Sherman Alexie Quotes
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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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Read. Read 1000 pages for every 1 page that you write.
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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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It's not oil that runs the world, it's shame.
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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.
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We all know the Indians were colonized by the Europeans, but every colonized Indian has been colonized by the Indian reaction to colonization.
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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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I recognize now that the conditions that Indians are living in are the conditions that poor people everywhere are living in.
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It sucks to be poor, and it sucks to feel that you somehow deserve to be poor. You start believing that you're poor because you're stupid and ugly. And then you start believing that you're stupid and ugly because you're Indian. And because you're Indian you start believing you're destined to be poor. It's an ugly circle and there's nothing you can do about it.
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I'm a method writer. In order to write about the emotion, I have to experience it. I get physically tired and exhausted, devoting hours and hours and hours to it.
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Funny how a little politeness can change people's minds.
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A lot of people have no idea that right now Y.A. (young adult). is the Garden of Eden of literature.
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Nervous means you want to play. Scared means you don't want to play.
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He wanted the songs, the stories, to save everybody.
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At the halfway point of any drunken night, there is a moment when an Indian realizes he cannot turn back toward tradition and that he has no map to guide him toward the future.
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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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My father is an amazing man.
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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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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 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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The ordinary can be like medicine.
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Do you know why the Indian rain dances always worked? Because the Indians would keep dancing until it rained.
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I know a lot about being white - because I have to, I live in the white world. A white person doesn't live in the Indian world. I have to be white every day.
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Humor was an antiseptic that cleaned the deepest of personal wounds.