Happy Birthday, Louise Erdrich!
If you’ve never heard of Louise Erdrich, allow me to introduce you.
Author of more than 20 novels (!), Erdrich writes about the Native American experience. Her more popular books include Love Medicine, Tracks, The Beet Queen, The Bingo Palace, The Round House, and my personal favorite, The Painted Drum.
If you haven’t checked out any of her novels, I highly suggest you do. Filled with beautiful language and prose, Erdrich’s books help give meeting to the things we can’t seem to put into words.
Want a little taste? Here are 17 of her most beautiful quotes, in my opinion anyway!
17 Beautiful Quotes from Louise Erdrich
“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.”
—The Master Butchers Singing Club
“Right and wrong were shades of meaning, not sides of a coin.”
—Love Medicine
“Getting blown up happened in an instant; getting put together took the rest of your life.”
—LaRose
“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.”
—The Beet Queen
“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.”
—The Plague of Doves
“The moonless sky was a rich, wild, blackness of stars.”
—The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse
“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.”
—Shadow Tag
“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.”
—The Bingo Palace
“Our love is a hurting delicacy, an old killer whiskey, a curse, and too beautiful for words.”
—The Antelope Wife
Looking for a new book to read? Check in every Friday for a “Bee Happy” post, where I share reviews of books I’ve read or other book-themed lists.
The Hob-bee Hive 