List of top 100 famous quotes and sayings about alexie sherman to read and share with friends on your Facebook, Twitter, blogs.
Top 100 Alexie Sherman Quotes
#1. How can we imagine a new language when the language of the enemy keeps our dismembered tongues tied to his belt?
#2. 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.
#3. You have to love somebody that much to also hate them that much, too. (191)
#4. But now I want it to pour. I want it to storm. I want to be clean.
#5. If God were good, why would he create Rush Limbaugh?
#6. If human beings possessed endless possibilities, then cities contained exponential hopes.
#7. I was young and frightened and craved respect and its ugly cousin, approval, so I did as I was told.
#8. He was the loser Indian father of a loser Indian son living in a world built for winners.
#9. Like the coffin was settling down for a long, long nap, for a forever nap.
#10. The problem for me with liberals is that we've abdicated our moral responsibility to the universe.
#11. 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?
#12. I feel like a carton of eggs holding up an elephant.
#13. magical realism? Aren't we all making shit up,
#14. 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.
#15. She was so white his reservation eyes suffered.
#16. World. Put down your fucking guns and pick up your kids.
#17. 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.
#18. 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".
#19. I wasn't just defending myself. I was defending Indians, black people, and buffalo.
#20. 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.
#21. More and more, he heard his spine playing stick games through his skin, singing old dusty words, the words of all his years.
#22. 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
#23. Somebody dies and people eat your food. Funny how that works.
#24. 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.
#25. In the middle of a crazy and drunk life, you have to hang onto the good and sober moments tightly.
#26. 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.
#27. Like any good shaman, professional baseball player, or politician, my mother always answered questions with questions.
#28. The ordinary can be like medicine.
#29. We're all travelling heavy with illusions.
#30. And anger is never added to anger. It multiplies.
#31. 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.
#32. 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.
#33. 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.
#34. What do you say to people when they ask you how it feels to lose everything?
#35. 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.
#36. He didn't do much of anything except ride that bike and listen to music.
#37. 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.
#38. Because I'm an American, I know there's all sorts of international folks who would gladly kidnap and behead me.
#39. But how can I get enough experience if they don't give me a chance to get experience?
#40. Walked back into the house to feed myself and my illusions.
#41. He was my best friend and I needed him.
#42. We only know how to lose and be lost.
#43. She wanted to find a way to love them in death, because she forgot how to love them in life.
#44. Life is a constant struggle between being an individual and being a member of the community.
#45. I would close my eyes and dream of something strong, dream of horses exploding, rising into the air, their hearts beating survive, survive, survive.
#46. Gay people could do anything. They were like Swiss army knives.
#47. My father was always depressed. When he was home and sober, he was mostly in his room.
#48. Listen you have to read a book three times before you know it.
#49. 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.
#50. I thought I'd been condescended to as an Indian - that was nothing compared to the condescension for writing young adult literature.
#51. 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.
#52. 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.
#53. 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.
#54. When you construct a mix tape, the first song you come out with has to be a barnburner.
#55. Love and death," my father said. "It's all love and death.
#56. If you let people into your life a little bit, they can be pretty damn amazing.
#57. I think I was born with a suitcase.
#58. 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.
#59. Exoticism was hard to find in Pullman, Washington.
#60. 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.
#61. The white people always want to fight someone and they always get the dark-skinned people to do the fighting.
#62. 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.
#63. 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.
#64. I had the feeling I was going to be successful, and I didn't want to be another disappointing Indian.
#65. But he wasn't ugly, just misplaced and marked by loneliness.
#66. When you read a piece of writing that you admire, send a note of thanks to the author.
#67. Had she been hanging on to her dream of being a writer, but only barely hanging on, and something made her let go?
#68. 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.
#69. The professor ignored Lynn's comments and proceeded with his lecture.
#70. 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.
#71. A lot of people have no idea that right now Y.A. (young adult). is the Garden of Eden of literature.
#72. And if God hadn't wanted us to masturbate, then God wouldn't have given us thumbs. So I thank God for my thumbs.
#73. 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!
#74. She went searching for her dreams, and she didn't find them, but she made the attempt.
#75. It made me cry for myself.
#76. 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.
#77. What's real? I ain't interested in what's real. I'm interested in how things should be.
#78. 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.
#79. 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?
#80. 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.
#81. Good art is not universal. Bruce Willis is universal.
#82. 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.
#83. one ponders. And when one ponders, one creates theories - hypotheses, to explain the world.
#84. He sang 'Stairway to Heaven' in four different languages but never knew where that staircase stood.
#85. 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.
#86. 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.
#87. But people forget.
#88. Here's a fact: Some people want to live more
Than others do.
#89. 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.
#90. 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?
#91. So I draw because I want to talk to the world. And I want the world to pay attention to me.
#92. 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.
#93. 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.
#94. (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)
#95. He wanted the songs, the stories, to save everybody.
#96. I wanted to run faster than the speed of sound, but nobody,no matter how much pain they're in, can run that fast.
#97. Listen. I don't know how or when
My grieving will end, but I'm always
Relearning how to be human again.
#98. There are family mysteries I cannot solve. There are family mysteries I am unwilling to solve.
#99. my nose bled like a firework
#100. She knew Indians were obsessed with authenticity. Colonized, genocided, exiled, Indians formed their identities by questioning the identities of other Indians. Self-hating,
