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Imagination is the politics of dreams; imagination turns every word into a bottle rocket. . . . Imagine every day is Independence Day and save us from traveling the river changed; save us from hitchhiking the long road home. Imagine an escape. Imagine that your own shadow on the wall is a perfect door. Imagine a song stronger than penicillin. Imagine a spring with water that mends broken bones. Imagine a drum which wraps itself around your heart. Imagine a story that puts wood in the fireplace.
Sherman Alexie -
I drew because words were too unpredictable.
Sherman Alexie
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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.
Sherman Alexie -
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 -
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 -
A lot of people have no idea that right now Y.A. (young adult). is the Garden of Eden of literature.
Sherman Alexie -
Most of my heroes are just decent people. Decency is rare and underrated.
Sherman Alexie -
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 . . .
Sherman Alexie
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I had the feeling I was going to be successful, and I didn't want to be another disappointing Indian.
Sherman Alexie -
I refuse to censor myself and kids will find their own way to my books and to all of the books that matter to them. As I write more honestly more kids will make their way toward me. And in subverting their repressive parents kids will learn the value of subverting the repressive nature of all authority figures.
Sherman Alexie -
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 -
Because I'm an American, I know there's all sorts of international folks who would gladly kidnap and behead me.
Sherman Alexie -
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?
Sherman Alexie -
Yes, I am Irish and Indian, which would be the coolest blend in the world if my parents were around to teach me how to be Irish and Indian. But they're not here and haven't been for years, so I'm not really Irish or Indian. I am a blank sky, a human solar eclipse.
Sherman Alexie
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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 -
We can all learn from every text. Reading the work that disgusts you can only strengthen your core beliefs. I could teach a semester-long course based only on reading the local telephone book. All stories can be taught in valuable ways.
Sherman Alexie -
When you resort to violence to prove a point, you’ve just experienced a profound failure of imagination.
Sherman Alexie -
I think the world is a series of broken dams and floods, and my cartoons are tiny little lifeboats.
Sherman Alexie -
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.
Sherman Alexie -
When it comes to death, we know that laughter and tears are pretty much the same thing.
Sherman Alexie
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I wanted to do a weird book and reestablish my independent, small-press roots.
Sherman Alexie -
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.
Sherman Alexie -
Religious fundamentalists are unaware that freedom of religion necessarily brings with it the freedom to mock religion.
Sherman Alexie -
My parents banned nothing, though the Christian fundamentalists in my tribe held book-and-record burnings every now and again. So, yes, fundamentalist assholes can also be brown-skinned.
Sherman Alexie