It's impossible to write about Native life without humor-that's how people maintain sanity.
Louise ErdrichRead
I live on the margin of just about everything. I'm a marginal person, and I think that is where I've become comfortable. I'm marginally there in my native life. I can do as much as I can, but I'm always German, too, you know, and I'm always a mother. That's my first identity, but I'm always a writer, too.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote reflects on the idea of living on the fringes of various identities and finding comfort in that space.
Louise Erdrich expresses a sense of comfort and identity in being at the margins of different roles in her life, such as being a mother, a writer, and her cultural identity as a German. She acknowledges the complexity of her existence and finds a unique comfort in navigating these multiple identities, suggesting that being marginal can lead to a richer understanding of self.
Themes
IdentityMarginalComfortRolesSelf
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about embracing diversity and complexity in our identities.
More from Louise Erdrich
All quotes βIt was just enough to sit there without words.
Louise ErdrichRead
Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart.
Louise ErdrichRead
The world tips away when we look into our children's faces.
Louise ErdrichRead
...which causes me to wonder, my own purpose on so many days as humble as the spider's, what is beautiful that I make? What is elegant? What feeds the world?
Louise ErdrichRead
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 ErdrichRead
Similar quotes
I always understood my ancestry, like that of so many others in the Gulf Coast, to be a tangle of African slaves, free men of color, French and Spanish immigrants, British colonists, Native Americans - but in what proportion, and what might that proportion tell me about who I thought I was?
Jesmyn WardRead
For me, having a gender identity that was different from my sex assigned at birth and that wasn't seen by society felt like a constant feeling of homesickness - that unwavering ache in the pit of my stomach.
Sarah McbrideRead
For a while, I was feeling like I was always playing characters that weren't specifically Korean or specifically Asian, even - that they were characters who were originally written white, and then they would cast me. And I used to consider that a badge of honor because that meant I had avoided stereotypes.
John ChoRead
When I first came to Harvard, I thought to myself, 'What kind of an Indian am I?' because I did not grow up on a reservation. But being an Indian is a combination of things. It's your blood. It's your spirituality. And it's fighting for the Indian people.
Winona LadukeRead
I don't know what I am if I'm not a woman.
Marsha P. JohnsonRead
I'm a Black woman and I've always been told that I wasn't Black enough because of the way that I grew up, the experiences that I had.
Rachel LindsayRead