The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse Quotes

“To love another human in all of her splendor and imperfect perfection , it is a magnificent task...tremendous and foolish and human.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

“The only time I see the truth is when I cross my eyes.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

“Sometimes owls came near to warn of death. Sometimes they just asked people to be careful. Sometimes they were just owls.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

“What is the question we spend our entire lives asking? Our question is this: Are we loved? I don’t mean by one another. Are we loved by the one who made us? Constantly, we look for evidence. In the gifts we are given—children, good weather, money, a happy marriage perhaps—we find assurance. In contrast, our pains, illnesses, the deaths of those we love, our poverty, our innocent misfortunes—those we take as signs that God has somehow turned away. But, my friends, what exactly is love here? How to define it? Does God’s love have anything at all to do with the lack or plethora of good fortune at work in our lives? Or is God’s love, perhaps, something very different from what we think we know?”
― Louise Erdrich, The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

“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

“It seemed to her that almost any pain was sympathetic to her loss and she inserted herself immediately into the concept of fantastic suffering.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

“What are you?' he [Nanapush] said to Damien, who was deep in a meditation over his [chess] bishop's trajectory.
'A priest' said Father Damien
'A man priest or a woman priest?'...
...'I am a priest', she whispered, hoarsely, fierce. 'Why' said Nanapush kindly, as though Father Damien hadn't answered, to put the question to rest, 'are you pretending to be a man priest?”
― Louise Erdrich, The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

“Nector [speaking to Bernadette] could have told her, having drunk down the words of Nanapush, that comfort is not security and money in the hand disappears. He could have told her that only the land matters and never to let go of the papers, the titles, the tracks of the words, all those things that his ancestors never understood how the vital relationship to the dirt and grass under their feet.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

“What is the whole of our existence," said Father Damien, practicing his sermon from the new pulpit, "but the sound of an appalling love?"

The snakes slid quietly among the feet of the empty pews.

"What is the question we spend our entire lives asking? Our question is this: Are we loved? I don't mean by one another. Are we loved by the one who made us? Constantly, we look for evidence. In the gifts we are given--children, good weather, money, a happy marriage perhaps--we find assurance. In contrast, our pains, illnesses, the deaths of those we love, our poverty, our innocent misfortunes--those we take as signs that God has somehow turned away. But, my friends, what exactly is love here? How to define it? Does God's love have anything at all to do with the lack or plethora of good fortune at work in our lives? Or is God's love, perhaps, something very different from what we think we know? ...

I am like you," said Father Damien to the snakes, "curious and small." He dropped his arms. "Like you, I poise alertly and open my senses to try to read the air, the clouds, the sun's slant, the little movements of the animals, all in the hope I will learn the secret of whether I am loved."

The snakes coiled and recoiled, curved over and underneath themselves.

"If I am loved," Father Damien went on, "it is a merciless and exacting love against which I have no defense. If I am not loved, then I am being pitilessly manipulated by a force I cannot withstand, either, and so it is all the same. I must do what I must do. Go in peace.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

“Whenever he thought he knew the truth it merged into another truth.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

“The moonless sky was a rich wild blackness of stars.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

“We Anishinaabeg are the keepers of the names of the earth. And unless the earth is called by the names it gave us humans, won’t it cease to love us? And isn’t it true that if the earth stops loving us, everyone, not just the Anishinaabeg, will cease to exist? That is why we all must speak our language, nindinawemagonidok, and call everything we see by the name of its spirit. Even the chimookomanag, who are trying to destroy us, are depending upon us to remember. Mi’sago’i.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

“The buffalo were taking leave of the earth and all they loved,” said the old chiefs and hunters after years had passed and they could tell what split their hearts. “The buffalo went crazy with grief to see the end of things. Like us, they saw the end of things and like many of us, many today, they did not care to live.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

“Between these two, where was the real self? It came to her that both Sister Cecilia and then Agnes were as heavily manufactured of gesture and pose as was Father Damien. And within this, what sifting of identity was she? What mote? What nothing?”
― Louise Erdrich, The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

“It was as though her soul were neatly removed by a drinking straw and siphoned into the green pool of quiet that lay beneath the rippling cascade of notes.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

“If I am loved,” Father Damien went on, “it is a merciless and exacting love against which I have no defense. If I am not loved, then I am being pitilessly manipulated by a force I cannot withstand, either, and so it is all the same. I must do what I must do. Go in peace.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

“...there was no place as unknown as grief.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

“I have never felt so supremely right in my emotions, not since I took my vows. To love another human in all of her splendor and imperfect perfection, it is a magnificent task, dear Father Damien, tremendous and foolish and human. I’m sick because I can’t eat for the beauty of it, and the anguish is beautiful too.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

“Our souls are tethered by the love of things that cannot last, Agnes wrote, a note in her pocket. But she had sometimes to think the opposite. Our souls are freed—the only problem was that freedom was an open and a lonely space.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

“He had learned one truth in his work—there was no changing the true arrangement of a human heart. One dealt with the earthly exigencies.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

“The piano had taken a year or more to make of woods, she knew, collected and seasoned by the craftsmen, each type destined for a different piece of the sounding board and trim. Time was in the wood. Time was in the hammers. Time was the existence of the piano. Time was the human who had voiced the piano, who had balanced the keys, shaped, hardened, softened each hammer.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

“Slowly and inevitably, she fell in love with each person in the family, only she didn’t know what to call it. She simply found herself related.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

“She felt no guilt, and so concluded that if God sent none she would not invent any. She decided to miss Agnes as she would a beloved sister, to make of Father Damien her creation. He would be loving, protective, remote, and immensely disciplined. He would be Agnes’s twin, her masterwork, her brother.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

“It was this immense resignation to the shape of his life that opened him every day to the experience of joy.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

“Her hands flew off the keyboard—she crouched as though she had been shot, saw yellow spots and then experienced a peaceful wave of oneness in which she entered pure communion. She was locked into the music, held there safely, entirely understood. Such was her innocence that she didn’t know she was experiencing a sexual climax, but believed rather that what she felt was the natural outcome of this particular nocturne played to the utmost of her skills—and so it came to be. Chopin’s spirit became her lover. His flats caressed her. His whole notes sank through her body like clear pebbles. His atmospheric trills were the flicker of a tongue. His pauses before the downward sweep of notes nearly drove her insane. The”
― Louise Erdrich, The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

“Gregory was in the walls, in the crawl space between the board floor of the cabin and the bitter ground. He was gone, but he was everywhere. He was on the small pantry shelf where canning was removed. The air of the cabin still held Gregory. He filled and expanded every dark corner, tight, to exploding. He was jammed between her legs so that no matter how she moved, he was inside of Agnes. She couldn't shake him from her vestments or burn him from the stove. He nested in the books, of course. She couldn't stand to touch their pages. He was in the sweet, fragrant wood Mary Kashpaw chopped, split, and piled. In the cloth of curtains, the clasp of doors, he waited. She turned the handle, let the light in, and he came, too, solid and good and alive.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

“Just as he dropped with a jerk into the pit of unconsciousness, he thought how odd it was that he was falling asleep in his sleep. When he entered the dream that he was dreaming, later, it was a dream within the dream he dreamed originally when he lay down in his bed.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

“Hildegarde stood, scratched her nose, an act for which she must later say a penance.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

“Nector got even by the use of penmanship.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

“It was Sister Hildegarde’s belief that good penmanship was the defining key to success in life.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse