Louise Erdrich Quotes

My mom and dad met at UCLA when he as a captain in the Air Force and she was in her junior year.

I was born into a middle class family in New Jersey. My dad came home from serving in the Army after having lost his father, worked in the Breyers ice cream plant in Newark, New Jersey. Was the first person to graduate from college.

My mother's family came from the British West Indies. And my father's family came from, well, my father's father came from the Montana/South Dakota area. They were Blackfoot Indian.

My dad was in the army. World War II. He got his college education from the army. After World War II he became an insurance salesman. Really, I didn't know my dad very well. He and my mother split up after the war. I was raised by my maternal grandmother and grandfather, and by my mother.

My father still is a lawyer, and my mom was a teacher and then later a career counselor.

My father went to boarding school in Sydney when he was 14.

My father is a retired army captain and banking software salesman, and my mother is an English teacher.

My mother's Mohawk and my father is Scottish/German from Nova Scotia.

My father was a golden boy from a very small town. He won a very prestigious law scholarship to NYU Law School, and there in Greenwich Village, he met my mother, who was very young, fresh off the boat from Germany.

My father was a Jewish immigrant who settled in Argentina and was left to his own devices at the age of 15. My mother was a teacher, herself the daughter of a poor immigrant family.

My father was in the coal business in West Virginia. Both dad and mother were, however, originally from Massachusetts; New England, to them, meant the place to go if you really wanted an education.

Upon graduation from high school, following my brother by a couple of years, I joined the U.S. Air Force.

My brothers and I grew up on stories about our grandfather building one-room schoolhouses and about our grandparents' courtship and their early lives together in Indian Territory.

I'd be satisfied just coaching in high school. I turned down a number of colleges when I was teaching in South Bend, Indiana, before I went into the service. I honestly believe that if I hadn't enlisted in the service, I would never have left high school teaching. I'm sure I would have never left.

My parents had met in high school and married right after my father came back from World War II. They honeymooned in Paris and returned to that city when my father, in college on the G.I. Bill, was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship.

My father came from a country called Bolivia. He was of Spanish descent. I never went to Bolivia until I was 60 years old, but apparently when he was 17, he had already planned his entire academic curriculum so that he could graduate high school and enter college in the United States. That's how much he wanted to come to this country.

My parents were the first in our family to go to grammar school. My grandparents were in service.

Why am I the first Kinnock in a thousand generations to be able to get to university?

There were Indians at Harvard College in the 1600s.

My father was an athlete, a great athlete, fought in the Marines in World War I. He was all sports and activity. My mother was all academics. I still have the complete works of Shakespeare that she had.

My mother was the only girl in the family. One brother was District Attorney of Odessa or something; another was teaching classical languages; another was a captain of a battleship of the Black Navy; and still another was a chemist and icthyologist.

My father and brothers were in the military.

When I got out of the army, I had the G.I. Bill. Since I had no high school education or anything like that, I came to NYU, and they took a chance on me and let me in.

I was the first one in the family, on either side, to go to college - much less graduate school.

My grandmother is British. She was in the Women's Auxiliary Air Force during World War II. That's where she met my grandfather, who was sailing for the British Royal Navy. She was a war bride.