Sherman Alexie Quotes
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They've been screaming about the death of literacy for years, but I think TV is the Gutenberg printing press. I think TV is the only thing that keeps us vaguely in democracy even if it's in the hands of the corporate culture. If you're an artist you write in your time. Moaning about the fact that maybe people read more books a hundred years ago - that's not true. I think the same percentage has always read.
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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.
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Nervous means you want to play. Scared means you don't want to play.
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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.
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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
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We are taught to take the bread into our bodies as proof of Jesus's body.
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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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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.
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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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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.
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My name is Sherman J. Alexie Jr., and I am an insomniac.
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These are things you should learn. Your past is a skeleton walking one step behind you; your future is a skeleton walking one step in front of you. Maybe you don’t wear a watch, but your skeletons do, and they always know what time it is. Now, these skeletons are made of memories, dreams, and voices. And they can trap you in the in-between, between touching and becoming. But they’re not necessarily evil, unless you let them be.
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Pain is never added to pain. It multiplies.
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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 suddenly understood that if every moment of a book should be taken seriously, then every moment of a life should be taken seriously as well.
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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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Read. Read 1000 pages for every 1 page that you write.
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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.
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I grew up in a storytelling culture, a tribal culture, but also in an American storytelling culture.
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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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That's one more thing people don't know about Indians: We love to talk dirty.
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We only know how to lose and be lost.
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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?
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When you construct a mix tape, the first song you come out with has to be a barnburner.