The Painted Drum Quotes

“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. You are here to be swallowed up.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum

“Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and being 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 have to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes too near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself that you tasted as many as you could.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum

“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.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum

“And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself that you tasted as many as you could.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum

“...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?”
― Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum

“When we’re young, we think we are the only species worth knowing. But the more I come to know people, the better I like ravens.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum

“Tu dois aimer. Tu dois ressentir. C'est la raison pour laquelle tu es ici sur terre. Tu es ici pour mettre ton coeur en danger”
― Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum

“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. ”
― Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum

“To join the company of women, to be adults, we go through a period of proudly boasting of having survived our own mother's indifference, anger, overpowering love, the burden of her pain, her tendency to drink or teetotal, her warmth or coldness, praise or criticism, sexual confusions or embarrassing clarity. It isn't enough that she sweat, labored, bore her daughters howling or under total anesthesia or both. No. She must be responsible for our psychic weaknesses the rest of her life. It is alright to feel kinship with your father, to forgive. We all know that. But your mother is held to a standard so exacting that it has no principles. She simply must be to blame.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum

“The contents of a house can trigger all sorts of revisions to family history.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum

“...which causes me to wonder, my own purpose on so many days as h umbel as the spider's, what is beautiful that I make? What is elegant? What feeds the world?”
― Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum

“For me, this is old. I probably know what is happening better than he does because I've tried over and over to wreck myself on another human, and always failed. I fail now. For it seems that my sorrow is deep in my bones and I'd have to break every single one to let it out.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum

“Only when you are secure enough not to fear immediate survival can you display creative intelligence in anything you do.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum

“To fly from one tree to another, the raven hangs itself, hawklike, on the air. I hang myself that same way in sleep, between one day and the next.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum

“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. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself that you tasted as many as you could.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum

“That's what a drum is all about - it gathers people in and holds them.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum

“When I was small, I imagined that my sister and I would meet after death in the form of birds.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum

“There are other things that she could say to me, things I will never hear. I doubt that many mothers say these things to their daughters. Maybe it would be like telling your daughter the truth about the pain of childbirth. They try to protect us, even when we’re middle-aged. So I must supply the words for myself:”
― Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum

“La vita ti spezzerà. Nessuno può proteggerti da questo e neanche vivere da solo ti aiuterà, perché anche la solitudine ti spezzerà, con la sua nostalgia. Devi amare. Devi provare emozioni. È il motivo per cui sei su questa Terra. Sei qui per mettere a rischio il tuo cuore. Sei qui per essere divorato. E quando accade che sei spezzato, tradito, lasciato, ferito o sfiorato dalla morte, concedi a te stesso di sedere sotto un albero di mele e ascoltare i frutti che cadono accumulandosi intorno a te, sprecando la loro dolcezza. Di’ a te stesso che hai assaporato tutte quelle che hai potuto”
― Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum

“it seems to us that the music of the coydogs, as they are mistakenly called, is the music of all the broken and hunted creatures who survive and persist and will not be eliminated. For there they are, along with the ravens, destroyed and returned.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum

“A hospital is a world apart, running day and night by its own rules.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum

“Shawnee pulled herself out of her body and went up into the trees. At first she was frightened by the lightness, the drifting. She clung to her brother and sister and they came up with her. They were made of ash, black reeds, soot, a powder of loneliness, smoke. They held one another, but they couldn’t speak or cry out. They were in blackness so deep that they did not know where it stopped or where they started.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum

“the memories of what the wolves in their innocence had done,”
― Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum

“He always felt so much better, once these hellish episodes subsided, that he often wondered why he dreaded them in the first place. But likewise, when he was curled in his bed, heart pumping with terror and longing, he could never remember how it felt to be at peace and so believed that his torment would last forever.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum

“And, darling,” he would say, “now that I’ve wasted time on your lawn, I expect that you will spend your time (much different from wasting it, as I am a genius and you are not) on me. You are my creature.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum

“As in French novels when the scheming Marquis boasts of a lover I have made her my creature, so I begin to understand that Kurt Krahe is making me his own. His grief is sucking me into an old persona, one I have forced myself to leave behind.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum

“The drum is the universe. The people who take their place at each side represent the spirits who sit at the four directions. A painted drum, especially, is considered a living thing and must be fed as the spirits are fed, with tobacco and a glass of water set nearby, sometimes a plate of food. A drum is never to be placed on the ground, or left alone, and it is always to be covered with a blanket or quilt. Drums are known to cure and known to kill. They become one with their keeper. They are made for serious reasons by people who dream the details of their construction. No two are alike, but every drum is related to every other drum. They speak to one another and they give their songs to humans. I should be careful around the drum. She is bothered by its presence in the collection.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum

“Were I a traditional Ojibwe, I would have a special place in the community because of my line of work. According to a number of written sources from my collection, the objects left behind by a dead person were regarded with fearful emotion. They were never kept by family, but immediately gathered up by a person whose job it was to parcel the belongings of the deceased out to others.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum

“When a love burns too hot, it scorches everyone it touches. We old women know it is a curse to love like that.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum

“I didn’t know where to go, so I went into the field of orb spiders. At first, as I walked in among their waiting webs, I was afraid. The mind is a wolf. Then the light shed down sharply golden and I began to think. Thinking saved me. Perception saved me. I saw that the spiders were just substance. Not bad, not good. We were all made of the same stuff. I saw how we spurted out of creation in different shapes. How for a time I would inhabit this shape but then I’d be the lace on my sister’s shoe that had dropped off her foot onto the weeds and tamped grass, or I’d be the blue pot my parents argued about, or maybe something else. There was nothing but the endless manufacture of things out of nothing. I saw the changing and exchanging of shapes. The grass growing all around me, now, would one day be the cow, the milk, the flesh of the calf, then me.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Painted Drum