Louise Erdrich Quotes

I think that at some point everybody turns into their mother or their father, it's just not normally from morning to afternoon.

Hats change everything. September knew this with all her being, deep in the place where she knew her own name, and that her mother would still love her even though she hadn’t waved goodbye. For one day her father had put on a hat with golden things on it and suddenly he hadn’t been her father anymore, he had been a soldier, and he had left. Hats have power. Hats can change you into someone else.

My mother loved my father. From my view, she let him get away with too much. It broke my heart to see him in an old people's home and stop being strong and lose his voice.

We tried not to age, but time had its rage.

When you are 20, 40 looks really old. When I was nearing 30, that seemed like a major milestone.

The older we get, the swifter time seems to pass and the quicker memories seem to fade.

Age affects how people experience time.

It doesn't seem like it's been 50 years. I don't even feel like I'm 50 years old yet, though I've had all these knee and back operations.

Age carries all things away, even the mind.

It's a tender and complicated dance, watching our parents age. We become protective in ways we never were before, and we study them with a mix of sadness and curiosity: Is this what we will be like when we are their age? We tell ourselves to be patient - just answer the same question again as if it wasn't answered a moment ago.

In America, people rarely stay in the town where they grew up, rarely stay in close proximity to their parents throughout their lives. You rarely find parents in their old age being taken care of by their children.

In youth the days are short and the years are long. In old age the years are short and day's long.

Most people acquire a softer side with age and sometimes with dad that has been quite weird to see.

Even if your parents don't have Alzheimer's or aren't in a wheelchair, your parents get old - if you're lucky to have parents who live for a long time. It's a challenge, and it's difficult and lovely and touching and awful and ghastly and real.

To grow up requires a whole life but to become old one night is enough.

I suppose the longer anyone spends on earth, the closer we all get to becoming superfluous characters.

Refuse to let an old person move into your body.

By the time you read this, you'll be older than you remember.

I am not old, but my young way was never the way to age.

Middle Age At forty-five, What next, what next? At every corner, I meet my Father, My age, still alive.

Time in his aging overtakes all things alike.

Children grow rapidly, forget the centuries-long embrace from their parents, which to them lasted but seconds. Children become adults, live far from their parents, live their own houses, learn ways of their own, suffer pain, grow old. Children curse their parents for their wrinkled skin and hoarse voices. Those now old children also want to stop time, but at another time. They want to freeze their own children at the center of time.

Old age is fifteen years older than I am.

The truth is I'm getting old, I said. We already are old, she said with a sigh. What happens is that you don't feel it on the inside, but from the outside everybody can see it.