Louise Erdrich Quotes

And sometimes you do everything right and something bad just happens. It's as simple, and as scary, as that.

People are entirely too disbelieving of coincidence. They are far too ready to dismiss it and to build arcane structures of extremely rickety substance in order to avoid it. I, on the other hand, see coincidence everywhere as an inevitable consequence of the laws of probability, according to which having no unusual coincidence is far more unusual than any coincidence could possibly be.

Life is savagely unfair. It ignores our deep-seated convictions and places a disproportionate emphasis on the decisions we make in split seconds.

Is not man himself the most unsettled of all the creatures of the earth? What is this trembling sensation that is intensified with each ascending step in the natural order?

Isn't it strange how we move out lives for another day? Like skipping a beat, what if a great wave should wash us all away?

Contingency is a thing unto itself, not the titration of determinism by randomness.

Bad things can happen to anyone at any time, whether you follow the rules or not.

Life consists of a long chain of coincidences.

Life is so complicated a game that the devices of skill are liable to be defeated at every turn by air-blown chances, incalculable as the descent of thistle-down.

By the laws of statistics we could probably approximate just how unlikely it is that it would happen. But people forget especially those who ought to know better, such as yourself that while the laws of statistics tell you how unlikely a particular coincidence is, they state just as firmly that coincidences do happen.

A fundamental principle of information theory is that you can’t guarantee outcomes… in order for an experiment to yield knowledge, it has to be able to fail. If you have guaranteed experiments, you have zero knowledge

Things shouldn't hinge on so very little. Sneeze and you're highway carnage. Remove one tiny stone and you're an avalanche statistic. But I guess if you can die without ever understanding how it happened then you can also live without a complete understanding of how. And in a way that's kind of relaxing.

Fate laughs at probabilities.

bad things, like good things don't happen any more often than they ought to by chance. the universe has no mind, no feelings, and no personality, so it doesn't do things in order to either hurt or please you. bad things happen because things happen.

Real life seems to have no plots.

In a world that operates largely at random, coincidences are to be expected, but any one of them must always be mistrusted.

But as the unthought-on accident is guilty To what we wildly do, so we profess Ourselves to be the slaves of chance, and flies Of every wind that blows.

There are patterns because we try to find them. A desperate attempt at order because we can't face the terror that it might all be random.

And if there is no lining to the world? If a thrush on a branch is not a sign, But just a thrush on the branch? If night and day Make no sense following each other?

A reasonable probability is the only certainty.

Story seems to say that everything happens for a reason and I want to say, No, it doesn’t.

Serious harm, I am afraid, has been wrought to our generation by fostering the idea that they would live secure in a permanent order of things.

Everything is chance, or nothing is chance. If I believed the first, I would be unable to live on, but I am not yet fully convinced of the second.

Luck is a thing that comes in many forms and who can recognize her?

I don't know -- maybe the world has two different kinds of people, and for one kind the world is this completely logical, rice pudding place, and for the other it's all hit-or-miss macaroni gratin.