Sherman Alexie Quotations

My only purpose is to teach children to rebel against authority figures.

But the real interesting stuff is in the cellar and the attic.

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.

I was a controversial figure on my reservation when I was a kid. I was mouthy and opinionated and arrogant. Nothing has changed.

You know, people speak in poetry all the time. They just don't realize it.

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.

We all know the Indians were colonized by the Europeans, but every colonized Indian has been colonized by the Indian reaction to colonization.

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.

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.

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.

I felt so conflicted about having fled the rez as a kid that I created a whole literary career that left me there.

My father was always depressed. When he was home and sober, he was mostly in his room.

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.

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.

I thought I'd been condescended to as an Indian - that was nothing compared to the condescension for writing young adult literature.

When you read a piece of writing that you admire, send a note of thanks to the author.

All I owe the world is my art.

My career means, if you're a non-Indian writing about Indians, at least there's one Indian in your rearview mirror.

In the middle of the night, when you're ambiguously ethnic, like me, when you're brown, beige, mauve, siena, one of those lighter browns in the Crayola box. You have to be careful of the cops and robbers, because nobody's quite sure what you are, but everybody has assumptions.

The dream he needed most was the dream that frightened him more.

The problem is that too many adults think their kids' lives are simple, or they try to make their lives simple, when their emotional lives are just as complicated as ours. They might have a few less tools to deal with it because they're young, but the emotions are all the same, and the subject matter is all the same.

You'd never know it from reading the rest of the Native writers, but Indians actually grew up with American pop culture.

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.

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.'

When I first read his work, I almost thought it was some kind of parody by a famous white writer, because he takes so many things from me and other writers.

Ann Beattie is a writer for and of her time. Her prose has become known for its vivid particularity, the details of the way we live.

A lot of people have no idea that right now Y.A. (young adult). is the Garden of Eden of literature.

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.

White Americans have a short memory.

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.

I look more Indian when I'm serious.

That's one more thing people don't know about Indians: We love to talk dirty.

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.

Reardan is the rich white farm town that sits in the wheat fields exactly 22 miles away from the Rez. And it's a hick town I suppose filled with farmers and rednecks and racists cops who stop every Indian that drives through. During one week when I was little dad got stopped three times for DWI- Driving While Indian.

Everyone I have lost in the closing of a door the click of the lock is not forgotten, they do not die but remain within the soft edges of the earth, the ash of house fires and cancer in sin and forgiveness huddled under old blankets dreaming their way into my hands, my heart closing tight like fists. - "Indian Boy Love Song #1

All I try to do is portray Indians as we are, in creative ways. With imagination and poetry. I think a lot of Native American literature is stuck in one idea: sort of spiritual, environmentalist Indians. And I want to portray everyday lives. I think by doing that, by portraying the ordinary lives of Indians, perhaps people learn something new.

Corliss had never once considered the fate of library books. She'd never wondered how many books go unread. She loved books. How could she not worry about the unread? She felt like a disorganized scholar, an inconsiderate lover, an abusive mother, and a cowardly soldier.

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

My father was a basketball player, so I loved basketball because he did. It was a direct transference. But, more than that, basketball, in the United States at least, plays the same function that soccer does everyone else in the world. It's the sport of poverty. It's the sport born of poverty. It's the cheapest sport.

Drinking would shut down my seeing and my hearing and my feeling," she used to say. "Why would I want to be in the world if I couldn't touch the world with all of my senses intact?

Okay, so maybe I'm romantic... but somebody is supposed to be romantic. Some warrior is supposed to go to war against the imperial forces of cynicism and irony. I am a sentimental soldier.

And none of these people, not one of them, had loved any of the others well enough. Failures, he thought, we're all failures... He wanted his love to be the wine and bread, and the blood and flesh. He reached for her, a dangerous stranger in a city of dangerous strangers, but she turned away from him and walked unsteadily through the crowd. How many loveless people walk among the barely loved?

Bush has not read enough books to have a developed moral sense. The fewer books you read, the easier it is to become fundamental. In some ways my antiwar stand here is also a stand on anti-literacy. Someone should get G.W. into a reading program, get him to join a book club. Have him read Hamlet, King Lear.

My school and my tribe are so poor and sad that we have to study from the same dang books our parents studied from. That is absolutely the saddest thing in the world.

We're all travelling heavy with illusions.

If one reads enough books, one has a fighting chance.

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.

Corliss wondered what happens to a book that sits unread on a library shelf for thirty years. Can a book rightfully be called a book if it never gets read? If a tree falls in a forest and gets pulped to make paper for a book that never gets read, but there's nobody there to read it, does it make a sound?

Humor was an antiseptic that cleaned the deepest of personal wounds.

She wanted to be buried in a coffin filled with used paperbacks.

When I had no money, and a great book came out, I couldn't get it. I had to wait. I love the idea that I have hardcover books here and at home that I haven't read yet. That's how I view that I'm rich. I have hardcover books I may never read.

My name is Sherman J. Alexie Jr., and I am an insomniac.

I feel like a carton of eggs holding up an elephant.

Funny how a little politeness can change people's minds.

Let us now celebrate the literary allusion.

We are taught to take the bread into our bodies as proof of Jesus's body.

How self-centered, how arrogant... Imagine the awesome privilege of living in a society where you get to choose what you eat at each and every meal. When I was a kid, I was a vegetarian and a vegan for long stretches... I was a commodity cheese-atarian.

Every movie is a road movie. Every novel is a mystery. Every tortilla chip is sacred.

You can't sustain [anger]. You become bitter. Nothing's going to change. Anger leads to resentment, then to spiking your orange juice, then to martyrdom.

Most of my heroes are just decent people. Decency is rare and underrated.

If I wasn't writing poems I'd be washing my hands all the time.

I'm quite aware of my differences. I wouldn't classify them as weird

Is revenge a circle inside of a circle inside of a circle?

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.

What inspires a poem for me is usually a moment.

In a real-world way, my gifts are very limited in terms of what I can do.

My father is an amazing man.

Nostalgia is always doomed and dooming.

Spiritual matters should be private.

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.

Well, I think the worst part about tribalism is its tendency to fundamentalize, and if I can fight fundamentalism in any of its forms I'm happy.

When you construct a mix tape, the first song you come out with has to be a barnburner.

Writing is a lonely business.

We all have to find our own ways to say good-bye.

I realized that I might be a lonely Indian boy, but I was not alone in the loneliness. There were millions of other Americans who had left their birthplaces in search of a dream. (217)

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.

I remember when people used to think I was smart. I remember when people used to think my brain was useful. Damaged by water, sure. And ready to seizure at any moment. But still useful, and maybe even a little bit beautiful and sacred and magical.

The world is divided by two different tribes. The people who are assholes and the people who are not.

That's the whole point of life, you know? To meet new people.

Is God a man or a woman? God could be an armadillo. I have no idea.

Like officer Dave.He's never said much about his life, but I can tell he's scarred. And he knows I'm scarred too. The wounded always recognize the wounded. We can smell each other.

Sometimes it's called passing out and sometimes it's just pretending to be asleep

When a glass sits on a table here, people don't wonder if it's half filled or half empty. They just hope it's good beer.

That's right, I am a book kisser.

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.

We Indians really should be better liars, considering how often we've been lied to.

You have to love somebody that much to also hate them that much, too. (191)

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)

The streetlight outside my house shines on tonight and I'm watching it like it could give me a vision. James ain't talked ever and he looks at that streetlight like it was a word and maybe like it was a verb. James wanted to streetlight me and make me bright and beautiful so all the moths and bats would circle me like I was the center of the world an held secrets.

Somebody dies and people eat your food. Funny how that works.

I've learned that the worst thing a parent can do is ignore their children

But something magical happened to me when I went to Reardan. Overnight I became a good player. I suppose it had something to do with confidence. I mean, I'd always been the lowest Indian on the reservation totem pole - I wasn't expected to be good so I wasn't. But in Reardan, my coach and the other players wanted me to be good. They needed me to be good. They expected me to be good. And so I became good. I wanted to live up to the expectations. I guess that's what it comes down to. The power of expectations. And as they expected more of me, I expected more of myself, and it just grew and grew.

Seems like the cold would never go away and winter would be like the bottom of my feet but then it is gone in one night and in its place comes the sun so large and laughable.

...it's like this white-Indian thing has gotten out of control. And the thing with the blacks and the Mexicans. Everybody blaming everybody...I don't know what happened. I can't explain it all. Just look around at the world. Look at this country. Things just aren't like they used to be.' 'Son, things have never been like what you think they used to be.

Everybody likes to have a place to think, to meditate, to eat a burrito...

Ialways think it's funny when Indians celebrate Thanksgiving. I mean, sure, the Indians and Pilgrims were best friends during the first Thanksgiving, but a few years later, the Pilgrims were shooting Indians. So I'm never quite sure why we eat Turkey like everybody else. (101)

There are all kinds of addicts, I guess. We all have pain. And we all look for ways to make the pain go away. (107)

I think I was born with a suitcase.

I learned how to stop crying. I learned how to hide inside of myself. I learned how to be somebody else. I learned how to be cold and numb.

It sucks to be poor, and it sucks to feel that you somehow deserve to be poor. You start believing that you're poor because you're stupid and ugly. And then you start believing that you're stupid and ugly because you're Indian. And because you're Indian you start believing you're destined to be poor. It's an ugly circle and there's nothing you can do about it.