The Mighty Red Quotes

“hands and transported by animal effort, eight dollars, ten dollars, sixteen dollars a ton. They were piled beside the railroad tracks as each section was built farther west. Hills of bones, mountains of blind skulls, loaded onto railroad cars and shipped back east to process sugar. So it was, every teaspoon of sugar that was stirred into a cup or baked into a pudding was haunted by the slave trade and the slaughter of the buffalo. Just as now, into every teaspoon, is mixed the pragmatic nihilism of industrial sugar farming and the death of our place on earth. This is the sweetness that pricks people’s senses and sparkles in a birthday cake and glitters on the tongue. Price guaranteed, delicious, a craving strong as love.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Mighty Red

“The cult had rejected him for being a Catholic because they didn’t accept people who already belonged to a cult.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Mighty Red

“She loved Hugo with that superb kind of love a mother has for a male child, a love that is deeper and more pure for knowing that he'll more than likely turn out a fool.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Mighty Red

“I don’t need another guy whose feelings I have to always worry about. I’m not equipped.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Mighty Red

“In some places lambsquarters is considered the Prince of Greens, one of the most nutritious greens ever analyzed; it was one of the earliest agricultural crops of the Americas. It also resembles amaranth, but the brothers rarely spoke of that. The rough-cut men were preparing to eradicate one of the most nutritious plants on earth in favor of growing the sugar beet, perhaps the lest nutritious plant on earth. Evolution thought this was hilarious. (221)”
― Louise Erdrich, The Mighty Red

“They were the sun when they bloomed, the moon when they formed seed heads, and the stars when you blew on the fragile globes. Ichor threw a pile of slain dandelions on the weed heap.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Mighty Red

“And so love dies, Crystal thought, pulled down to earth by the tedious weight of a partner's habits.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Mighty Red

“It’s prairie planted but you have to weed out the invasive stuff forever to get prairie reestablished. I think it almost broke Mom. But you should see it in spring when the prairie lilies come out. Every single plant has its own pollinator so you have to coax those in too. Like, well, it’s not for the faint of heart.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Mighty Red

“One day a young man stood at the foot of Shackamaxon Street in Philadelphia, sugar town, 1882. Folded into his vest, a letter of reference. He had an idea that involved a railroad ticket and the millions of dead buffalo out west. If he could get those bones into railroad cars and ship them to Philadelphia, they could be heated in a sealed vessel at 700 degrees Celsius, which was 1292 degrees Fahrenheit, not easy to imagine. The super-heating would drive off the organic matter in the bones, leaving activated carbon, composed of tricalcium phosphate, calcium carbonate, and carbon. Bone charcoal. Bone black. Ivory black. Animal charcoal. Abaiser. Pigment black 9. Bone char. Carbo animalis. Buffalo black. This substance could be used to refine crude raw sugar processed from sugarcane, slave sugar, although of course the slave trade had been abolished, then as now, but there still were enslaved people, then as now. Bone char worked better than bull’s blood or egg whites or any other substance to bleach the sugar white. And the bones! The bones were everywhere, he’d heard, littering the ground, so thick that a farmer couldn’t plow without stacking them beside the fields. He went into”
― Louise Erdrich, The Mighty Red

“Everything down here on earth was shattering, yet pointless.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Mighty Red

“This responding to a man who asks for approval had been her downfall in so many ways.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Mighty Red

“Crystal stopped showed her feelings in an argument. She was done with second chances, done with the opulent mercy of women. Unaffordable mercy. For years, no matter how hard she’d saved, she’d been overspending. She forged onward and it finally ended with Martin saying, ‘I’m outta here.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Mighty Red

“He emanated a sort of hopeful sadness and contained the usual secrets. Crystal had once thought he owned some interior dramas and interesting thoughts, but then she went to great trouble to find out everything, only to fail. Martin either had no intention of revealing himself, or there was no ulterior self to reveal.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Mighty Red

“The mournful honks of the geese sounded in the dusky air like the spirits of the slain giants.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Mighty Red

“...a large slash of grief....never heals. There is always a soft crater in a family after that, a sink hole spot that people flinch from....”
― Louise Erdrich, The Mighty Red

“superstitious people like order”
― Louise Erdrich , The Mighty Red

“She should weep but that weeping would never be enough.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Mighty Red

“People kept or left things in books—quotes, clippings, often about the author, letters that arrived while they were reading the book, bills they didn’t want to pay, foil gum wrappers, bookmarks from now-closed bookstores, funny drawings from their children, dry autumn leaves, grocery lists, complaints. She stored these scraps in a manila envelope marked Ephemera. From another time, another place, the bits had come into her hands. Some were personal. A bookmark made from dried yarrow flowers arranged between pieces of clear packing tape had kept the reader’s place in Rosemary’s Baby. Later, when she looked it up, she found that yarrow was a banishing herb against evil. In a copy of The Aspern Papers, she’d found a lock of dark brown hair. A torn envelope printed with the words Let me go, hundreds of times, in tiny letters. She’d left the found words I have never felt such bliss in yet another book, a very dry study on the properties of land snails. But”
― Louise Erdrich, The Mighty Red

“The rough-cut men were preparing to eradicate one of the most nutritious plants on earth in favor of growing the sugar beet, perhaps the least nutritious plant on earth. Evolution thought this was hilarious.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Mighty Red

“Later, she would remember the words ‘Until death do you part’ and realize that marriage is ideally supposed to end in death. Nobody really talks about that after the ceremony.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Mighty Red

“As boys they were husky. As men they are bulky. They loom like monoliths. They are chainsaw art. As Diz and Gusty lumbered across the yard, strong bulwark guts atop leg beams, they talked. Their thin exquisite lips barely moved. Their handsome wind-whipped faces were impassive in the shadow of billed caps. They had survived their father by sticking together. They never discussed the past. To speak about the way their father, Sport, had treated them would be like grabbing an electric fence. (220)”
― Louise Erdrich, The Mighty Red

“One reason he had become a priest was the feeling of comfort these high ceilings gave him. There was room up there for thought, for memory, for prayer, for emotion.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Mighty Red

“A mother daughter eye look got witchy so fast.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Mighty Red

“cult had rejected him for being a Catholic because they didn’t accept people who already belonged to a cult.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Mighty Red

“The rough-cut men were preparing to eradicate one of the most nutritious plants on earth in favor of growing the sugar”
― Louise Erdrich, The Mighty Red

“In these families you created a large dark slash of grief and that, young Gary, never heals. It closes over, but it never heals. There is always a soft crater of agony in a family after that, a sinkhole spot that people flinch from.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Mighty Red

“People in towns and cities had strange ideas about farming. People thought you just put a seed in the ground and it grew. Winnie Geist’s husband, Diz, called farming a war, but Winnie said it was a conflict. True, something was always trying to kill your crop, but there were ways and there were ways . . . she drifted off thinking of her parents’ ways. Driving to town over the summers, she had looked out to either side and seen that a field of sugar beets was going to be a good stand, that corn was growing unevenly, that soybeans had been planted too early or too late, that the sunflowers were outstanding. She knew who owned each field too, and so she was glad for or irritated by various families along the way.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Mighty Red

“how boredom was a part of small-town life that you had to get drunk to accept.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Mighty Red

“One day a young man stood at the foot of Shackamaxon Street in Philadelphia, sugar town, 1882. Folded into his vest, a letter of reference. He had an idea that involved a railroad ticket and the millions of dead buffalo out west. If he could get those bones into railroad cars and ship them to Philadelphia, they could be heated in a sealed vessel at 700 degrees Celsius, which was 1292 degrees Fahrenheit, not easy to imagine. The super-heating would drive off the organic matter in the bones, leaving activated carbon, composed of tricalcium phosphate, calcium carbonate, and carbon. Bone charcoal. Bone black. Ivory black. Animal charcoal. Abaiser. Pigment black 9. Bone char. Carbo animalis. Buffalo black. This substance could be used to refine crude raw sugar processed from sugarcane, slave sugar, although of course the slave trade had been abolished, then as now, but there still were enslaved people, then as now. Bone char worked better than bull’s blood or egg whites or any other substance to bleach the sugar white. And the bones! The bones were everywhere, he’d heard, littering the ground, so thick that a farmer couldn’t plow without stacking them beside the fields. He went into business. The bones were picked up by human”
― Louise Erdrich, The Mighty Red

“During the Reagan administration, budget director David Stockman decided to suddenly accelerate, or call in, loans that farmers had previously had decades to repay.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Mighty Red