Louise Erdrich Quotes

Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved.

You could say, in a vulgar Freudian way, that I am the unhappy child who escapes into books. Even as a child, I was most happy being alone. This has not changed.

Because some of my at-home life was rough and lonely, I often looked to escape into my imagination. Science fiction provided a deep well to pull from and was something easily accessible to me.

The last few years I've had to force myself to go out and be more involved the world because I can get a bit more cerebral and escape into characters and the world of characters. But now I guess I escape into stories about 'Wilfred.'

I've always kind of lived in my own world.

I felt like an outcast and turned to books, fantasy in particular, to find a place for myself. Reading took me away from this world, which I needed.

When you live in a small town behind the Pine Curtain, you live inside your head a lot.

From an early age she had developed the art of being alone and generally preferred her own company to anyone else’s. She read books at enormous speed and judged them entirely on her ability to remove her from her material surroundings. In almost all the unhappiest days of her life she had been able to escape from her own inner world by living temporarily in someone else’s, and on the two or three occasions that she had been too upset to concentrate she had been desolate.

This girl shivers and crawls under the covers with all her clothes on and falls into an overdue library book, a faerie story with rats and marrow and burning curses. The sentences build a fence around her, a Times Roman 10-point barricade, to keep the thorny voices in her head from getting too close.

The world in books seemed so much more alive to me than anything outside. I could see things I'd never seen before. Books and music were my best friends. I had a couple of good friends at school, but never met anyone I could really speak my heart to.

He was a very private person, and sometimes it seemed to me that he was no longer interested in the world or in other people... I got the feeling that Julián was living in the past, locked in his memories. Julián lived within himself, for his books and inside them - a comfortable prison of his own design." "You say this as if you envied him." "There are worse prisons than words.

Only in books could you find pity, comfort, happiness and love.

I don't remember ever feeling lonely; in fact, on the rare occasions when I met other children I found their games and their talk far less interesting than the adventures and dialogues I read in my books.

A book is the only real escape from this fallen world. Aside from death.

I'm lonely I'll make me a world.

My lack of access to the real world has been replaced completely by books, and it can’t be healthy to live in a land of happily ever afters.

I leapt eagerly into books. The characters’ lives were so much more interesting than the lonely heartbeat of my own.

I had very low self-esteem. Books saved me. I found friends in stories like The Chronicles of Narnia and A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. During lunch hour at school I'd avoid social interactions by sitting on the bathroom sink and reading. My mother worked in my school cafeteria. When my anxiety got really bad, I'd put a coat on, grab my book and a flashlight, and hide in the freezer with the mac and cheese.

Books. I'd probably spend all my time alone and lost in books if I could. It's easier that way.

I used to sleep with my books in piles all over my bed and sometimes they were the only thing keeping me warm and always the only thing keeping me alive. Books are the best and worst defense.

books have been my greatest comfort, castle-building a never-failing delight, and scribbling a very profitable amusement.

I don't know myself, what to do, where to go... I lie in the crack of a book for my comfort... it's what the world offers... please leave me alone to dream as I fancy.

If only they would all just leave me alone with my books and my letters, I would be content to let life, and the world pass me by

I hate Christmas. Everything is designed for families, romance, warmth, emotion and presents, and if you have no boyfriend, no money, your mother is going out with a missing Portuguese criminal and your friends don't want to be your friend anymore, it makes you want to emigrate to a vicious Muslim regime, where at least all the women are treated like social outcasts. Anyway, I don't care. I am going to quietly read a book all weekend and listen to classical music.

When I was small and easily wounded books were my carapace. If I were recalled to my hurts in the middle of a book they somehow mattered less. My corporeal life was slight the dazzling one in my head was what really mattered. Returning to books was coming home.