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21 " Delphine began to read with a mad attention when she wanted to talk to Clarisse. She saw that in her life there was a woman-shaped hole, a cutout that led to a mysterious place. Through it, her mother, then Eva, and now Clarisse had walked. If only she could plunge her arms through and drag them back. "
― Louise Erdrich , The Master Butchers Singing Club
22 " Women don't realize how much store men set on the regularity of their habits. We absorb their comings and goings into our bodies, their rhythms into our bones. "
― Louise Erdrich , The Round House
23 " He had a thousand-year-old stare. "
― Louise Erdrich , The Antelope Wife
24 " A woman's body is the gate to this life. A man's body is the gate to the next life. "
25 " 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. "
26 " The pattern glitters with cruelty. The blue beads are colored with fish blood, the reds with powdered heart. The beads collect in borders of mercy. The yellows are dyed with the ocher of silence. There is no telling which twin will fall asleep first, allowing the other's colors to dominate, for how long. The design grows, the overlay deepens. The beaders have no other order at the heart of their being. Do you know that the beads are sewn onto the fabric of the earth with endless strands of human muscle, human sinew, human hair? We are as crucial to this making as other animals. No more and no less important than the deer. "
27 " Delphine witnessed awful things occurring to other humans. Worse than that, she was powerless to alter their fate. It would be that way all her life--disasters, falling like chairs all around her, falling so close they disarranged her hair, but not touching her. "
28 " Old love, middle love, the kind of love that knows itself and knows that nothing lasts, is a desperate shared wildness. "
― Louise Erdrich , The Plague of Doves
29 " If, 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 Erdrich , The Blue Jay's Dance: A Birth Year
30 " 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. "
31 " 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. "
― Louise Erdrich , The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse
32 " She gave her husband such a night of sexual pleasure that his eyes followed her constantly after that, narrow and hot. He grew molten when she passed near other men, and at night they made their own shaking tent. They got teased too much and moved farther off, into the brush, into the nesting ground of shy and holy loons. There, no one could hear them. In solitude they made love until they became gaunt and hungry, pale windigos with aching eyes, tongues of flame. "
33 " Upon walking into Eva's kitchen, something profound happened to Delphine. She experienced a fabulous expansion of being. Light-headed, she felt a swooping sensation and then a quiet, as though she'd settled like a bird. "
34 " And it occurred to me how even pulling trees that day, just months ago, I was in heaven. Unaware. I had known nothing even as the evil was occurring, I hadn't been touched yet. "
35 " When small towns find they cannot harm the strangest of their members, when eccentrics show resilience, they are eventually embraced and even cherished. "
36 " Then his head tipped down on his chest and he fell into the instant sleep of the ancient and the very young. "
― Louise Erdrich
37 " White people covered the earth like lice. "
― Louise Erdrich , LaRose
38 " And how funny, strange, that a thing can grow so powerful even when planted in the wrong place. Ideas too, I muttered. Ideas. "
39 " There will never come a time when I will be able to resist my emotions. "
― Louise Erdrich , Tales of Burning Love
40 " Her 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. "