Quotes from The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

“To love another human in all of her splendor and imperfect perfection , it is a magnificent task...tremendous and foolish and human.”
― Louise Erdrich, quote from The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

“The only time I see the truth is when I cross my eyes.”
― Louise Erdrich, quote from The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

“Sometimes owls came near to warn of death. Sometimes they just asked people to be careful. Sometimes they were just owls.”
― Louise Erdrich, quote from The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

“It seemed to her that almost any pain was sympathetic to her loss and she inserted herself immediately into the concept of fantastic suffering.”
― Louise Erdrich, quote from The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

“What is the question we spend our entire lives asking? Our question is this: Are we loved? I don’t mean by one another. Are we loved by the one who made us? Constantly, we look for evidence. In the gifts we are given—children, good weather, money, a happy marriage perhaps—we find assurance. In contrast, our pains, illnesses, the deaths of those we love, our poverty, our innocent misfortunes—those we take as signs that God has somehow turned away. But, my friends, what exactly is love here? How to define it? Does God’s love have anything at all to do with the lack or plethora of good fortune at work in our lives? Or is God’s love, perhaps, something very different from what we think we know?”
― Louise Erdrich, quote from The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

“What are you?' he [Nanapush] said to Damien, who was deep in a meditation over his [chess] bishop's trajectory.
'A priest' said Father Damien
'A man priest or a woman priest?'...
...'I am a priest', she whispered, hoarsely, fierce. 'Why' said Nanapush kindly, as though Father Damien hadn't answered, to put the question to rest, 'are you pretending to be a man priest?”
― Louise Erdrich, quote from The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

“For it was through books that she felt her life to be unjudged Look at all of the great mix-ups, messes, confinement, and double-dealings in Shakespeare, she thought.Identities disguised continually, in a combative dance of illusion and discovery.”
― Louise Erdrich, quote from The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

“The buffalo were taking leave of the earth and all they loved,” said the old chiefs and hunters after years had passed and they could tell what split their hearts. “The buffalo went crazy with grief to see the end of things. Like us, they saw the end of things and like many of us, many today, they did not care to live.”
― Louise Erdrich, quote from The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

“We Anishinaabeg are the keepers of the names of the earth. And unless the earth is called by the names it gave us humans, won’t it cease to love us? And isn’t it true that if the earth stops loving us, everyone, not just the Anishinaabeg, will cease to exist? That is why we all must speak our language, nindinawemagonidok, and call everything we see by the name of its spirit. Even the chimookomanag, who are trying to destroy us, are depending upon us to remember. Mi’sago’i.”
― Louise Erdrich, quote from The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

“Whenever he thought he knew the truth it merged into another truth.”
― Louise Erdrich, quote from The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

“Nector [speaking to Bernadette] could have told her, having drunk down the words of Nanapush, that comfort is not security and money in the hand disappears. He could have told her that only the land matters and never to let go of the papers, the titles, the tracks of the words, all those things that his ancestors never understood how the vital relationship to the dirt and grass under their feet.”
― Louise Erdrich, quote from The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

“The moonless sky was a rich wild blackness of stars.”
― Louise Erdrich, quote from The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

“Just as he dropped with a jerk into the pit of unconsciousness, he thought how odd it was that he was falling asleep in his sleep. When he entered the dream that he was dreaming, later, it was a dream within the dream he dreamed originally when he lay down in his bed.”
― Louise Erdrich, quote from The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

“Why do the chimookomanag want us?” she growled. “They take all that makes us Anishinaabeg. Everything about us. First our land, then our trees. Now husbands, our wives, our children, our souls. Why do they want to capture every bit?”
― Louise Erdrich, quote from The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

“If I am loved,” Father Damien went on, “it is a merciless and exacting love against which I have no defense. If I am not loved, then I am being pitilessly manipulated by a force I cannot withstand, either, and so it is all the same. I must do what I must do. Go in peace.”
― Louise Erdrich, quote from The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

“I have never seen the truth,” said Damien, “without crossing my eyes. Life is crazy.”
― Louise Erdrich, quote from The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

“Between these two, where was the real self? It came to her that both Sister Cecilia and then Agnes were as heavily manufactured of gesture and pose as was Father Damien. And within this, what sifting of identity was she? What mote? What nothing?”
― Louise Erdrich, quote from The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

“Gregory was in the walls, in the crawl space between the board floor of the cabin and the bitter ground. He was gone, but he was everywhere. He was on the small pantry shelf where canning was removed. The air of the cabin still held Gregory. He filled and expanded every dark corner, tight, to exploding. He was jammed between her legs so that no matter how she moved, he was inside of Agnes. She couldn't shake him from her vestments or burn him from the stove. He nested in the books, of course. She couldn't stand to touch their pages. He was in the sweet, fragrant wood Mary Kashpaw chopped, split, and piled. In the cloth of curtains, the clasp of doors, he waited. She turned the handle, let the light in, and he came, too, solid and good and alive.”
― Louise Erdrich, quote from The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

“Hildegarde stood, scratched her nose, an act for which she must later say a penance.”
― Louise Erdrich, quote from The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

“It was Sister Hildegarde’s belief that good penmanship was the defining key to success in life.”
― Louise Erdrich, quote from The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

“It was as though her soul were neatly removed by a drinking straw and siphoned into the green pool of quiet that lay beneath the rippling cascade of notes.”
― Louise Erdrich, quote from The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

“Nector got even by the use of penmanship.”
― Louise Erdrich, quote from The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

“Her hands flew off the keyboard—she crouched as though she had been shot, saw yellow spots and then experienced a peaceful wave of oneness in which she entered pure communion. She was locked into the music, held there safely, entirely understood. Such was her innocence that she didn’t know she was experiencing a sexual climax, but believed rather that what she felt was the natural outcome of this particular nocturne played to the utmost of her skills—and so it came to be. Chopin’s spirit became her lover. His flats caressed her. His whole notes sank through her body like clear pebbles. His atmospheric trills were the flicker of a tongue. His pauses before the downward sweep of notes nearly drove her insane. The”
― Louise Erdrich, quote from The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

“For the countries of the spirit, to which he was now admitted, were accessible only via many dim and tangled trails.”
― Louise Erdrich, quote from The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse

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Popular quotes

“Do you think Gandhi was interested in Art?" I asked.

"Gandhi? No, of course not."

"I think you're right," I agreed. "Neither in art nor in science. And that is why we killed him."

"We?"

"Yes, we. The intelligent, the active, the forward-looking, the believers in Order and Perfection. Whereas Gandhi was a reactionary who believed only in people. Squalid little individuals governing themselves, village by village, and worshiping the Brahman who is also Atman. It was intolerable. No wonder we bumped him off."

But even as I spoke I was thinking that that wasn't the whole story. The whole story included an inconsistency, almost a betrayal. This man who believed only in people had got himself involved in the sub-human mass-madness of nationalism, in the would-be superhuman, but actually diabolic, institution of the nation-state. He got himself involved in these things, imagining that he could mitigate the madness and convert what was satanic in the state to something like humanity. But nationalism and the politics of power had proved too much for him. It is not at the center, not from within the organization, that the saint can cure our regimented insanity; it is only from without, at the periphery. If he makes himself a part of the machine, in which the collective madness is incarnated, one or the other of two things is bound to happen. Either he remains himself, in which case the machine will use him as long as it can and, when he becomes unusable, reject or destroy him. Or he will be transformed into the likeness of the mechanism with and against which he works, and in this case we shall see Holy Inquisitions and alliances with any tyrant prepared to guarantee ecclesiastical privileges.”
― Aldous Huxley, quote from Ape and Essence

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― Kristen Ashley, quote from With Everything I Am

“Love knows not distance; It hath no continent; Its eyes are for the stars.”
― Lucinda Riley, quote from The Seven Sisters

“LABOR IS A RESOURCE and TIME IS A RESOURCE are by no means universal. They emerged naturally in our culture because of the way we view work, our passion for quantification, and our obsession with purposeful ends. These metaphors highlight those aspects of labor and time that are centrally important in our culture. In doing this, they also deemphasize or hide certain aspects of labor and time. We can see what both metaphors hide by examining what they focus on. In viewing labor as a kind of activity, the metaphor assumes that labor can be clearly identified and distinguished from things that are not labor. It makes the assumptions that we can tell work from play and productive activity from nonproductive activity. These assumptions obviously fail to fit reality much of the time, except perhaps on assembly lines, chain gangs, etc. The view of labor as merely a kind of activity, independent of who performs it, how he experiences it, and what it means in his life, hides the issues of whether the work is personally meaningful, satisfying, and humane. The quantification of labor in terms of time, together with the view of time as serving a purposeful end, induces a notion of LEISURE TIME, which is parallel to the concept LABOR TIME. In a society like ours, where inactivity is not considered a purposeful end, a whole industry devoted to leisure activity has evolved. As a result, LEISURE TIME becomes a RESOURCE too—to be spent productively, used wisely, saved up, budgeted, wasted, lost, etc. What is hidden by the RESOURCE metaphors for labor and time is the way our concepts of LABOR and TIME affect our concept of LEISURE, turning it into something remarkably like LABOR. The RESOURCE metaphors for labor and time hide all sorts of possible conceptions of labor and time that exist in other cultures and in some subcultures of our own society: the idea that work can be play, that inactivity can be productive, that much of what we classify as LABOR serves either no clear purpose or no worthwhile purpose.”
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― N.T. Wright, quote from Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense

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