Louise Erdrich

I was not prepared to think of the people I had lost, or to speak of them, although we did, carefully, without letting their names loose in the wind that would reach their ears. We feared that they would hear us and never rest, come back out of pity for the loneliness we felt.

A smile of remembrance of lost times.

The story comes around, pushing at our brains, and soon we are trying to ravel back to the beginning, trying to put families into order and make sense of things. But we start with one person, and soon another and another follows, and still another, until we are lost in the connections.

Very little is needed to make a happy life, he said.

Something in her was changing as she read the books. Life after life flashed before her eyes, yet she stayed safe from misery. And the urge to act things out onstage could be satisfied cheaply, and at home, and without the annoyance of other members of an acting company. Her ambition to leave faded and a kind of contentment set in. She hadn't exactly feared the word contentment, but had always associated it with a vague sense of failure. To be discontented had always seemed much richer a thing. To be restless, striving. That view was romantic. In truth, she was finding out, life was better lived in a tranquil pattern. As long as she could read, she never tired of the design of her days.

"You know any Mormons?" asked Martin Cross
"I don't think so."
"They haven't got to you. They'll come around yet. It's in their religion to change Indians into whites."
"I thought that was a government job."

Loss, dislocation, disease, addiction, and just feeling like the tattered remnants of a people with a complex history. What was in that history? What sort of knowledge? Who had they been? What were they now? Why so much fucked-upness wherever you turned?

It seemed to her that almost any pain was sympathetic to her loss and she inserted herself immediately into the concept of fantastic suffering.

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

I knew each person's delusion, the places their records had scratched, where the sounds repeated.

Juggie Blue: We don’t want to leave our homes We are poor, but even poor people can love their land. You do not need money to love your home.

How come we've got these bodies? They are frail supports for what we feel. There are times I get so hemmed in by my arms and legs I look forward to getting past them. As though death will set me free like a traveling cloud... I'll be out there as a piece of the endless body of the world feeling pleasures so much larger than skin and bones and blood.

I was the sort of kid who spent a Sunday afternoon prying little trees out of the foundation of his parents’ house. I should have given in to the inevitable truth that this was the sort of person I would become, in the end, but I kept fighting it.

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.

I already knew, too, that these questions would not change the facts. But they would inevitably change the way we sought justice.