LaRose Quotes

“Sorrow eats time. Be patient. Time eats sorrow.”
― Louise Erdrich, LaRose

“Getting blown up happened in an instant; getting put together took the rest of your life.”
― Louise Erdrich, LaRose

“Girls were not named for flowers, as flowers died so quickly. Girls were named for deathless things - forms of light, forms of cloud, shapes of stars, that which appears and disappears like an island on the horizon.”
― Louise Erdrich, LaRose

“He was becoming an effective human being. He had learned from his birth family how to snare rabbits, make stew, paint fingernails, glue wallpaper, conduct ceremonies, start outside fires in a driving rain, sew with a sewing machine, cut quilt squares, play Halo, gather, dry, and boil various medicine teas. He had learned from the old people how to move between worlds seen and unseen. Peter taught him how to use an ax, a chain saw, safely handle a .22, drive a riding lawn mower, drive a tractor, even a car. Nola taught him how to paint walls, keep animals, how to plant and grow things, how to fry meat, how to bake. Maggie taught him how to hide fear, fake pain, how to punch with a knuckle jutting. How to go for the eyes. How to hook your fingers in a person’s nose from behind and threaten to rip the nose off your face. He hadn’t done these things yet, and neither had Maggie, but she was always looking for a chance. When”
― Louise Erdrich, LaRose

“White people covered the earth like lice.”
― Louise Erdrich, LaRose

“The worst kind of loneliness gripped him. The kind you feel alongside another person.”
― Louise Erdrich, LaRose

“There was the unspeakable neatness of military preparation for violence”
― Louise Erdrich, LaRose

“Funny how often the Will of God puts a dollar in a pocket, said Dr. Ames.”
― Louise Erdrich, LaRose

“People didn't want to think about boarding schools--the era of forced assimilation was supposed to be over. But then again, kids from chaotic families didn't get to school, or get sleep, or real food, or homework help. And they'd never get out of the chaos--whatever brand of chaos, from addictions to depression to failing health--unless they got to school. To succeed in school, kids had to attend regularly, eat regularly, sleep regularly, and study regularly. Maybe the boarding schools of the earliest days had stripped away culture from the vulnerable, had left adults with little understanding of how to give love or parent, but what now? Kids needed some intervention, but not the wrenching away of foster families and outside adoptions.”
― Louise Erdrich, LaRose

“Loss, dislocation, disease, addiction, and just feeling like the tattered remnants of a people with a complex history. What was in that history? What sort of knowledge? Who had they been? What were they now? Why so much fucked-upness wherever you turned?”
― Louise Erdrich, LaRose

“Soon she cried and farted herself to sleep.”
― Louise Erdrich, LaRose

“They remembered volleyball as a laid back backyard barbecue pastime, or a gym requirement. They had no idea how fierce and cool the sport had become, how girls had taken it over.”
― Louise Erdrich, LaRose

“He always had trouble opening his heart. Tonight it was stuck again. It was a wooden chest secured by locked iron bands. An army duffel, rusted zipper. Kitchen cupboards glued shut. Tabernacle. Desk. Closet. He had to wedge apart doors, lift covers. He was always disappointed to find a drab or menacing interior. To make a welcoming place of his heart was mentally slippery work. Sometimes cleaning was involved, rearrangements. He had to dust. He had to throw out old junk to make room.”
― Louise Erdrich, LaRose

“Getting out of bed, out of a chair, changing her position, was like moving furniture.”
― Louise Erdrich, LaRose

“Information, long of reach, devastating, and as a side benefit, a substance with no serious legal repercussions, was superior to any other form of power.”
― Louise Erdrich, LaRose

“Why did you stay so faithful? Oh, I wasn’t so good—I was just tired of them. Men. They’re stressful. You’ll see.”
― Louise Erdrich, LaRose

“Dawn was sad, calm, and brimming with debt.”
― Louise Erdrich, LaRose

“She took drugs, therefore I exist.
Ain't life odd? But still, please refrain from getting mixed up with substances.”
― Louise Erdrich, LaRose

“In the darkness, she wound herself into the blanket still more tightly. She was swaddled, confined, protected from herself--as in a very exclusively privately run mental hospital devoted solely to the care of one person: Nola. She fell asleep bothered only by the nagging thought that she would have to start all over in the morning. Existence whined in her head like a mosquito. Then she swatted it. Rode the tide of her comfort down into the earth.”
― Louise Erdrich, LaRose

“Sometimes energy of this nature, chaos, ill luck, goes out in the world and begets and begets. Bad luck rarely stops with one occurrence. All Indians know that. To stop it quickly takes great effort,”
― Louise Erdrich, LaRose

“There were so many sensations in his body that he couldn't feel them all at once, and each, as soon as he felt it, slipped away into the past.”
― Louise Erdrich, LaRose

“Minute by minute, a day passed.”
― Louise Erdrich, LaRose

“He was not all good, would never be; yet there were slender threads of okay.”
― Louise Erdrich, LaRose

“In English there was a word for every object. In Ojibwe there was a word for every action. English had more shades of personal emotion, but Ojibwe had more shades of family relationships.”
― Louise Erdrich, LaRose

“His mouth, his tongue, his voice box, seem to be working separately at first. His Adam's apple shivers, the skulls vibrate, his voice quakes. What's going on? It is as if a different Romeo is speaking, an interior Romeo. This unknown alternate Romeo has staged a coup. This Romeo Two has infiltrated his communication infrastructure. Are the drugs betraying him? What did he take again? What shape of pill? Romeo thinks it was a big white oval but there also were some smaller yellow articles. Perhaps crisscrossing side affects. Romeo is startled to silence even as Romeo Two becomes voluble, moved to unload certain acts undertaken for certain reasons. Romeo Two's mouth claptraps, his voice shifts gear, high and higher, until Romeo One understands in despair that Romeo Two has frog-leaped all the way to that holy step somewhere beyond three, maybe four, five, where you tell God and another human the exact nature of your wrongs. Talk about combined side effects. Where among the vertigo, gastric pain, incontinence, shortness of breath, and possible kidney failure was telling the truth?”
― Louise Erdrich, LaRose

“Snow stepped forward and slapped Josette, who slapped her back. Emmaline dropped the spoon and slapped them both - she had never slapped her child, or any child, before that moment. It happened so quickly - like a scene choreographed by the Three Stooges, which was what saved it. Emmaline started crying, then Snow. The three of them clung together.

I want to cut off my hand, wept Emmaline. I never slapped you girls before.

We should each cut our hands off, wailed Snow.

Then making frybread two of us will have to stand together, you know, like each use our remaining hand, pat, pat. Josette and Snow demonstrated.

Pat, pat, how pitiful, cry-laughed Emmaline.”
― Louise Erdrich, LaRose

“It was ancient and had risen from the boiling earth. It had slept, falling dormant in the dust, rising in mist. Tuberculosis had flown in a dizzy rush to unite with warm life. It was in each new world, and every old world. First it loved animals, then it loved people too.”
― Louise Erdrich, LaRose

“They sat on chairs made of air and fanned their faces with transparent leaves. They spoke in both languages. We love you, don’t cry. Sorrow eats time. Be patient. Time eats sorrow.”
― Louise Erdrich, LaRose

“as with the actions of the action figures. Because the fabric between realities, living and dead, was porous not only to herself. This pass-between existed. LaRose went there too. She was not crazy after all. Just maybe more aware, like LaRose was, like everybody said he was. Special. Something good he was doing for her by playing with her son from the other kingdom.”
― Louise Erdrich, LaRose

“other”
― Louise Erdrich, LaRose