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.

Louise Erdrich

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 are here to risk your heart.

Louise Erdrich

strength love life

What happens when you let an unsatisfactory present go on long enough? It becomes your entire history.

Louise Erdrich

life long past

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.

Louise Erdrich

shapes young stories

When women age into their power, no wind can upset them, no hand turn aside their knowledge, no fact can deflect their point of view.

Louise Erdrich

women views hands

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.

Louise Erdrich

strength love life

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.

Louise Erdrich

wise heart trying

Things which do not grow and change are dead things.

Louise Erdrich

novelists change native-american

To sew is to pray. Men don't understand this. They see the whole but they don't see the stitches. They don't see the speech of the creator in the work of the needle. We mend. We women turn things inside out and set things right. We salvage what we can of human garments and piece the rest into blankets. Sometimes our stitches stutter and slow. Only a woman's eyes can tell. Other times, the tension in the stitches might be too tight because of tears, but only we know what emotion went into the making. Only women can hear the prayer.

Louise Erdrich

eye prayer men

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.

Louise Erdrich

daughter mother children

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.

Louise Erdrich

ravens light bird

Our 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 Erdrich

earth stones song

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 Erdrich

strength love-you heart

Every so often something shatters like ice and we are in the river of our existence. We are aware.

Louise Erdrich

chaos ice rivers

some people meet the way the sky meets the earth, inevitably, and there is no stopping or holding back their love. It exists in a finished world, beyond the reach of common sense.

Louise Erdrich

sky romantic people

Of course, 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.

Louise Erdrich

vitality other-cultures powerful

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.

Louise Erdrich

destiny time two

Love won't be tampered with, love won't go away. Push it to one side and it creeps to the other.

Louise Erdrich

going-away sides love

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.

Louise Erdrich

mad dog people

So what is wild? What is wilderness? What are dreams but an internal wilderness and what is desire but a wildness of the soul?

Louise Erdrich

soul dream desire

There will never come a time when I will be able to resist my emotions.

Louise Erdrich

able emotion