Love Medicine Quotes

“Her clothes were filled with safety pins and hidden tears.”
― Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine

“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.”
― Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine

“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.”
― Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine

“Right and wrong were shades of meaning, not sides of a coin.”
― Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine

“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.”
― Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine

“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.”
― Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine

“I was in love with the whole world and all that lived in its rainy arms.”
― Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine

“Veils of love which was only hate petrified by longing--that was me.”
― Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine

“The greatest wisdom doesn't know itself. The richest plan is not to have one.”
― Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine

“...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.”
― Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine

“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. She loved him. She was jealous. She mourned him like the dead. And he just smiled into the air, trapped in the seams of his mind.”
― Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine

“I hold his name close as my own blood and I will never let it out. I only spoke it that once so he would know he was alive.”
― Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine

“They moved in dance steps too intricate for the noninitiated eye to imitate or understand. Clearly they were of one soul. Handsome, rangy, wildly various, they were bound in total loyalty, not by oath, but by the simple, unquestioning belongingness of part of one organism.”
― Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine

“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.”
― Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine

“Higher Power makes promises we all know they can't back up, but anybody ever go and slap an old malpractice suit on God? Or the U.S. government? No they don't. Faith might be stupid, but it gets us through.”
― Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine

“Because we shared the loneliness that was one shape. Because I knew that in her old age she shared that same boat, where I had labored. She crested and sank in dark waves. Those waves were taking her onward, through night, through day, the water beating and slashing across her unknown path. She struggled to continue. She was traveling hard, and death was her light.”
― Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine

“The heavy winds couldn’t blow her off course. She continued. Even when her heart clenched and her skin turned crackling cold it didn’t matter, because the pure and naked part of her went on.”
― Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine

“My petunias,” she tells me in a flat voice, “are none of your business.”
― Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine

“I still had Grandma’s hankie in my pocket. The sun flared. I’d heard that this river was the last of an ancient ocean, miles deep, that once had covered the Dakotas and solved all our problems. It was easy to still imagine us beneath them vast unreasonable waves, but the truth is we live on dry land. I got inside. The morning was clear. A good road led on. So there was nothing to do but cross the water and bring her home.”
― Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine

“The snow fell deeper that Easter than it had in forty years, but June walked over it like water and came home.”
― Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine

“And so when they tell you that I was heartless, a shameless man-chaser, don’t ever forget this: I loved what I saw. And yes, it is true that I’ve done all the things they say. That’s not what gets them. What aggravates them is I’ve never shed one solitary tear. I’m not sorry. That’s unnatural. As we all know, a woman is supposed to cry.”
― Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine

“I was rippling gold. My breasts were bare and my nipples flashed and winked. Diamonds tipped them. I could walk through panes of glass. I could walk through windows. She was at my feet, swallowing the glass after each step I took. I broke through another and another. The glass she swallowed ground and cut until her starved insides were only a subtle dust. She coughed. She coughed a cloud of dust. And then she was only a black rag that flapped off, snagged in bob wire, hung there for an age, and finally rotted into the breeze.”
― Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine

“couldn’t do the touch for Grandpa, though. He was a hard nut. You know, some people fall right through the hole in their lives.”
― Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine

“Člověk se na život dívá jinak, když se zblízka setká se smrtí a porozumí svému srdci. Od té doby už vždycky nosíte svůj život jako šaty, co jste si koupili na dobročinném bazaru - lehce, protože si uvědomujete, že jste za ně doopravdy nic nezaplatili, i jako vzácnost, protože víte, že už si žádné tak výhodné nepořídíte. A máte taky pocit, že už je někdo nosil před váma a někdo je bude nosit po vás. Ještě to nedovedu vysvětlit, ale budu se o to snažit.”
― Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine

“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 get past the ragged leaves that dead bum of my youth looked into. 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.”
― Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine

“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. I don't believe in numbering God's creatures.”
― Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine

“I saw that tears were in her eyes. And that's when I saw how much grief and love she felt for him. And it gave me a real shock to the system. 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.”
― Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine

“They already knew each other better than most people who were married a lifetime. They knew the good things, but they knew hoe to hurt each other, too.”
― Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine

“I gave her up and dived down to the bottom of the lake where it was cold, dark, still, like the pit bottom of a grave. Perhaps I should have stayed there and never fought. Perhaps I should have taken a breath. But I didn't.”
― Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine

“She seemed to have noticed the shape of my loneliness. Maybe she found it was the same as hers.”
― Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine