It's impossible to write about Native life without humor-that's how people maintain sanity.
You know, some people fall right through the hole in their lives. It's invisible, but they come to it after time, never knowing where.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote reflects on the unseen challenges that individuals may face in life, often leading them to a feeling of emptiness or loss without understanding the cause.
Louise Erdrich's quote speaks to the existential struggles that many individuals confront throughout their lives. It suggests that there are gaps or 'holes' in our existence, often unnoticed, which can lead to a sense of disorientation or lack of fulfillment. These holes symbolize the emotional or psychological voids that can form as we navigate through life, highlighting the importance of awareness and introspection in understanding our personal journeys.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
In a motivational speech about overcoming life's obstacles.
More from Louise Erdrich
All quotes →It was just enough to sit there without words.
Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart.
The world tips away when we look into our children's faces.
...which causes me to wonder, my own purpose on so many days as humble as the spider's, what is beautiful that I make? What is elegant? What feeds the world?
Her mind was present because she was always gone. Her hands were filled because they grasped the meaning of empty. Life was simple. Her husband returned and she served him with indifferent patience this time. When he asked what had happened to her heat for him, she gestured to the west. The sun was setting. The sky was a body of fire.
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The purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience.
Life has been some combination of fairy-tale coincidence and joie de vivre and shocks of beauty together with some hurtful self-questioning.
Tears are a river that takes you somewhere…Tears lift your boat off the rocks, off dry ground, carrying it downriver to someplace better.
One can stand anything except a succession of ordinary days