The Antelope Wife Quotes

“ We have these earthly bodies. We don't know what they want. Half the time, we pretend they are under our mental thumb, but that is the illusion of the healthy and the protected. Of sedate lovers. For the body has emotions it conceives and carries through without concern for anyone or anything else. Love is one of those, I guess. Going back to something very old knit into the brain as we were growing. Hopeless. Scorching. Ordinary. ”
― Louise Erdrich, The Antelope Wife

“He had a thousand-year-old stare.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Antelope Wife

“I think she is confused by the way I want her, which is like nobody else. I know this deep down. I want her in a new way, a way she's never been told about.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Antelope Wife

“All of our actions have in their doing the seed of their undoing. ... That in her creation of her children there should be the unspeakable promise of their death, for by their birth she had created mortal beings.”
― Louise Erdrich , The Antelope Wife

“Her mind was present because she was always gone. Her hands were filled because they grasped the meaning of empty. Life was simple. Her husband returned and she served him with indifferent patience this time. When he asked what had happened to her heat for him, she gestured to the west.

The sun was setting. The sky was a body of fire.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Antelope Wife

“A woman's body is the gate to this life. A man's body is the gate to the next life.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Antelope Wife

“She gave her husband such a night of sexual pleasure that his eyes followed her constantly after that, narrow and hot. He grew molten when she passed near other men, and at night they made their own shaking tent. They got teased too much and moved farther off, into the brush, into the nesting ground of shy and holy loons. There, no one could hear them. In solitude they made love until they became gaunt and hungry, pale windigos with aching eyes, tongues of flame.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Antelope Wife

“The pattern glitters with cruelty. The blue beads are colored with fish blood, the reds with powdered heart. The beads collect in borders of mercy. The yellows are dyed with the ocher of silence. There is no telling which twin will fall asleep first, allowing the other's colors to dominate, for how long. The design grows, the overlay deepens. The beaders have no other order at the heart of their being. Do you know that the beads are sewn onto the fabric of the earth with endless strands of human muscle, human sinew, human hair? We are as crucial to this making as other animals. No more and no less important than the deer.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Antelope Wife

“Emotions unreel in her like spools of cotton.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Antelope Wife

“The world of grass was never meant to be shortened to a carpet so that the outdoors is like one big wall-to-wall room.”
― Louise Erdrich, Antelope Woman

“They dance together in a line, murmuring in swift, low voices, smiling carefully as they are too proud to give away their beauty. They are light steppers with a gravity of sure grace.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Antelope Wife

“Effortless. Easy. The lack of trying is what makes them lovely. We all try too hard. Striving wears down our edges, dulls the best of us.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Antelope Wife

“Our love is a hurting delicacy, an old killer whiskey, a curse, and too beautiful for words.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Antelope Wife

“The world halted. There sounded a great gong made of sky. A gasp. Silence.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Antelope Wife

“People still lived on the margins of the land they had owned.”
― Louise Erdrich, The Antelope Wife

“She was as sturdily made as a captain's chair, yet drew water with graceful wrists and ran dancing across the rutted road on curved white ankles.”
― louise erdrich, The Antelope Wife