The Blue Jay's Dance Quotes

“Women without children are also the best of mothers,often, with the patience,interest, and saving grace that the constant relationship with children cannot always sustain. I come to crave our talk and our daughters gain precious aunts. Women who are not mothering their own children have the clarity and focus to see deeply into the character of children webbed by family. A child is fortuante who feels witnessed as a peron,outside relationships with parents by another adult.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Blue Jay's Dance: A Birth Year

“So what is wild? What is wilderness? What are dreams but an internal wilderness and what is desire but a wildness of the soul?”
― Louise Erdrich, The Blue Jay's Dance: A Birth Year

“When every inch of the world is known, sleep may be the only wilderness that we have left.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Blue Jay's Dance: A Birth Year

“In praise of mu husband's hair
A woman is alone in labor, for it is an unfortunate fact that there is nobody who can have the baby for you. However, this account would be inadequate if I did not speak to the scent of my husband's hair. Besides the cut flowers he sacrifices his lunches to afford, the purchase of bags of licorice, the plumping of pillows, steaming of fish, searching out of chic maternity dresses, taking over of work, listening to complaints and simply worrying, there was my husband's hair.
His hair has always amazed stylists in beauty salons. At his every first appointment they gather their colleagues around Michael's head. He owns glossy and springy hair, of an animal vitality and resilience that seems to me so like his personality. The Black Irish on Michael's mother's side of the family have changeable hair--his great-grandmother's hair went from black to gold in old age. Michael's went from golden-brown of childhood to a deepening chestnut that gleams Modoc black from his father under certain lights. When pushing each baby I throw my arm over Michael and lean my full weight. When the desperate part is over, the effort, I turn my face into the hair above his ear. It is as though I am entering a small and temporary refuge. How much I want to be little and unnecessary, to stay there, to leave my struggling body at the entrance.
Leaves on a tree all winter that now, in your hand, crushed, give off a dry, true odor. The brass underside of a door knocker in your fingers and its faint metallic polish. Fresh potter's clay hardening on the wrist of a child. The slow blackening of Lent, timeless and lighted with hunger. All of these things enter into my mind when drawing into my entire face the scent of my husband's hair. When I am most alone and drowning and I think I cannot go on, it is breathing into his hair that draws me to the surface and restores my small courage. ”
― Louise Erdrich, The Blue Jay's Dance: A Birth Year

“If, as I suspect, my body survives by uttering itself over and over again, then I have some questions. If [I] am one word, so are my daughters, so are all of us in strings and loops. Each life is one short word slowly uttered.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Blue Jay's Dance: A Birth Year

“Life seems to flood by, taking our loves quickly in its flow. In the growth of children, in the aging of beloved parents, time's chart is magnified, shown in its particularity, focused, so that with each celebration of maturity there is also a pang of loss. This is our human problem, one common to parents, sons and daughters, too - how to let go while holding tight, how to simultaneously cherish the closeness and intricacy of the bond while at the same time letting out the raveling string, the red yarn that ties our hearts.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Blue Jay's Dance: A Birth Year

“She compares the deepest wells of depression to gestation, to a time enclosed, a secluded lightlessness in which, unknown and unforced, we grow.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Blue Jay's Dance: A Birth Year

“We live and work with a divided consciousness. It is a beautiful enough shock to fall in love with another adult, to feel the possibility of unbearable sorrow at the loss of that other, essential, personality, expressed just so, that particular touch. But love of an infant is of a different order. It is twinned love, all absorbing, a blur of boundaries and messages. It is uncomfortably close to self-erasure, and in the face of it one's fat ambitions, desperations, private icons, and urges fall away into a dreamlike BEFORE that haunts and forces itself into the present with tough persistence.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Blue Jay's Dance: A Birth Year

“Full of the usual blights, mistakes, ruinous beetles and parasites, glorious for one week, bedraggled the next, my actual garden is always a mixed bag. As usual, it will fall far short of the imagined perfection. It is a chore. Hard work. I'll by turns aggressively weed and ignore it. The ground I tend sustains me in early summer, but the garden of the spirit is the place I go when the wind howls. This lush and fragrant expectation has a longer growing season than the plot of earth I'll hoe for the rest of the year. Raised in the mind's eye, nurtured by the faithful composting of orange rinds and tea leaves and ideas, it is finally the wintergarden that produces the true flowering, the saving vision.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Blue Jay's Dance: A Birth Year

“Our baby gives herself to me completely. There is no hesitation, no reservation, no holding back, no coldness, no craft, no tremor or fear in her love. Although our relationship may encompass tears, frustration, even fury, it is an utterly reliable bond. As it grows, her love is literally unadulterated. Her love is wholly of the child, pure in its essence as children are in their direct passions. Children do not love wisely, but perhaps they love the best of all.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Blue Jay's Dance: A Birth Year

“For my thirtieth birthday, I was given a watch by a dear one who assumed with cheerful lovingness that, since I had never worn a watch, I would now like to start. I smiled and appreciated, but deep down I felt uneasy. Wear a watch? Early on in my adult life I tried to wear a watch, but I didn't lke the feel of time ticking itself away on my wrist, as if in a mortal race with my own pulse. I tried to tell time by the length of light, but I was always late. I resorted to keeping the watch in my pocket, where it was easy to forget. Even now, I only wear a watch to travel and to keep appointment with friends...Fortunately, not long after I received the time piece I developed an allergy to metal and broke out in red bumps where the watch touched my wrist. Perhaps it is true I'm allergic to time itself”
― Louise Erdrich, The Blue Jay's Dance: A Birth Year

“Laughter is our consolation prize for consciousness.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Blue Jay's Dance: A Birth Year

“What we profoundly need are rituals that regard the blood, the shock, the heat, the shit, the anguish, the glory, the earnestness of the female body.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Blue Jay's Dance: A Birth Year

“Women without children are also the best of mothers, often, with the patience, interests, and saving grace that the constant relationship with children cannot always sustain. I come to crave our talk and our daughters gain precious aunt. Women who are not mothering their own children have the clarity and focus to see deeply into the character of children webbed by family. A child is fortunate who feels witnessed as a person, outside relationships with parent, by another adult." (162)”
― Louise Erdrich, The Blue Jay's Dance: A Birth Year

“The self will not be forced under, nor will the baby's needs gracefully retreat. The world tips away when we look into our children's faces.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Blue Jay's Dance: A Birth Year