It's impossible to write about Native life without humor-that's how people maintain sanity.
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?
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the search for personal purpose and the beauty that one can create in the world.
In this quote, Louise Erdrich expresses a deep contemplation about the nature of purpose and beauty in life, comparing her own humble existence to that of a spider. She questions what meaningful and elegant contributions she can make to the world, prompting readers to reflect on their own lives and the beauty they can create, no matter how small or seemingly insignificant.
In practice
In a personal development workshop, this quote can inspire attendees to reflect on their contributions to the world.
It's impossible to write about Native life without humor-that's how people maintain sanity.
It was just enough to sit there without words.
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.
The world tips away when we look into our children's faces.
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.
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.
Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do.
In overlooking, denying, evading this complexity--which is nothing more than the disquieting complexity of ourselves--we are diminished and we perish; only within this web of ambiguity, paradox, this hunger, danger, darkness, can we find at once ourselves and the power that will free us from ourselves. It is this power of revelation that is the business of the novelist, this journey toward a more vast reality which must take precedence over other claims.
Two may talk and one may hear, but three cannot take part in a conversation of the most sincere and searching sort.
...the very cannibalism of the counterrevolution will convince the nations that there is only one way in which the murderous death agonies of the old society and the bloody birth throes of the new society can be shortened, simplified and concentrated, and that way is revolutionary terror.
...those called by Christ's name should order their lives. They should persevere in prayers and supplications and, in imitation of the angels, have their eyes lifted up to the Master above the heavens, praising and blessing Him with irreproachable conduct, and waiting for His mystical Coming. As the Psalmist says to Him, 'I will sing and will behave myself wisely in a perfect way. O when wilt Thou come unto me?' (Ps. 101:2).
Books and drafts mean something quite different for different thinkers. One collects in a book the lights he was able to steal and carry home swiftly out of the rays of some insight that suddenly dawned on him, while another thinker offers us nothing but shadows - images in black and grey of what had built up in his soul the day before.
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