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I Might Not Be Able To Use The Word "hope," But I Could Certainly Use The Word "optimism." I'm Very Optimistic. I Don't Feel That It Helps To Be Pessimistic. At Some Point In My Life I Made A Conscious Decision That I Would Try To Be Optimistic - Not Blind To Anything At All - But To Always Hear The Way That Had The Best Chance For Happiness.

-Louise Erdrich

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I Might Not Be

Louise Erdrich

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I Might Not Be Able To Use The Word "hope," But I Could Certainly Use The Word "optimism." I'm Very Optimistic. I Don't Feel That It Helps To Be Pessimistic. At Some Point In My Life I Made A Conscious Decision That I Would Try To Be Optimistic - Not Blind To Anything At All - But To Always Hear The Way That Had The Best Chance For Happiness.

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I Have Brothers And Was A Tomboy, If That's Still A Designation. It Wasn't A Stretch For Me To Think And Write As A 13-year-old Boy - It Is Freeing.

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.

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.

Numbers, Time, Inches, Feet. All Are Just Ploys For Cutting Nature Down To Size.

We Have A Huge Struggle For Our Sense Of What A Democracy Is. We're Not Living In Reality When We Think We Have Some Sort Of Democracy. We're Really On The Edge. We Have Two Presidents Who Lost The Popular Vote But Won The Election. This Is Not Working.

They Were So Strong In Their Beliefs That There Came A Time When It Hardly Mattered What Exactly Those Beliefs Were; They All Fused Into A Single Stubbornness.

It's Impossible To Write About Native Life Without Humor-that's How People Maintain Sanity.

The Contents Of A House Can Trigger All Sorts Of Revisions To Family History.

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.

It Is Easy To Take Away The World That We Think Is So Permanent And Reliable.

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.

I Had A Very Free Childhood And Ranged Around On My Bicycle The Way Boys Do. I Had Few Restrictions.

The Internet, Which Seems Now So Embedded And Personal And Crucial To Our Lives, Isn't At All - We Really Shouldn't Think Of It That Way.

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.

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.

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.

To Love Another Another Human In All Of Her Splendor And Imperfect Perfection , It Is A Magnificent Task...tremendous And Foolish And Human.

Your Life Feels Different On You, Once You Greet Death And Understand Your Heart's Position.

Every So Often Something Shatters Like Ice And We Are In The River Of Our Existence. We Are Aware.

All Of Our Actions Have In Their Doing The Seed Of Their Undoing.

I Might Not Be Able To Use The Word "hope," But I Could Certainly Use The Word "optimism." I'm Very Optimistic. I Don't Feel That It Helps To Be Pessimistic. At Some Point In My Life I Made A Conscious Decision That I Would Try To Be Optimistic - Not Blind To Anything At All - But To Always Hear The Way That Had The Best Chance For Happiness.

I Work Really Out Of Mythology, So Often I Work Out Of A Story That Has Remained Lodged Inside Somehow, Or I Work Out Of History, You Know, Out Of A Sense Of Historical Inevitability With Characters.

You Really Need To Approach Each Book As If You Have Been A Failure. . . . If You Start To Believe Your Flap-copy, You're Finished As A Writer.

I Did Not Choose Solitude. Who Would? It Came On Me Like A Kind Of Vocation, Demanding An Effort That Married Women Can't Picture.

I Prefer To Have Some Beliefs That Don't Make Logical Sense.

Old Love, Middle Love, The Kind Of Love That Knows Itself And Knows That Nothing Lasts, Is A Desperate Shared Wildness.

Love Won't Be Tampered With, Love Won't Go Away. Push It To One Side And It Creeps To The Other. Throw It In The Garbage And It Springs Up Clean. Try To Root It Out And It Only Flourishes. Love Is A Weed, A Dandelion That You Poison From Your Heart. The Taproots Wait. The Seeds Blow Off, Ticklish, Into A Part Of The Yard You Didn't Spray. And One Day, Though You Worked, Though You Prodded Out Each Spiky Leaf, You Lift Your Eyes And Dozens Of Fat Golden Faces Bob In The Grass.

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.

To Be Of Mixed Blood Is A Great Gift For A Writer. I Have One Foot On Tribal Lands And One Foot In Middle-class Life.

The Universe Is Transformation.

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.

Here I Am, Where I Ought To Be. A Writer Must Have A Place Where He Or She Feels This, The Place To Love And Be Irritated With.

Women Are Strong, Strong, Terribly Strong. We Don't Know How Strong Until We Are Pushing Out Our Babies. We Are Too Often Treated Like Babies Having Babies When We Should Be In Training, Like Acolytes, Novices To High Priestesshood, Like Serious Applicants For The Space Program.

But If There Was Embellishment, It Only Had To Do With The Facts.

You Have To Love. You Have To Feel. It Is The Reason You Are Here On Earth. You Are Here To Risk Your Heart.

Money Helps, Though Not So Much As You Think When You Don't Have It.

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.

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.

Death Is The Least Civilized Rite Of Passage.

Here Is The Most Telling Fact: You Wish To Possess Me.  Here Is Another Fact: I Loved You And Let You Think You Could.

Each Life Is One Short Word Slowly Uttered.

It's Very Hard To Track Down What's Real And What's Not Real. We Haven't Absorbed What Climate Change Is Doing. Because Whether People Associate It Or Not, Fear Of Immigration Is Completely Related To Climate Change, Because The Mass Migrations That Are Happening, The War In Syria, All Of These Structural Human Migrations Are Related To Climate Change.

I Knew Each Person's Delusion, The Places Their Records Had Scratched, Where The Sounds Repeated.

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.

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.

We All Got Holes In Our Lives. Nobody Dies In A Perfect Garment.

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.

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.

So What Is Wild? What Is Wilderness? What Are Dreams But An Internal Wilderness And What Is Desire But A Wildness Of The Soul?

Columbus Only Discovered That He Was In Some New Place. He Didn't Discover America.

By Writing I Can Live In Ways That I Could Not Survive.

Now I'm Sixty-one... Sixty-two, Pretty Soon. It's A Really Interesting Age. Now We Have Women Of Your Age, And Coming Up, And All These Fantastic Writers, Who Have Managed To Have Their Children But Continue With Their Art, Their Work. I Think Women Are Doing The Most Interesting Writing Right Now, The Most Interesting Art. I See Everything Through This Lens, Of Women Finally Taking Their Place In The World. Their True Place. And It's Very, Very Exciting To Me.

To Think About Love And Passion And Political Correctness All Together, It Doesn't Work. Art Has To Go Way Past The Political To Be Effective.

He Had A Thousand-year-old Stare.

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.

I Am Part Of What She Thinks Is Her Illness, A Symptom Of Which She Thinks She Has Been Cured. She, On The Other Hand, Is What I Was Looking For.

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.

The Greatest Wisdom Doesn't Know Itself. The Richest Plan Is Not To Have One.

Greatest Wisdom

Right And Wrong Were Shades Of Meaning, Not Sides Of A Coin.

We Started Dying Before The Snow, And Like The Snow, We Continued To Fall.

Looking At The Shape Of The World, I See How We're In A Time Where Women Are The Subject Of Hatred, Fear, And We Have To Fight That All The Time. I Feel That There Are Fights We Take For Granted. When I Look At The World, I See That Women Are Subject To Cruelty. And That's Why The Global Gag Rule Means So Much To Me, That The United States Wouldn't Stand Up For The Rights And Health Of Women.

The Only Time I See The Truth Is When I Cross My Eyes.

The Only Answer To This, And It Isn't An Entire Answer, Said Father Travis, Is That God Made Human Beings Free Agents. We Are Able To Choose Good Over Evil, But The Opposite Too. And In Order To Protect Our Human Freedom, God Doesn't Often, Very Often At Least, Intervene. God Can't Do That Without Taking Away Our Moral Freedom. Do You See? No. But Yeah. The Only Thing That God Can Do, And Does All Of The Time, Is To Draw Good From Any Evil Situation.

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.

When Small Towns Find They Cannot Harm The Strangest Of Their Members, When Eccentrics Show Resilience, They Are Eventually Embraced And Even Cherished.

I Got Well By Talking. Death Could Not Get A Word In Edgewise, Grew Discouraged, And Traveled On.

I Spend Most Of My Time Writing.

I Was In Love With The Whole World And All That Lived In Its Rainy Arms.

Freedom, I Found Is Not Only In The Running But In The Heart, The Mind, The Hands.

You Know, Some People Fall Right Through The Hole In Their Lives. Its Invisible, But They Come To It After Time, Never Knowing Where.

A Woman's Body Is The Gate To This Life. A Man's Body Is The Gate To The Next Life.

She Had Always Been A Reader… But Now She Was Obsessed. Since Her Discovery Of The Book Hoard Downstairs From Her Job, She’d Been Caught Up In One Such Collection Of People And Their Doings After The Next…the Pleasure Of This Sort Of Life – Bookish, She Supposed It Might Be Called, A Reading Life – Had Made Her Isolation Into A Rich And Even Subversive Thing. She Inhabited One Consoling Or Horrifying Persona After Another…that She Was Childless And Husbandless And Poor Meant Less Once She Picked Up A Book. Her Mistakes Disappeared Into It. She Lived With An Invented Force.

All Of Our Actions Have In Their Doing The Seed Of Their Undoing. ... That In Her Creation Of Her Children There Should Be The Unspeakable Promise Of Their Death, For By Their Birth She Had Created Mortal Beings.

As Soon As There's A Crisis, There Are People Who Take Charge And Want To Control Others. Climate-change Catastrophe And Human Migration And Immigration Are Great For Corporate And Governmental Control Over People, And We Have To Contend With That. I Should Say, I See Corporate Control Behind Everything That The Government Is Working On Right Now.

It Kills Your Writing If You Try To Manipulate It With Crude Politics.

Hunger Steals The Memory

I Want To Hear What's Happened To You," She Said Evenly After A While. She Gestured In The Direction, Down River, Of The Butcher Shop. "it's Just That There Is Nowhere Else To Start," She Said Gently. "niether Of Us Is The Same. But I'm Different Because Of Small, Good, Manageable Things. You're Different Because ... Things I Don't Know.

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.

Coming Down Off The Trail, I Am Lost In My Own Thoughts And Unprepared When A Bear Chugs Across The Path Just Before It Gives Out On The Gravel Road. I Am So Distracted That I Keep Walking Towards The Bear. I Only Stop When It Rears, Stands On Hind Legs, And Stares At Me, Sensitive Nose Pressed Into The Air, Weak Eyes Searching. I Have Never Been This Close To A Wild Bear Before, But I Am Not Frightened. There Is No Menace In Its Stance; It Is Not Even Curious. The Bear Seems To Know Who Or What I Am. The Bear Is Not Impressed.

We Passed Over In A Sweep Of Sorrow That Would Persist Into Our Small Forever. We Just Keep Going.

Women Are Strong, Strong, Terribly Strong. We Don't Know How Strong Until We're Pushing Out Our Babies.

There Is No Such Thing As A Complete Lack Of Order, Only A Design So Vast It Appears Unrepetitive Up Close.

I Want To Remember What Bullshit Looks Like When Weapons Of Mass Destruction Are Diagrammed Out And Whacko "intelligence" Is Delivered In An Ominous Way To Strike Fear Into People And Especially To Pull On The Idealism And Zeal Of The Young.

Mass Destruction

People Forget The Good, Because The Bad Has More Punch.

I Truly Think That You Can't Go And Stalk Your Material, You Have To Leave The Door Open And Whatever Chooses You, Chooses You. You Can't Go And Wrestle It To The Ground.

Veils Of Love Which Was Only Hate Petrified By Longing--that Was Me.

I Am At The Bookstore A Lot, But Let My Friends, The Professional Birchbark Books Staff, Handle The Day In And Day Out.

We Are Conjured Voiceless Out Of Nothing And Must Return To An Unknowing State. What Happens In Between Is An Uncontrolled Dance, And What We Ask For In Love Is No More Than A Momentary Chance To Get The Steps Right, To Move In Harmony Until The Music Stops.

This So Gnawed At Him On Some Nights That He Lay Awake Wondering Just How Many Unknown And Similarly Inconsequential Accidents And Bits Of Happenstance Were At This Moment Occurring Or Failing To Occur In Order To Ensure He Took His Next Breath, And The Next.

There Are People Who Are Always, I Think, Going To Remain People Of The Book, To Use Another Author's Title, But People Of The Book, Who Really Must Be Around.

The World Tips Away When We Look Into Our Children's Faces.

I Don't Pray. When I Was Young, I Vowed I Never Would Be Caught Begging God. If I Want Something I Get It For Myself. I Go To Church Only To Show The Old Hens They Don't Get Me Down.

I Always Have Some Way Of Putting The Stories Together That Works For The Book. I've Always Switched Points Of View In My Books. I'm A Gemini.

If Life's A Joke, Then Suicide's A Bad Punch Line.

Her Clothes Were Filled With Safety Pins And Hidden Tears.

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.

Don't Read Anything Except What Destroys The Insulation Between Yourself And Your Experience.

If Only I Had Discipline, But Alas, It Is Only An Obsessive-compulsive Trait And The Beauty Of Habit That Causes Me To Return Again And Again To My Work.

Obsessive Compulsive

What Happens When You Let An Unsatisfactory Present Go On Long Enough? It Becomes Your Entire History.

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.

History Works Itself Out In The Living.

Life Is Made Up Of Three Kinds Of People -- Those Who Live It, Those Afraid To, Those In Between.

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.

...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?

Where Was I?""a Different Island," Said Old Tallow. Her Voice Was Stern, But There Was An Ache In Her Look That Omakayas Had Never Before Seen. "an Island Called Spirit Island Where Everyone But You Died Of The Itching Sickness- You Were The Toughest One, The Littlest One, And You Survived Them All.""you Were Sent Here So You Could Save The Others," She Said. "because You'd Had The Sickness, You Were Strong Enough To Nurse Them Through It. They Did A Good Thing When They Took You In, And You Saved Them For Their Good Act. Now The Circle That Began When I Found You Is Complete.

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.

The Length Of Sky Is Just About The Size Of My Ignorance. Pure And Wide.

Things Which Do Not Grow And Change Are Dead Things.

Native American

Love Won't Be Tampered With, Love Won't Go Away. Push It To One Side And It Creeps To The Other.

The Music Was More Than Music - At Least What We Are Used To Hearing. The Music Was Feeling Itself. The Sound Connected Instantly With Something Deep And Joyous.

...grandpa's Mind Had Left Us, Gone Wild And Wary. When I Walked With Him I Could Feel How Strange It Was. His Thoughts Swam Between Us, Hidden Under Rocks, Disappearing In Weeds, And I Was Fishing For Them, Dangling My Own Words Like Baits And Lures.

I Thought How We Might Have To Yell To Be Heard By Higher Power, But That's Not Saying It's Not There. And That Is Faith For You. It's Belief Even When The Gods Don't Deliver.

Be Lovely And Do No Harm.

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.

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.

When Every Inch Of The World Is Known, Sleep May Be The Only Wilderness That We Have Left.

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.

There Will Never Come A Time When I Will Be Able To Resist My Emotions.

Can You Stop Your Mother From Singing To You? Who Would Do Such A Thing?

...whom He Had Saved From A Life Of Excessive Freedom

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.

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.

My Mind Ran Over Scenes Of Shesheeb Seducing Margaret Until I Was A Wagon Dragged By The Runaway Horses Of My Jealousy.

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.

By The Time I Was Done With The Car It Looked Worse Than Any Typical Indian Car That Has Been Driven All Its Life On Reservation Roads, Which They Always Say Are Like Government Promises - Full Of Holes.

You See I Thought Love Got Easier Over The Years So It Didn't Hurt So Bad When It Hurt, Or Feel So Good When It Felt Good. I Thought It Smoothed Out And Old People Hardly Noticed It. I Thought It Curled Up And Died, I Guess. Now I Saw It Rear Up Like A Whip And Lash.

What Men Call Adventures Usually Consist Of The Stoical Endurance Of Appalling Daily Misery.

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... 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 Stars.

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.

Add There Was That Moment When My Mother And Father Walked In The Door Disguised As Old People. I Thought The Miles In The Car Had Bent Them, Dulled Their Eyes, Even Grayed And Whitened Their Hair And Caused Their Hands And Voices To Tremble. At The Same Time, I Found, As I Rose Form The Chair, I'd Gotten Old Along With Them.

I Tried Out The Unfamiliar Syllables. They Fit. They Cracked In My Ears Like A Fist Through Ice.

Love. The Black Hook. The Spear Singing Through The Mind.

I Feel Myself Becoming Less A Person Than A Place, Inhabited, A Foreign Land.

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.

What Is This Life But The Sound Of An Appalling Love.

I Can't Imagine A Home Without An Overflow Of Books. The Point Of Books Is To Have Way Too Many But To Always Feel You Never Have Enough, Or The Right One At The Right Moment, But Then Sometimes To Find You'd Longed To Fall Asleep Reading The Aspern Papers, And There It Is.

You Never Know Where You're Going To Find The Same Thoughts In Another Brain, But When It Happens You Know It Right Off, Just Like You Were Connected By A Small Electrical Wire That Suddenly Glows Red Hot And Sparks.

Life Will Break You. Nobody Can Protect You From That.

I Make Very Involved Drawings, Even Little Structures, And Try Using Design To Figure Out The Rhythm Of A Plot. If There Are Several Narrators Then A Clue Has To Pop Up In The First Line. There Have To Be Certain Grammatical Clues, Or Distinctive Names.

In Our Own Beginnings, We Are Formed Out Of The Body's Interior Landscape. For A Short While, Our Mothers' Bodies Are The Boundaries And Personal Geography Which Are All That We Know Of The World...once We No Longer Live Beneath Our Mother's Heart, It Is The Earth With Which We Form The Same Dependent Relationship, Relying...on Its Cycles And Elements, Helpless Without Its Protective Embrace.

Sometimes A Person's Monstrosity Seems Superhuman.

[on Her And Husband Michael Dorris:] We Both Have Title Collections. I Think A Title Is Like A Magnet. It Begins To Draw These Scraps Of Experience Or Conversation Or Memory To It. Eventually, It Collects A Book.

I Have Always Kept Notebooks And I Go Back To Them Over And Over. They Are My Compost Pile Of Ideas.

Being A Girl Didn't Really Affect Me Until I Entered Junior High And Had To Wear Skirts, Curl My Hair, And Even Get Used To Panty Hose. However, My Hatred Of Panty Hose Helped Make Me A Writer Who Only Wears Comfortable Clothes. I've Successfully Avoided Panty Hose For Most Of My Life.

It Was Just Enough To Sit There Without Words.

I Spend My Time Dwelling On Revenge And Try To Deal With The Monsters Crawling Out Of The Ashes.

We Have These Earthly Bodies. We Don't Know What They Want. Half The Time, We Pretend They Are Under Our Mental Thumb, But That Is The Illusion Of The Healthy And The Protected. Of Sedate Lovers. For The Body Has Emotions It Conceives And Carries Through Without Concern For Anyone Or Anything Else. Love Is One Of Those, I Guess. Going Back To Something Very Old Knit Into The Brain As We Were Growing. Hopeless. Scorching. Ordinary.

There Are Ways Of Being Abandoned Even When Your Parents Are Right There.

Power Travels In The Bloodlines, Handed Out Before Birth.

Our Tribe Unraveled Like A Coarse Rope, Frayed At Either End As The Old And New Among Us Were Taken.

I Stood There In The Shadowed Doorway Thinking With My Tears. Yes, Tears Can Be Thoughts, Why Not?

There Is A Legacy Of Violence Against Native Women That Has Gotten Worse And Worse Over Time.

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.

I Think One Of The Reasons To Be Here On Earth Is To Finally Be Who We Are, At All Times - To Know And Be Predictable To Ourselves.

I Think One Of The Most Fertile, Unexplored Areas For Poets And Fiction Writers Is The World Of Science. I Become Overwhelmed By The Science World.

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