The Plague of Doves Quotes

“When we are young, the words are scattered all around us. As they are assembled by experience, so also are we, sentence by sentence, until the story takes shape.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Plague of Doves

“What happens when you let an unsatisfactory present go on long enough? It becomes your entire history.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Plague of Doves

“Old love, middle love, the kind of love that knows itself and knows that nothing lasts, is a desperate shared wildness.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Plague of Doves

“The music was more than music- at least what we are used to hearing. The music was feeling itself. The sound connected instantly with something deep and joyous. Those powerful moments of true knowledge that we have to paper over with daily life. The music tapped the back of our terrors, too. Things we'd lived through and didn't want to ever repeat. Shredded imaginings, unadmitted longings, fear and also surprisingly pleasures. No, we can't live at that pitch. But every so often something shatters like ice and we are in the river of our existence. We are aware. And this realization was in the music, somehow, or in the way Shamengwa played it.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Plague of Doves

“I am part of what she thinks is her illness, a symptom of which she thinks she has been cured. She, on the other hand, is what I was looking for.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Plague of Doves

“Freedom, I found is not only in the running but in the heart, the mind, the hands.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Plague of Doves

“There are ways of being abandoned even when your parents are right there.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Plague of Doves

“What men call adventures usually consist of the stoical endurance of appalling daily misery.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Plague of Doves

“He was a bad thing waiting for a worse thing to happen.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Plague of Doves

“She had a talent for looking at a person with no expression - you filled in whatever you felt guiltiest about.”
― Louise Erdich, The Plague of Doves

“But if there was embellishment, it only had to do with the facts.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Plague of Doves

“The present was enough, though my work in the cemetery told me every day what happens when you let an unsatisfactory present go on long enough: it becomes your entire history.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Plague of Doves

“We'd better get there soon," said Corwin. "They're probably building new streets in Paris right this minute."
"What if I don't want to, being a lesbian?"
Corwin fell silent; after a while he spoke.
"So you think it might be permanent?”
― Louise Erdrich, The Plague of Doves

“The whiskey had its own mind. Or spirit, he said. A cunning spirit. Sometimes it fooled him. Sometimes it set him free.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Plague of Doves

“I knew each person's delusion, the places their records had scratched, where the sounds repeated.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Plague of Doves

“I took a step toward her, but she turned from me and stomped back to her car. I watched her drive off. After a moment, I walked up the limestone steps and through the phantom oak-and-glass front doors of the house where I grew up. I paced the hall, entered the long rectangle of dining room, rested a hand on the carved cherrywood mantel, then passed into the kitchen. The house was so real around me that I could smell the musty linen in the cedar closet, the gas from the leaky burner on the stove, the sharp tang of geraniums that I had planted in clay pots. I lay down on the exact place where the living room couch had been pushed tight under the leaded-glass windows. I closed my eyes and it was all around me again. The stuffed bookshelves, the paneling, the soft slap of my mother's cards on the table.

I could see from the house of my dark mind the alley, from the alley the street leading to the end of town, its farthest boundary the lucid silence of the dead. Between the graves my path, and along that path her back door, her face, her timeless bed, and the lost architecture of her bones. I turned over and made myself comfortable in the crush of wild burdock. A bee or two hummed in the drowsy air. The swarm had left the rubble and built their houses beneath the earth. They were busy in the graveyard right now, filling the skulls with white combs and the coffins with sweet black honey.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Plague of Doves

“Our individual consciousnesses were sieves of the divine. We could only know what our minds could encompass safely.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Plague of Doves

“So I was, like most artists, deformed by my art.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Plague of Doves

“The whole time we made love, in deepening light, we watched each other's faces as the expressions came and went. We saw the pleasure and the tenderness. We saw the helplessness deepen. We saw the need that was a beautiful sickness between us.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Plague of Doves

“The music was more than music— at least what we are used to hearing. The music was feeling itself. The sound connected instantly with something deep and joyous. Those powerful moments of true knowledge that we have to paper over with daily life. The music tapped the back of our terrors, too. Things we'd lived through and didn't want to ever repeat. Shredded imaginings, unadmitted longings , fear and also surprising pleasures. No, we can't live at that pitch. But every so often something shatters like ice and we are in the river of our existence. We are aware. And this realization was in the music, somehow...”
― Louise Erdrich, The Plague of Doves

“The gun jammed on the last shot and the baby stood holding the crib rail, eyes wild, bawling.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Plague of Doves

“In Erling Nicolai Rolfsrud’s compendium of memorable women and men from North Dakota, “Mustache” Maude Black, for that was the name of my grandparents’ benefactress, is described as not un-womanly, though she dressed mannishly, smoked, drank, was a crack shot and a hard-assed camp boss. These”
― Louise Erdrich, The Plague of Doves

“She was a woman of reserve.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Plague of Doves

“Drugs now travel the old fur trade routes, and where once Corwin”
― Louise Erdrich, The Plague of Doves

“I do my work. I do my best to make the small decisions well, and I try not to hunger for the great things, for the deeper explanations. For I am sentenced to keep watch over this small patch of earth, to judge its miseries and tell its stories. That’s who I am.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Plague of Doves

“What is the difference between the influence of instinct upon a wolf and history upon a man? In both cases, justice is prey to unknown dreams.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Plague of Doves