Original Fire Quotes

“Leave the dishes.
Let the celery rot in the bottom drawer of the refrigerator
and an earthen scum harden on the kitchen floor.
Leave the black crumbs in the bottom of the toaster.
Throw the cracked bowl out and don't patch the cup.
Don't patch anything. Don't mend. Buy safety pins.
Don't even sew on a button.
Let the wind have its way, then the earth
that invades as dust and then the dead
foaming up in gray rolls underneath the couch.
Talk to them. Tell them they are welcome.
Don't keep all the pieces of the puzzles
or the doll's tiny shoes in pairs, don't worry
who uses whose toothbrush or if anything
matches, at all.
Except one word to another. Or a thought.
Pursue the authentic-decide first
what is authentic,
then go after it with all your heart.
Your heart, that place
you don't even think of cleaning out.
That closet stuffed with savage mementos.
Don't sort the paper clips from screws from saved baby teeth
or worry if we're all eating cereal for dinner
again. Don't answer the telephone, ever,
or weep over anything at all that breaks.
Pink molds will grow within those sealed cartons
in the refrigerator. Accept new forms of life
and talk to the dead
who drift in though the screened windows, who collect
patiently on the tops of food jars and books.
Recycle the mail, don't read it, don't read anything
except what destroys
the insulation between yourself and your experience
or what pulls down or what strikes at or what shatters
this ruse you call necessity.”
― Louise Erdrich, Original Fire

“Why do I long
to be devoured and to forget
in life rather than in death?
What is the difference?”
― Louise Erdrich, Original Fire

“You were made by women.
You were made because we needed someone,
a man, to blame.
You were struck from our hands
and kneaded to your man-shape like dough
Then you rose and rose and doubled to enclose us
in the God-shape, the myth.”
― Louise Erdrich, Original Fire

“I allowed you to spring forward without me.
Sister, I unchained myself.
For I was always the heaviest passenger,
the stone wagon of example,
the firelight you dragged all the way to heaven,
and how were you to release yourself from me, then, poor mad horse,
except by reaching the gate?”
― Louise Erdrich, Original Fire

“Sometimes you have to take your own hand
as though you were a lost child
and bring yourself stumbling home over twisted ice.”
― Louise Erdrich, Original Fire

“Still, when death comes you weep, you do not recognize it as the immortality you crave.”
― Louise Erdrich, Original Fire

“Mystery is not a passive condition.
To see a thing so perfectly what it is--
doesn't it make you
want to hold it,
to marvel, to touch,
its answered question?”
― Louise Erdrich, Original Fire

“Recycle the mail, don't read it, don't read anything
except what destroys
the insulation between yourself and your experience
or what pulls down or what strikes at or what shatters
this ruse you call necessity.”
― Louise Erdrich, Original Fire