Sherman Alexie Quotes
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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.
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I had the feeling I was going to be successful, and I didn't want to be another disappointing Indian.
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It was so quiet, a reservation kind of quiet, where you can hear somebody drinking whiskey on the rocks three miles away.
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Let us now celebrate the literary allusion.
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I'm a poet who can whine in meter
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Summer coming like a car from down the highway.
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I write in blood because I remember what it felt like to bleed.
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What if someone picks on me?" I asked Then I'll pick on them". What if someone picks my nose?" I asked. The I'll pick your nose, too" Rowdy said.
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and then she asks me how many sexual partners I've had and I say one or two depending on your definition of what I did to Custer . . .
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If you're good at it, and you love it, and it helps you navigate the river of the world, then it can't be wrong.
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It's a weird thing. Reservations were meant to be prisons, you know? Indians were supposed to move onto reservations and die. We were supposed to disappear. But somehow or another, Indians have forgotten the reservations were meant to be death camps.
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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.
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The world, even the smallest parts of it, is filled with things you don't know.
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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.
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I was a controversial figure on my reservation when I was a kid. I was mouthy and opinionated and arrogant. Nothing has changed.
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In order to know somebody through their words, I mean, it has to be an, it has to be a letter, you know? It has to be a long e-mail. It has to be a five-page hand-written letter, you know, it has to be overwhelming and messy and sloppy as humans are.
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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.
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I think the world is a series of broken dams and floods, and my cartoons are tiny little lifeboats.
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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.
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The librarian spoke in a reverential whisper. Corliss knew she'd misjudged this passionate woman. Maybe she dressed poorly, but she was probably great in bed, certainly believed in God and goodness, and kept an illicit collection of overdue library books on her shelves.
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I think a lot of Indians want Indian artists to be cultural cheerleaders rather than cultural investigators.
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I think I was born with a suitcase.
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Gordie, the white boy genius, gave me this book by a Russian dude named Tolstoy, who wrote, 'Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.' Well, I hate to argue with a Russian genius, but Tolstoy didn't know Indians, and he didn't know that all Indian families are unhappy for the same exact reasons: the frikkin' booze.
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We Indians really should be better liars, considering how often we've been lied to.