain this to a child. (p236)

• All that held him together now was the crowd, and when the parade was finally over and they drew apart he would disperse, too, in so many pieces that not even the work of his own clever hands could shape him back the way he was. (p315)

Love Medicine (1984)

• The length of sky is just about the size of my ignorance. Pure and wide. (p40)

• ...I let my thoughts run out like water from a dam. (p66)

• Time was rushing around me like water around a big wet rock. The only difference is, I was not so durable as stones. Very quickly I would be smoothed away. It was happening already. (p94)

• 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. (p190)

• I had gotten humble in the past week, not just losing the touch but getting jolted into the understanding that would prey on me from here on out. Your life feels different on you, once you greet death and understand your heart's position. You wear your life like a garment from the mission bundle sale ever after -- lightly because you realize you never paid nothing for it, cherishing because you know you won't ever come by such a bargain again. Also, you have the feeling someone wore it before you and someone will after. I can't explain that, not yet, but I'm putting my mind to it. (p213)

• And so when they tell you that I was heartless, a shameless man-chaser, don't ever forget this: I loved what I saw. And yes, it is true that I've done all the things they say. That's not what gets them. What aggravates them is I've never shed one solitary tear. I'm not sorry. (p217)

• 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. (p221)

• "...Society 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." (p263)

• So many things in the world have happened before. But it's like they never did. Every new thing that happens to a person, it's a first. To be a son of a father was like that. In that night I felt expansion, as if the world was branching out in shoots and growing faster than the eye could see. I felt smallness, how the earth divided into bits and kept dividing. I felt the stars. I felt them roosting on my shoulders with his hand. The moon came up red and warm. (p271)

from Interviews

• Nothing. I was a model child. It was the teacher’s mistake I am sure. The box was drawn on the blackboard and the names of misbehaving children were written in it. As I adored my teacher, Miss Smith, I was destroyed to see my name appear. This was just the first of the many humiliations of my youth that I’ve tried to revenge through my writing. I have never fully exorcised shames that struck me to the heart as a child except through written violence, shadowy caricature, and dark jokes.
  • On how a childhood experience shaped her future writing in “Louise Erdrich, The Art of Fiction No. 208” in The Paris Review (Winter 2010)

• I started Future Home of the Living God sometime after the 2000 U.S. election. I was furious and worried. I saw the results of electing George W. Bush as a disaster for reproductive rights. Sure enough, he began by reinstating the global gag rule, which cuts international funding for contraceptives if abortion is mentioned. This, when we face overpopulation.
  • On one of her inspirations for writing Future Home of the Living God in “Inside The Dystopian Visions Of Margaret Atwood And Louise Erdrich” in Elle Magazine (2017 Nov 14)

• (What moves you most in a work of literature?) Reading about an ordinary person who behaves with integrity in a terrifying situation.
  • interview (2016)

with NPR (2020)

• These treaties had been made since the beginning of our country on a nation-to-nation basis with every tribe. And they all contain these words, as long as the grass grows, as long as the rivers flow.

• I'm a very mixed person. And yet, being a citizen of a nation within our nation gives one a certain sense of - it changes your life. It means that I care deeply about my people, my mother's people.

• The reasoning behind the best schools being far away was to assimilate native children, to train them to live in a culture that was very different from their parents. So that when they came home, often children couldn't speak the language that their parents were speaking. I have to say right here that boarding schools are often characterized in sort of a lump definition, but they were all very different. And the government had secular boarding schools which underwent a real sea change in the 1930s and became much more supportive of native culture, while many of the boarding schools which were run by religious groups did not and remained hostile to native religion and native culture.

• I've been asked by people, well, why wasn't that great? Why didn't people just want to move away from their reservation and become like everybody else? You know, I've been asked that question. It's a fair question. And the answer is because native people aren't like everybody else, and native people want to stay who we are, right? And that's because the government made a very firm decision not to put money into the infrastructure on reservations, not to keep the treaties. The treaties stated that they would provide for health, education and the general welfare of native people as they struggled into this new form of existence. And that was basically rent for all that the rest of the country enjoys; all of the lands, all of the rivers, all of the places that no longer belonged to Native Americans.

• Now there is a lot more awareness about missing and murdered Indigenous women. And it hasn't - of course, it hasn't stopped. It's probably gotten worse.

• If you should ever doubt that a series of dry words in a government document can shatter spirits and demolish lives, let this book (The Night Watchman) erase that doubt. Conversely, if you should be of the conviction that we are powerless to change those dry words, let this book give you heart.

with The Paris Review (2010)

• I have never fully exorcised shames that struck me to the heart as a child except through written violence, shadowy caricature, and dark jokes.

• The Ojibwe say that each word has a spirit.

• English is a very powerful language, a colonizer’s language and a gift to a writer. English has destroyed and sucked up the languages of other cultures—its cruelty is its vitality.

• I’ve come to love the traditional Ojibwe ceremonies, and some rituals, but I hate religious rules. They are usually about controlling women. On Sundays when other people go to wood-and-stone churches, I like to take my daughters into the woods. Or at least work in the garden and be outside. Any god we have is out there. I’d hate to be certain that there was nothing. When it comes to God, I cherish doubt.

• People assume there is just one sort of Native experience. No.

• 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.

• I suppose one develops a number of personas and hides them away, then they pop up during writing. The exertion of control comes later. I take great pleasure in writing when I get a real voice going and I’m able to follow the voice and the character. It’s like being in a trance state. Once that had happened a few times, I knew I needed to write for the rest of my life. I began to crave the trance state. I would be able to return to the story anytime, and it would play out in front of me, almost effortlessly.

• All of the books will be connected somehow—by history and blood and by something I have no control over, which is the writing itself. The writing is going to connect where it wants to, and I will have to try and follow along.

• By having children, I’ve both sabotaged and saved myself as a writer. I hate to ­pigeonhole myself as a writer, but being a female and a mother and a Native American are important aspects of my work, and even more than being mixed blood or Native, it’s difficult to be a mother and a writer...It’s because you’re ­always fighting sentiment. You’re fighting sentimentality all of the time ­because being a mother alerts you in such a primal way. You are alerted to any danger to your child, and by extension you become afraid of anybody getting hurt. This becomes the most powerful thing to you; it’s instinctual. Either you end up writing about terrible things happening to children—as if you could ward them off simply by writing about them—or you tie things up in easily opened packages, or you pull your punches as a writer. All deadfalls to watch for...having children has also made me this particular writer. Without my children, I’d have written with less fervor; I wouldn’t understand life in the same way. I’d write fewer comic scenes, which are the most challenging. I’d probably have become obsessively self-absorbed, or slacked off. Maybe I’d have become an alcoholic. Many of the writers I love most were alcoholics. I’ve made my choice, I sometimes think: Wonderful children instead of hard liquor.

• Bits of narrative always cling to a title, like magnetism.

• I have always kept notebooks—I have an obsessive devotion to them—and I go back to them over and over. They are my compost pile of ideas.

• (A journalist once asked you what advice you would give someone trying to write a novel. You said, “Don’t take the project too seriously.” Is that what you would say today?) LE: I think I meant that grand ideas kill first efforts. Begin with something in your range. Then write it as a secret. I’d be paralyzed if I thought I had to write a great novel, and no matter how good I think a book is on one day, I know now that a time will come when I will look upon it as a failure. The gratification has to come from the effort itself. I try not to look back. I approach the work as though, in truth, I’m nothing and the words are everything. Then I write to save my life. If you are a writer, that will be true. Writing has saved my life...I needed a way to go at life. I needed meaning. I might have chosen something more self-destructive had I not found writing.

• If I am writing a novel, it casts an aura around me and I get ideas for it, descriptions, words, phrases, at all times. I’m always jotting in notebooks I keep with me. That delight of immersion in a book is as good as a trance. For a while, the book is so powerful that I can follow the thread even through my chaotic daily existence, with children at all hours, school, dinner, long calls to my daughters, my ever-demanding house, barking dogs, and the bookstore.

• Any good business is about its people.

• People need bookstores and need other readers. We need the intimate communication with others who love books. We don’t really think we do, because of the ease that the Internet has introduced, but we still need the physical world more than we know.

• There’s something very wrong in our country—and not just in the book business. We now see what barely fettered capitalism looks like. We are killing the small and the intimate. We all feel it and we don’t know quite why everything is beginning to look the same. The central cores of large cities can still sustain interesting places. But all across our country we are intent on developing chain after chain with no character and employees who work for barely livable wages. We are losing our individuality. Killing the soul of our landscape. Yet we’re supposed to be the most individualistic of countries. I feel the sadness of it every time I go through cities like Fargo and Minneapolis and walk the wonderful old Main Streets and then go out to the edges and wander through acres of concrete boxes. Our country is starting to look like Legoland.

• (Is writing a lonely life for you?) LE: Strangely, I think it is. I am surrounded by an abundance of family and friends, and yet I am alone with the writing. And that is perfect.

in Conversations with Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris (1994)

edited by Allan Chavkin and Nancy Feyl Chavkin

• (Q: Do you recall what you read when you were a child?) A: What most children read, I think-Nancy Drew, the Bobbsey Twins and Hardy Boys, Jack London, Marjorie Morningstar, Animal Farm and Shakespeare's history plays, because with my father, I watched all of Educational TV's The Age of Kings, and then listened to Macbeth and King Lear records over and over. I read every single Readers Digest Condensed book, all kinds of household magazines, nature guides, Victoria Holt, Robert Ruark, Leon Uris, all the big fat books in the front shelf at the local library. I remember having books splayed open, under pillows and jackets all over the house because, as the oldest of several children, I had lots of responsibility and not much time to read. (1993 interview)

• (Q: Who were your favorite authors in your apprenticeship years?) A: Flannery O'Connor, Gunter Grass, Jean Rhys, Flann O'Brien, Alejo Carpentier, Mark Twain, John Barth, Willa Cather, William Faulkner, W.B. Yeats, John Tanner, Vladimir Nabokov, William Gass. (1993 interview)

• (Q: Were there any established writers whom you knew and were important to your writing career during or after your apprenticeship period?) A: Mark Vinz, Cynthia MacDonald, Richard Howard, Charles Newman, Edmund White, M. L. Rosenthal, and then, although Love Medicine went out with absolutely no expectations or any prepublication notes or hype, none at all, Toni Morrison, Kay Boyle, Philip Roth, Peter Matthiessen, Anne Tyler, and Rosellen Brown read an unknown manuscript and responded with those quotes and marks of approval that appear on book jackets. These were completely unsolicited and I still find it remarkable that these writers, overwhelmed with pleas and manuscripts, picked up Love Medicine and responded. There were a great number of people kind along the way. One hears much more about the egomania and posturing of writers than one does about the devotion that writers have for one another's work. (1993 interview)

• (Q: Who are the writers who influenced your work or served as models?) A: Michael Dorris, of course: believer, critic, beloved, and the person I most admire. Other than Michael, it is hard to pick out lasting influences. I'm a browser, prey to temporary enthusiasms. In my reading life, I usually have a number of books "going" at once. Last year I read nature essays. This year, women's politics and Henry James. My favorites over the years include Flannery O'Connor, William Faulkner, Angela Carter, Gabrel Garcia Marquez, Marguerite Duras, Robert Stone, Jane Smiley, Robb Forman Dew, Jean Rhys, Adrienne Rich, Toni Morrison, Rene Char, Larry Woiwode, Christina Stead, Katherine Anne Porter, Willa Cather, Jim Harrison, the poets Louise Gluck, Mary Oliver, Sharon Olds and Donald Hall. I read Madame Bovary and Jane Austen and George Eliot over and over. (1993 interview)

• (Q: Can you name some contemporary writers whose work you admire?) A: Linda Hogan's book Mean Spirits, Amy Tan's novels The Joy Luck Club and The Kitchen God's Wife, Gretel Ehrlich's essays. Annie Dillard. James Welch. Joanna Scott's Arrogance. A. S. Byatt. Jeanette Winterson. Of course, everything by Toni Morrison, Philip Roth, and Joyce Carol Oates. Doris Betts. Margaret Atwood. Alice Munro. Thom Jones. Charles Palliser. (1993 interview)

• (Q: Are you concerned that being labelled a "Native American writer" or a "woman writer" might result in your being marginalized? Do you object to those labels?) Erdrich: I think they originate in course descriptions and that there is some use in them. If the work survives, perhaps they'll fall away. If not, there isn't much I can do about it. After all, I don't think we read George Eliot, [Jane Austen]], Virginia Woolf, or Flannery O'Connor as "women writers" anymore, but as vital voices of their time. I know that, for instance, Toni Morrison will be read in this fashion. She is already. The point we're striving for is one at which the criteria for the work is its worth to readers, its excellence, the qualities that shine out and endure. (1993 interview)

• (Wasn't it Pete Seeger who once said that any time you assemble a group of people, for whatever purpose, you have the body politic?) Erdrich: That's what people on reservations say. You know, everything's political. Getting your teeth fixed is political. There's no way around it. I just don't want to become polemical. That's the big difference. (1991 interview)

• when you love someone you try to listen to them. Their voice then comes through. (1987)

• The recent abundance of Native American writers follows the course of Native American fortunes in general. Things got better for Native Americans in education, in health, in many areas. I'm one who has benefited from Bureau of Indian Affairs money and education. The program at Dartmouth really stresses the importance of keeping your heritage. All of these things really work together. If things continue as they are now under the Reagan administration, we can expect to see a corresponding absence of younger Native American writers as well as Native American doctors, lawyers, everything-who don't have the educational advantages. These things are linked to a national governmental attitude toward keeping those promises of providing education and tribal assistance. (1986 interview)

• there's such a sense of humor and irony in Native American life, in tribal life. I mean, that's one of the things that does not get portrayed often enough-that there's such an irony and humor. (1986 interview)

Quotes about Louise Erdrich

• Today, great writers from minority groups in the U.S. are finding their voice in the wonderful, rich imagery of magic realism. Writers such as Louise Erdrich, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Amy Tan all have a unique, rich way of writing that can be described as magic realism. These women are among those who have broken away from the style of writing that defines most of the fiction coming from industrialized countries: that pragmatic, minimalist style and way of facing reality in which the only things one dares talk about are those things one can control.
  • 1991 interview in Conversations with Isabel Allende (1999)

• Louise Erdrich, Barbara Kingsolver. They write, as you say, from the margins: a subversive novel, with an anti-WASP tone that I love.
  • 1991 interview included in Conversations with Isabel Allende (1999) Translated from Spanish by Virginia Invernizzi

• Anishinaabe Louise Erdrich’s novel Future Home of the Living God (2017) is a really interesting take on decolonizing the Anthropocene.
  • Grace Dillon "Taking the Fiction Out of Science Fiction: A Conversation about Indigenous Futurisms" (2021)

• Philip Roth has declared her "greatly gifted" and found in her work "originality, authority, tenderness, and a pitiless and wild wit," and Toni Morrison has written that "the beauty of Love Medicine saves us from being devastated by its power."
  • Shelby Grantham, 1985 interview in Conversations with Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris edited by Allan Chavkin and Nancy Feyl Chavkin (1994)

• I feel that with Louise, that was a great breakthrough for Indian writers, for her to succeed financially.
  • Linda Hogan (writer) interview in Winged Words edited by Laura Coltelli (1990)

• Louise Erdrich, who recently won the Nelson Algren short fiction award, writes of survival in a tone that has quiet strength. Roles reverse. The hunted and the hunter merge, become one. The poems contain a mystery and depth that charge them with meaning and intensity.
  • Linda Hogan (writer) "Native American Women: Our Voice, the Air" in Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies (Autumn, 1981)

• Like two of her favorite contemporary writers, Marilynne Robinson and Joan Chase, Erdrich is committed to evoking the spirit of place.
  • Nan Nowick, 1986 article in Conversations with Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris edited by Allan Chavkin and Nancy Feyl Chavkin (1994)

• I read Louise Erdrich’s “Love Medicine,” with its strong multiple voices. The stories were bound by community and mutual loss. That later became a model for the structure of “The Joy Luck Club.”
  • Amy Tan interview (2013)

• Love Medicine has received all kinds of acclaim. Like many others, Ursula Le Guin is unrestrained in her praise of Love Medicine which she calls "a work of really startling beauty and power" and of you, Louise, whom she refers to as "a true artist and probably a major one" [SAIL, Winter 1985].
  • Hertha D. Wong, 1986 interview in Conversations with Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris edited by Allan Chavkin and Nancy Feyl Chavkin (1994)

External links

• Blog
• GoodReads page