Sherman Alexie Quotes
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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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When you resort to violence to prove a point, you’ve just experienced a profound failure of imagination.
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Environmentalism is a luxury. Just like being a vegetarian is a luxury. When you have to worry about eating - you're not going to be worried about where the food's coming from, or who made your shoes. Poverty, whether planned or not planned, is a way of making environmentalism moot.
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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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Only in rock music and the literary world you see so many ugly white guys with beautiful women. That says a lot about the women, their character. They're attracted to more than surface.
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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?
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Can you hear the dreams crackling like a campfire? Can you hear the dreams sweeping through the pine trees and tipis? Can you hear the dreams laughing in the sawdust? Can you hear the dreams shaking just a little bit as the day grows long? Can you hear the dreams putting on a good jacket that smells of fry bread and sweet smoke? Can you hear the dreams stay up late and talk so many stories?
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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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The world, even the smallest parts of it, is filled with things you don't know.
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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.
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Facebook and Twitter and these other social sites bring every, I mean, 140 characters. I mean, I'm on Twitter and I have fun. But I don't think anybody learns anything about me as a person.
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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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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.
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I look more Indian when I'm serious.
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He loved her, of course, but better than that, he chose her, day after day. Choice: that was the thing.
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Spiritual matters should be private.
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That's the whole point of life, you know? To meet new people.
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The problem for me with liberals is that we've abdicated our moral responsibility to the universe.
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Poetry = Anger x Imagination
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There's this whole notion of being an Indian - the idea that "warrior" is a positive description of us Indians as native Americans. When an Indian guy does well, he's a warrior, even now. He could be a computer salesman, but if he does well, he's a warrior. I'm not a pacifist by any measure, but I'm also fully aware that the reasons I might go to war could be very dubious.
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My father was always depressed. When he was home and sober, he was mostly in his room.
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In a sense, you're always mythologizing your life; it's always an effort to make yourself epic. At least in fiction you can lie and sort of justify your delusion about your "epicness." But when you're writing a memoir, you're trying to make your life epic and it's not - nobody's life is.
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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.
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It's not oil that runs the world, it's shame.