Top 100 Sherman Alexie Quotes
#1. You have to love somebody that much to also hate them that much, too. (191)
Sherman Alexie
#2. If human beings possessed endless possibilities, then cities contained exponential hopes.
Sherman Alexie
#4. He looked into the crowd for approval, saw his mother and father. He waved and they waved back. Smiles and Indian teeth. They were both drunk. Everything familiar and welcome. Everything beautiful.
Sherman Alexie
#5. World. Put down your fucking guns and pick up your kids.
Sherman Alexie
#6. Rowdy and I played one-on-one for hours. we played until dark. we played until the streetlights lit up court. we played until the bats swooped down at our heads. we played until the moon was huge and golden and perfect in the dark sky.
we didn't keep score.
Sherman Alexie
#7. Somebody dies and people eat your food. Funny how that works.
Sherman Alexie
#8. I don't know what any individual should do about crossing her own borders. I only know that I live a happier, more adventurous life, by crossing borders.
Sherman Alexie
#9. My wife was the first romantic partner who understood both American and native parts of me - not so much the positive stuff, but the damage.
Sherman Alexie
#10. He didn't do much of anything except ride that bike and listen to music.
Sherman Alexie
#11. Because I'm an American, I know there's all sorts of international folks who would gladly kidnap and behead me.
Sherman Alexie
#12. She wanted to find a way to love them in death, because she forgot how to love them in life.
Sherman Alexie
#13. Life is a constant struggle between being an individual and being a member of the community.
Sherman Alexie
#14. I thought I'd been condescended to as an Indian - that was nothing compared to the condescension for writing young adult literature.
Sherman Alexie
#15. Exoticism was hard to find in Pullman, Washington.
Sherman Alexie
#16. I felt brave all of a sudden. Yeah, maybe it was just a stupid and immature school yard fight. Or maybe it was the most important moment of my life. Maybe I was telling the world that I was no longer a human target.
Sherman Alexie
#17. I had the feeling I was going to be successful, and I didn't want to be another disappointing Indian.
Sherman Alexie
#18. But he wasn't ugly, just misplaced and marked by loneliness.
Sherman Alexie
#19. The professor ignored Lynn's comments and proceeded with his lecture.
Sherman Alexie
#20. At the halfway point of any drunken night, there is a moment when an Indian realizes he cannot turn back toward tradition and that he has no map to guide him toward the future.
Sherman Alexie
#21. A lot of people have no idea that right now Y.A. (young adult). is the Garden of Eden of literature.
Sherman Alexie
#22. What about me?" I asked. "Am I mean?" "You aren't mean to me with words," she said. "You're mean to me with your silences.
Sherman Alexie
#24. Here's a fact: Some people want to live more
Than others do.
Sherman Alexie
#25. Okay, so it's like each of these books is a mystery. Every book is a mystery. And if you read all of the books ever written, it's like you've read one giant mystery. And no matter how much you learn, you keep on learning so much more you need to learn.
Sherman Alexie
#26. I don't think there's a whole lot of class literature at all. I think most of that has become racially based, and people don't think of it as being class literature.
Sherman Alexie
#28. If I were a doctor nobody would be inviting me to talk to reservations. I'd be a different person. Writers can influence more people.
Sherman Alexie
#29. Do you know why the Indian rain dances always worked? Because the Indians would keep dancing until it rained.
Sherman Alexie
#30. In high school I dated a white woman. She would come to visit me on the rez. And her dad, who was very racist, didn't like that at all. And he told her one time, 'You shouldn't go on the rez if you're white because Indians have a lot of anger in their heart.'
Sherman Alexie
#31. Imagine Columbus landed in 1492 and some tribe or another drowned him in the ocean. Would Lester FallsApart still be shoplifting in the 7-11?
Sherman Alexie
#32. I was studying the sky like I was an astronomer, except it was daytime and I didn't have a telescope, so I was just an idiot.
Sherman Alexie
#33. We lived in a small house, so there was no escape from the goddamn racket of her loneliness.
Sherman Alexie
#35. I thought maybe if you wore different clothes at school,' Paul said, 'maybe you could start a trend. You'd be original.' 'Oh, my God,' she said. 'It's high school, Dad. People get beat up for being original.
Sherman Alexie
#36. I think all of us are always five years old in the presence and absence of our parents.
Sherman Alexie
#37. My father went on a legendary drinking binge. My mother went to church every single day. It was all booze and God, booze and God, booze and God.
Sherman Alexie
#38. I think the world is a series of broken dams and floods, and my cartoons are tiny little lifeboats.
Sherman Alexie
#39. You should approach each book
you should approach life
with the real possibility that you might get a metaphorical boner at any point.
Sherman Alexie
#40. It's way too early for him to be talking anyhow but I see in his eyes something and I see in his eyes a voice and I see in his eyes a whole new set of words
Sherman Alexie
#41. Is God a man or a woman?
God could be an armadillo. I have no idea.
Sherman Alexie
#42. We are taught to take the bread into our bodies as proof of Jesus's body.
Sherman Alexie
#43. Held on to me like I was a baby. And she kept crying. So many tears. My clothes and hair were soaked with her tears. It was, like, my mother had given me a grief shower, you know? Like she'd baptized me with her pain.
Sherman Alexie
#44. Walk the midway and hear the carnival barker.
Come see the freak named after his deceased father.
Come see the prince who wants to abdicate his throne.
Come see the son whose name is carved on a gravestone.
Sherman Alexie
#45. Environmentalism is a luxury. Just like being a vegetarian is a luxury. When you have to worry about eating - you're not going to be worried about where the food's coming from, or who made your shoes. Poverty, whether planned or not planned, is a way of making environmentalism moot.
Sherman Alexie
#46. Lies have short shelf lives. Lies go bad. Lies rot and stink up the joint.
Sherman Alexie
#47. He was going to punish me now. He couldn't beat me up with his old man fists, but he could hurt me with his old man words.
Sherman Alexie
#48. I believe in any kid's ability to read any book and form their own judgments. It's the job of a parent to guide his/her child through the reading of every book imaginable. Censorship of any form punishes curiosity.
Sherman Alexie
#49. She told me that every other step was just for me.'
But that's only half of the dance,' I said.
Yeah,' my father said. 'She was keeping the rest for herself. Nobody can give everything away. It ain't healthy.
Sherman Alexie
#50. I think that white women are more apt to read laterally. So I think there's some strong identification for women, and their political and social positions, and minorities. I think that the political power of, let's say, the average Indian man and a white woman are pretty equal.
Sherman Alexie
#51. (I think Rowdy might be the most important person in my life. maybe more important than my family.) Can your best friend be more importamt than your family? (24)
Sherman Alexie
#52. But I'm also addicted to books. And I know there has never been a human being or a television show, no matter how great, that could measure up to a great book.
Sherman Alexie
#53. My parents came from poor people who came from poor people who came from poor people, all the way back to the very first poor people.
Sherman Alexie
#56. I recognize now that the conditions that Indians are living in are the conditions that poor people everywhere are living in.
Sherman Alexie
#57. I felt so conflicted about having fled the rez as a kid that I created a whole literary career that left me there.
Sherman Alexie
#58. But God has a way of making things even out, I guess.
Sherman Alexie
#60. Poverty doesn't give you strength or teach you lessons about perseverance. No, poverty only teaches you how to be poor.
Sherman Alexie
#61. Of course, she didn't care about me. She mostly made fun of me. But that just made me love her even more. She was out of my league, and even though I was only twelve, I knew that I'd be one of those guys who always fell in love with the unreachable, ungettable, and uninterested.
Sherman Alexie
#62. 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.
Sherman Alexie
#63. I thought that once I figured out thirteen, then it was history,
Sherman Alexie
#65. Dear wife, I'm sorry that I am mysteriously incapable of folding clean laundry, but I iron, oh, I iron. Sweetheart, I'll make your white shirt so crisp and sharp that it will split atoms as you walk.
Sherman Alexie
#66. If one reads enough books one has a fighting chance. Or better, one's chances of survival increase with each book one reads.
Sherman Alexie
#67. My career means, if you're a non-Indian writing about Indians, at least there's one Indian in your rearview mirror.
Sherman Alexie
#68. So Lightning says to Mud,
"What would happen if I struck your blood?"
And Mud says, "Brother,
It would hurt,
And make me the mother
Of every living thing.
But, Fire Boy, you ain't lifting my grass skirt
Until you burn me a ring.
Sherman Alexie
#69. I end up feeling like a spy in the house of ethnicity, you know? Because people will talk around me as they would talk around the people in their cultural group. So I get to hear all the secrets and jokes and you know, I'm a part of every community because of the way I look.
Sherman Alexie
#70. She'd teach him nineteen different ways to spell matriarchy.
Sherman Alexie
#71. Facebook and Twitter and these other social sites bring every, I mean, 140 characters. I mean, I'm on Twitter and I have fun. But I don't think anybody learns anything about me as a person.
Sherman Alexie
#72. How much do we remember of what hurts us most? I've been thinking about pain, how each of us constructs our past to justify what we feel now. How each successive pain distorts the preceding.
Sherman Alexie
#73. I've come to the point in my life where I encourage young Native Americans to become much more selfish about their personal needs and wants.
Sherman Alexie
#74. I heard it on the wind. I heard it from the birds. I felt it in the sunlight.
Sherman Alexie
#75. Listen" said Mather. "I understand what you're going through, I really do. An Indian woman in college. I understand. I'm a Marxist."
Really," said Marie. "I'm a Libra.
Sherman Alexie
#76. Seymour looked around the Tucson McDonald's. There were white people and Mavajos; there were people who preferred their Quarter Pounders with cheese and those who didn't care for cheese at all; and there were those who desperately wish that McDonald's would introduce onion rings to its menu.
Sherman Alexie
#77. Late one day James and I watch the sun fly across the sky like a basketball on fire until it falls down completely and lands in Benjamin Lake with a splash and shakes the ground and even wakes up Lester FallsApart who thought it was his father come back to slap his face again.
Sherman Alexie
#78. You want the good life? You live where white people live, you go to school where white people go to school, and you shop where white people shop.
Sherman Alexie
#79. And that's when I knew that I was going to be okay.
Sherman Alexie
#81. The dream he needed most was the dream that frightened him more.
Sherman Alexie
#82. How does one survive these revelations? One just lives.
Sherman Alexie
#83. Every Indian kid has access to MySpace and Facebook. But that doesn't mean they have access to books and great teachers. This idea about bringing digital tech into schools is great, but once again I'll say that this is not how people actually learn.
Sherman Alexie
#84. I mean, I don't think you're supposed to have sex with people you don't love. I know, I know, I know. People do it all the time. But I really think you're supposed to be a little bit in love with them. At least a tiny bit.
Sherman Alexie
#85. Unlike landed white men, she didn't need to climb mountains to experience mystic panic. All she needed was to set her alarm dock for the next morning, wake when it rang, and go to class.
Sherman Alexie
#87. What do you have to worry about? That you're lonely? That you have a mortgage? That your wife doesn't love you? F you, F you. I have to worry about having enough to eat!
Sherman Alexie
#88. If you care about something enough, it's going to make you cry. But you have to use it. Use your tears. Use your pain. Use your fear. Get mad. Arnold, get mad.
Sherman Alexie
#89. Then I remember that God is really, really old. So maybe God has God arthritis. And maybe that's why the world sucks. Maybe God's hands and fingers don't work as well as they used to.
Sherman Alexie
#90. Reservations were meant to be prisons, you know? Indians were supposed to move onto reservations and die. We were supposed to disappear.
Sherman Alexie
#91. Those Montana Indians were so tough that white people were scared of them.
Can you imagine a place where white people are scared of Indians and not the other way around?
That's Montana.
Sherman Alexie
#92. Traveling between Reardan and Wellpinit, between the little white town and the reservation, I always felt like a stranger. I was half Indian in one place and half white in the other. It was like being Indian was my job, but it was only a part-time job. And it didn't pay well at all.
Sherman Alexie
#93. Yep, my daddy was an undependable drunk. But he'd never missed any of my organized games, concerts, plays, or picnics. He may not have loved me perfectly, but he loved me as well as he could. (189)
Sherman Alexie
#95. And I know there has never been a human being or a television show, no matter how great, that could measure up to a great book. But
Sherman Alexie
#97. Sometimes I caught my mother digging through old photo albums or staring at the wall or out the window. She'd get that look on her face that I knew meant she missed my father. Not enough to want him back. She missed him just enough for it to hurt. On
Sherman Alexie
#98. Seattle is Sweden! Extremely liberal, progressive, and very white, with a strong undercurrent of racism.
Sherman Alexie
#99. There have been players with Indian heritage, but there hasn't been a Native-American professional basketball player who became a regular for all sorts of social and political reasons.
Sherman Alexie
#100. If you weren't good for making food, shelter, or babies, then you were tossed out on your own.
Sherman Alexie
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