Top 100 Alexie Quotes
#1. I recognize that I'm probably the luckiest novelist in recent memory, because Sherman Alexie, a writer I greatly admire, raved about my book on 'The Colbert Report,' and then Mr. Colbert himself urged his viewers to buy it - on his show and on Twitter.
Edan Lepucki
#2. My name is Sherman J. Alexie Jr., and I am an insomniac.
Sherman Alexie
#3. Ten Little Indians once again shows [Alexie] to be not just one of the West's best, but one of the most brilliantly literate American writers, even funnier than Louise Erdrich, even more primal than Jim Harrison, and even more eloquent than Annie Proulx.
Ron Franscell
#4. Reading centers on finding yourself in a book. -- Sherman Alexie
Anita Silvey
#5. How can we imagine a new language when the language of the enemy keeps our dismembered tongues tied to his belt?
Sherman Alexie
#6. There isn't a lot of poverty literature in the young-adult world. And I don't know why that is, but I think certainly I felt a gap.
Sherman Alexie
#7. You have to love somebody that much to also hate them that much, too. (191)
Sherman Alexie
#8. But now I want it to pour. I want it to storm. I want to be clean.
Sherman Alexie
#9. If God were good, why would he create Rush Limbaugh?
Sherman Alexie
#10. If human beings possessed endless possibilities, then cities contained exponential hopes.
Sherman Alexie
#11. I was young and frightened and craved respect and its ugly cousin, approval, so I did as I was told.
Sherman Alexie
#12. He was the loser Indian father of a loser Indian son living in a world built for winners.
Sherman Alexie
#13. Like the coffin was settling down for a long, long nap, for a forever nap.
Sherman Alexie
#14. The problem for me with liberals is that we've abdicated our moral responsibility to the universe.
Sherman Alexie
#15. I didn't know what to say to her. What do you say to people when they ask how it feels to lose everything? When every planet in your solar system has exploded?
Sherman Alexie
#16. I feel like a carton of eggs holding up an elephant.
Sherman Alexie
#18. 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
#20. World. Put down your fucking guns and pick up your kids.
Sherman Alexie
#21. My sister is running away to get lost, but I am running away because I want to find something. And my parents love me so much that they want to help me. Yeah, Dad is a drunk and Mom is an ex-drunk, but they don't want their kids to be drunks.
Sherman Alexie
#22. Coach said. "the quality of a man's life is in direct proportion to his commitment to excellence, regardless of his chosen field of endeavor".
Sherman Alexie
#23. I wasn't just defending myself. I was defending Indians, black people, and buffalo.
Sherman Alexie
#24. 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
#25. More and more, he heard his spine playing stick games through his skin, singing old dusty words, the words of all his years.
Sherman Alexie
#26. Junior talks about it - relating to dozens if not hundreds of tribes. Even as the world tries to define you, narrow the definition of you, don't do it to yourself. True
Sherman Alexie
#27. Somebody dies and people eat your food. Funny how that works.
Sherman Alexie
#28. 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
#29. In the middle of a crazy and drunk life, you have to hang onto the good and sober moments tightly.
Sherman Alexie
#30. Last September 16th, I was walking in downtown Seattle when this pick-up truck pulls up in front of me. Guy leans out the window and yells, "Go back to your own country," and I was laughing so hard because it wasn't so much a hate crime as a crime of irony.
Sherman Alexie
#31. Like any good shaman, professional baseball player, or politician, my mother always answered questions with questions.
Sherman Alexie
#35. My father was sleepless most of his life. So by the age of five, I was awake with him all night long, watching bad television or we'd lie in the same bed, and I'd read my comic books while he read his latest spy or mystery novel.
Sherman Alexie
#36. Certainly I'm angry at the way Indians have been treated and continue to be treated. But I don't think it's a helpless emotion.
Sherman Alexie
#37. The people who loved me when I was seven years old love my books, and the people who didn't like me when I was seven years old don't like my books.
Sherman Alexie
#38. What do you say to people when they ask you how it feels to lose everything?
Sherman Alexie
#39. 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
#40. He didn't do much of anything except ride that bike and listen to music.
Sherman Alexie
#41. Sometimes we meet a character and we fall so hopelessly in love with him or her that we want to be that character, no matter how tough they have it, no matter how they might mess things up.
Sherman Alexie
#42. Because I'm an American, I know there's all sorts of international folks who would gladly kidnap and behead me.
Sherman Alexie
#43. But how can I get enough experience if they don't give me a chance to get experience?
Sherman Alexie
#44. Walked back into the house to feed myself and my illusions.
Sherman Alexie
#47. She wanted to find a way to love them in death, because she forgot how to love them in life.
Sherman Alexie
#48. Life is a constant struggle between being an individual and being a member of the community.
Sherman Alexie
#49. I would close my eyes and dream of something strong, dream of horses exploding, rising into the air, their hearts beating survive, survive, survive.
Sherman Alexie
#50. Gay people could do anything. They were like Swiss army knives.
Sherman Alexie
#51. My father was always depressed. When he was home and sober, he was mostly in his room.
Sherman Alexie
#52. Listen you have to read a book three times before you know it.
Sherman Alexie
#53. The form I most enjoy writing is the sonnet or sonnet-like forms, where you have a - you know, three stanzas or two stanzas that lead into a concluding couplet.
Sherman Alexie
#54. I thought I'd been condescended to as an Indian - that was nothing compared to the condescension for writing young adult literature.
Sherman Alexie
#55. Do you understand how amazing it is to hear that from an adult? Do you know how amazing it is to hear that from anybody? It's one of the simplest sentences in the world, just four words, but they're the four hugest words in the world when they're put together.
You can do it.
Sherman Alexie
#56. As for romance, Frank had dated a few women over the years but found them to be too inconsistent and illogical, so he dated a few men and found them to be even more random and frightening.
Sherman Alexie
#57. I didn't know what to do or say, so I just sat as quietly as he did. The silence got so big and real that it felt like three people sat on the porch.
Sherman Alexie
#58. When you construct a mix tape, the first song you come out with has to be a barnburner.
Sherman Alexie
#59. Love and death," my father said. "It's all love and death.
Sherman Alexie
#60. If you let people into your life a little bit, they can be pretty damn amazing.
Sherman Alexie
#62. Sixty percent of all Indians live in urban areas, but nobody's writing about them. They're really an underrepresented population, and the ironic thing is very, very few of those we call Native American writers actually grew up on reservations, and yet most of their work is about reservations.
Sherman Alexie
#63. Exoticism was hard to find in Pullman, Washington.
Sherman Alexie
#64. Your past is a skeleton walking one step behind you, and your future is a a skeleton walking one step in front of you. Maybe you don't wear a watch, but your skeletons do, and they always know what time it is.
Sherman Alexie
#65. The white people always want to fight someone and they always get the dark-skinned people to do the fighting.
Sherman Alexie
#66. They put me in a holding cell with a black kid and a white kid and a Chinese kid. We're the United Nations of juvenile delinquents.
Sherman Alexie
#67. 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
#68. I had the feeling I was going to be successful, and I didn't want to be another disappointing Indian.
Sherman Alexie
#69. But he wasn't ugly, just misplaced and marked by loneliness.
Sherman Alexie
#70. When you read a piece of writing that you admire, send a note of thanks to the author.
Sherman Alexie
#71. Had she been hanging on to her dream of being a writer, but only barely hanging on, and something made her let go?
Sherman Alexie
#72. I think most Native American literature is unreadable by the vast majority of Native Americans. Generally speaking Indians don't read books. It's not a book culture. That's why I'm trying to make movies. Indians go to movies; Indians own video recorders.
Sherman Alexie
#73. The professor ignored Lynn's comments and proceeded with his lecture.
Sherman Alexie
#74. 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
#75. A lot of people have no idea that right now Y.A. (young adult). is the Garden of Eden of literature.
Sherman Alexie
#76. And if God hadn't wanted us to masturbate, then God wouldn't have given us thumbs. So I thank God for my thumbs.
Sherman Alexie
#77. I got hundreds of emails insulting me, accusing me of being some caveman. I am by no means a Luddite. I have two iPods. I have a cell phone. I have cable TV, HDTV!
Sherman Alexie
#78. She went searching for her dreams, and she didn't find them, but she made the attempt.
Sherman Alexie
#80. And then I realized that my sister was trying to LIVE a romance novel.
Man, that takes courage and imagination. Well, it also took some degree of mental illness, too, but I was suddenly happy for her.
And a little scared. Well, a lot scared.
Sherman Alexie
#81. What's real? I ain't interested in what's real. I'm interested in how things should be.
Sherman Alexie
#82. 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
#83. Sir, in your thirty-nine years as a parent, you broke your children's hearts, collectively and individually, 612 times and you did this without ever striking any human being in anger. Does this absence of physical violence make you a better man than you might otherwise have been?
Sherman Alexie
#84. You can do it."
"I can do it."
Do you understand how amazing it is to hear that from anybody? It's one of the simplest sentences in the world, just four words, but they're the four hugest words in the world when they're put together.
Sherman Alexie
#85. Good art is not universal. Bruce Willis is universal.
Sherman Alexie
#86. She'd wanted to completely shave her head: I don't want long hair, I don't want short hair, I don't want hair at all, and I don't want to be a girl or a boy, I want to be a yellow and orange leaf some little kid picks up and pastes in his scrapbook.
Sherman Alexie
#87. one ponders. And when one ponders, one creates theories - hypotheses, to explain the world.
Sherman Alexie
#88. He sang 'Stairway to Heaven' in four different languages but never knew where that staircase stood.
Sherman Alexie
#89. Maria was staring at me like I was wearing purple socks.
'Wow," she said. "That's exactly what music is.'
And then she started crying again. But this time, she wept quietly.
'You understand," she said. 'You really understand.
Sherman Alexie
#90. Because they don't want to be perfect, because only God is perfect, Indian people sew flaws into their powwow regalia. My family always sewed one yellow bead somewhere on our regalia. But we always hid it so that you had to search really hard to find it.
Sherman Alexie
#92. Here's a fact: Some people want to live more
Than others do.
Sherman Alexie
#93. 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
#94. Years ago, homosexuals were given special status within the tribe. They had powerful medicine. I think it's even more true today, even though our tribe has assimilated into homophobia. I mean, a person has to have magic to assert their identity without regard to all the bullshit, right?
Sherman Alexie
#95. So I draw because I want to talk to the world. And I want the world to pay attention to me.
Sherman Alexie
#96. Well, as a native, as a colonized people you do live in the in between. The thing is I'm native. But necessarily because I'm a member of the country, I'm also a White American.
Sherman Alexie
#97. 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
#98. (So I heard the boom of my fathr's rifle when he shot my best friend.) A bullet only costs about two cents, and anybody can afford that.(14)
Sherman Alexie
#99. He wanted the songs, the stories, to save everybody.
Sherman Alexie
#100. I wanted to run faster than the speed of sound, but nobody,no matter how much pain they're in, can run that fast.
Sherman Alexie
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