The Night Watchman Quotes

“Lastly, if you should ever doubt that a series of dry words in a government document can shatter spirits and demolish lives, let this book erase that doubt. Conversely, if you should be of the conviction that we are powerless to change those dry words, let this book give you heart.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Night Watchman

“When he needed to calm his mind, he opened a book. Any book. He had never failed to feel refreshed, even if the book was no good.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Night Watchman

“And Patrice thought another thing her mother said was definitely true—you never really knew a man until you told him you didn’t love him. That’s when his true ugliness, submerged to charm you, might surface.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Night Watchman

“Things started going wrong, as far as Zhaanat was concerned, when places everywhere were named for people—political figures, priests, explorers—and not for the real things that happened in these places—the dreaming, the eating, the death, the appearance of animals. This confusion of the chimookomaanag between the timelessness of the earth and the short span here of mortals was typical of their arrogance.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Night Watchman

“Because everything was alive, responsive in its own way, capable of being hurt in its own way, capable of punishment in its own way, Zhaanat’s thinking was built on treating everything around her with great care.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Night Watchman

“It was something about being an Indian. And the government. The government acted like Indians owed them something, but wasn’t it the other way around? She hadn’t been educated in a boarding school or educated in any way about Indians. From her Catholic schooling, she would never have known about Indians at all except as a bunch of heathens who were vanquished or conveniently died off. She’d hardly known her family and was as assimilated as an Indian could be. And people hardly ever recognized her as an Indian. So why did she firmly see herself as an Indian? Why did she value this? Why did she not long for the anonymity of whiteness, the ease of it, the pleasures of fitting in? When people found out why she looked a little different, they would often say, “I never thought of you as an Indian.” And it would be said as a compliment. But it felt more like an insult.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Night Watchman

“In all, 113 tribal nations suffered the disaster of termination; 1.4 million acres of tribal land was lost. Wealth flowed to private corporations, while many people in terminated tribes died early, in poverty. Not one tribe profited. By the end, 78 tribal nations, including the Menominee, led by Ada Deer, regained federal recognition; 10 gained state but not federal recognition; 31 tribes are landless; 24 are considered extinct.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Night Watchman

“Patrice had come to think that humans treated the concept of God, or Gizhe Manidoo, or the Holy Ghost, in a childish way. She was pretty sure that the rules and trappings of ritual had nothing to do with God, that they were ways for people to imagine they were doing things right in order to escape from punishment, or harm, like children. She had felt the movement of something vaster, impersonal yet personal, in her life. She thought that maybe people in contact with that nameless greatness had a way of catching at the edges, a way of being pulled along or even entering this thing beyond experience.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Night Watchman

“The services that the government provides to Indians might be likened to rent. The rent for use of the entire country of the United States. *”
― Louise Erdrich, The Night Watchman

“An enemy has to be defeated in battle, but an adversary’s different. You must outwit an adversary.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Night Watchman

“You know any Mormons?" asked Martin Cross
"I don't think so."
"They haven't got to you. They'll come around yet. It's in their religion to change Indians into whites."
"I thought that was a government job.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Night Watchman

“one explanation did not rule out the other, that charged electrons could be spirits, that nothing ruled out anything else, that mathematics was a rigorous form of madness,”
― Louise Erdrich, The Night Watchman

“You cannot feel time grind against you. Time is nothing but everything, not the seconds, minutes, hours, days, years. Yet this substanceless substance, this bending and shaping, this warping, this is the way we understand our world.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Night Watchman

“The sun was low in the sky, casting slant regal light. As they plodded along, the golden radiance intensified until it seemed to emanate from every feature of the land. Trees, brush, snow, hills. She couldn’t stop looking. The road led past frozen sloughs that bristled with scorched reeds. Clutches of red willow burned. The fans and whips of branches glowed, alive. Winter clouds formed patterns against the fierce gray sky. Scales, looped ropes, the bones of fish. The world was tender with significance.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Night Watchman

“When Thomas thought of his father, peace stole across his chest and covered him like sunlight.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Night Watchman

“They both started laughing in that desperate high-pitched way people laugh when their hearts are broken.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Night Watchman

“Juggie Blue: We don’t want to leave our homes We are poor, but even poor people can love their land. You do not need money to love your home.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Night Watchman

“As animals subject to the laws of earth, we think time is experience. But time is more a substance, like air, only of course not air. It is in fact a holy element.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Night Watchman

“Don’t you want to be a U.S. citizen?” “What?” said Thomas. “We are citizens.” “Vote? You already can vote?” “Sure, back in 1924 we got the vote. After the black man, after the women. But we got the vote.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Night Watchman

“Everything ceased. She listened hard. Nothing, nothing, nothing. But she could feel the calm breathing of the night. She put on her mother’s mitts, took the ax, stepped out the door. Outside, there was resounding silence. The black sky was a poem beyond meaning.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Night Watchman

“She slowed to pick her way through places where water was seeping up through the mats of dying grass. Rain tapping through the brilliant leaves the only sound. She stopped. The sense of something there, with her, all around her, swirling and seething with energy. How intimately the trees seized the earth. How exquisitely she was included. Patrice closed her eyes and felt a tug. Her spirit poured into the air like song.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Night Watchman

“The average man is proof the average woman can take a joke,” he said.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Night Watchman

“The services that the government provides to Indians might be likened to rent. The rent for use of the entire country of the United States.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Night Watchman

“Government is more like sex than people think. When you are having good sex, you don't appreciate it enough. When you are having bad sex, it is all you can think about.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Night Watchman

“The stars were impersonal. But they took human shapes and arranged themselves in orders that conveyed directions to the next life. There was no time where he was going. He’d always thought that inconceivable. For years now he’d understood that time was all at once, back and forth, upside down. As animals subject to the laws of earth, we think time is experience. But time is more a substance, like air, only of course not air. It is in fact a holy element.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Night Watchman

“The world was tender with significance.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Night Watchman

“They stood inside their own quiet like a pocket.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Night Watchman

“Why would she waste her time figuring out men when she was a person who had slept with a bear?”
― Louise Erdrich, The Night Watchman

“You can never get enough of the ones you love, thought Thomas,”
― Louise Erdrich, The Night Watchman

“The trees were having a last bedtime drink of the great waters that flowed along down there. Like him, before they went to sleep. Beneath that layer of water he sensed beings. They moved so slowly that humans were usually not aware of their existence. But he did feel their movements down in those regions. And yet deeper, far deeper, below those beings, there was the fire of creation, which had been buried at the center of the earth by stars.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Night Watchman