Sherman Alexie Quotes
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My father is an amazing man.
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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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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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I don't think the revisionist historians are accurate. I think their agendas are clouded by selfishness and anger and rage.
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I drew because words were too unpredictable.
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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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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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When you read a piece of writing that you admire, send a note of thanks to the author.
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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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Funny how a little politeness can change people's minds.
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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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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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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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Do you know why the Indian rain dances always worked? Because the Indians would keep dancing until it rained.
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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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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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We are taught to take the bread into our bodies as proof of Jesus's body.
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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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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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The ordinary can be like medicine.
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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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I don't have to participate in another culture's ceremonies in order to respect that culture.
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I'll quit eating meat when you get a cow out here to beat me at a poetry slam. Only so many words rhyme with 'Mooo.' I mean, yes, we're supposed to be better stewards; yes, we're supposed to take care of the earth; yes, we're supposed to honor the sacrifices made by the animals; yes yes yes yes yes, but dammit, we're in charge, and you know why? It's because of these [holding out thumbs]...Maybe you think that carrots are less important than cows. I think they're equal, especially in a sauce.
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And believe me, a good piece of chicken can make anybody believe in the existence of God.