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

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About Louise Erdrich

Portrait of Louise Erdrich

Karen Louise Erdrich ( ER-drik; born June 7, 1954) is a Native American author of novels, 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.

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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

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solitude love life risk vulnerability heartbreak yearning

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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

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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

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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

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

—Louise Erdrich

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money

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