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. You are here to be swallowed up.

—Louise Erdrich in The Painted Drum

solitude love life risk vulnerability heartbreak yearning

About Louise Erdrich

Portrait of Louise Erdrich

Karen Louise Erdrich ( ER-drik; born June 7, 1954) is an Indigenous-American author of novels, short stories, poetry, and children's books featuring Native American characters and settings. She is an enrolled citizen of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians of North Dakota, a federally recognized Ojibwe people.

More quotations from Louise Erdrich

Now that I knew fear, I also knew it was not permanent. As powerful as it was, its grip on me would loosen. It would pass.

—Louise Erdrich in The Round House

We have these earthly bodies. We don't know what they want. Half the time, we pretend they are under our mental thumb, but that is the illusion of the healthy and protected. Of sedate lovers.… For the body has emotions it conceives and carries through without concern for anyone or anything else.

—Louise Erdrich

They were so strong in their beliefs that there came a time when it hardly mattered what exactly those beliefs were; they all fused into a single stubbornness.

—Louise Erdrich

People want to be who they are. People don't want to assume a kind of identity… this persona that Americans think makes us the envy of the rest of the world. Even within our own borders there are three hundred different cultures who do not envy Americans so much that they want to give up their tribal status.

—Louise Erdrich

Money helps, though not so much as you think when you don't have it.

—Louise Erdrich

More quotations tagged with “yearning”

The absolute yearning of one human body for another particular one and its indifference to substitutes is one of life's major mysteries.

—Iris Murdoch

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Justice is like the kingdom of God—it is not without us as a fact; it is within us as a great yearning.

—George Eliot

justice God yearning

All writing, even the clumsy kind, exposes in its loops and slants a yearning deeper than an intention, the soul of the writer flopping on the clothes-peg of his exclamation mark.

—Paul Theroux

writing soul yearning intention

All my life, my heart has yearned for a thing I cannot name.

—Andre Breton

longing yearning naming

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther.… And one fine morning—
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

—F. Scott Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby

future effort desire striving yearning want

History

7 Jul 2019 Added