It's impossible to write about Native life without humor-that's how people maintain sanity.
Louise ErdrichRead
Women are strong, strong, terribly strong. We don't know how strong until we're pushing out our babies.
Interpretation
The quote highlights the immense strength of women, particularly revealed during childbirth.
In this quote, Louise Erdrich emphasizes the extraordinary resilience and strength that women possess, especially during the challenging experience of giving birth. It suggests that the true extent of a woman's strength may not be fully realized until she faces the intense physical and emotional demands of childbirth, revealing a profound aspect of womanhood and resilience that is often underestimated.
In practice
This quote could be used in a speech celebrating women's achievements on International Women's Day.
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.
...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?
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.
I am not Christ or a philanthropist, old lady, I am all the contrary of a Christ I fight for the things I believe in, with all the weapons at my disposal and try to leave the other man dead so that I don't get nailed to a cross or any other place.
We must confront persecution faced by many Christian communities and the intolerance that plagues us. We must overcome anti-Semitism and the prejudice that divides us. We must defeat Islamophobia and the fears that weaken us.
Obviously, the real issue has nothing to do with fear itself, but, rather, how we hold the fear. For some, the fear is totally irrelevant. For others, it creates a state of paralysis. The former hold their fear from a position of power (choice, energy, and action), and the latter hold it from a position of pain (helplessness, depression, and paralysis).
An act of heroism, of extraordinary courage, the grandeur of it, won't easily inspire us to act in imitation, but it can inspire us to emulate its author. For that, we should learn what we can of the whole experience of the subject, the hero's life, as it was before and after, and believe that trying to emulate the character it reveals is one tried way to prepare for the tests that might await us and gain hope that our courage will not be wanting in the moment.
I'm against genocide. I'm against fascism. I'm willing to fight against them so that, in that sense, I think one can still be committed to justice and committed to peace but recognize the circumstances under which one does have to fight.
As an astronaut, especially during launch, half of the risk of a six-month flight is in the first nine minutes.
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