Sherman Alexie Quotes
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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.
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I felt so conflicted about having fled the rez as a kid that I created a whole literary career that left me there.
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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.
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And believe me, a good piece of chicken can make anybody believe in the existence of God.
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The ordinary can be like medicine.
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My name is Sherman J. Alexie Jr., and I am an insomniac.
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Indians have no monopoly on environmentalism. That's one of the great myths. But we were subsistence livers. They're two different things. Environmentalism is a conscious choice and subsistence is the absence of choice. We had to use everything to survive. And now that we've been assimilated and colonized and we have luxuries and excesses, we're just as wasteful as other people.
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Pain is never added to pain. It multiplies.
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Poverty doesn’t give you strength or teach you lessons about perseverance. No, poverty only teaches you how to be poor.
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In a real-world way, my gifts are very limited in terms of what I can do.
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I guess a witness is all I am. I think as a writer, you're pretty removed. Writing is a very selfish, individualistic pursuit. So in that sense I'm a witness because I'm not participating.
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Estranged from the tribe that gives no protection, What happens to the soul that hates its reflection?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I don't have to participate in another culture's ceremonies in order to respect that culture.
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Books and beer are the best and worst defense.
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Don't live up to your stereotypes.
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What inspires a poem for me is usually a moment.
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I hear poetry whenever I turn on the radio. Eminem is a better poet than just about everybody. He's better than Billy Collins; he's better than Richard Wilbur; he's better than me.
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Nervous means you want to play. Scared means you don't want to play.
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The poetry, if you will, of life is reduced to this sort of dry, scientific, you know, it's the worst sort of précis of who we are.
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When you read a piece of writing that you admire, send a note of thanks to the author.
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A lot of native culture has been destroyed. So you already feel lost inside your culture. And then you add up feeling lost and insignificant inside the larger culture. So you end up feeling lost squared. And to never be recognized, to never have any power, you know, other minority communities actually have a lot of economic, cultural power.