Top 400 Sherman Alexie Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “He loved her, of course, but better than that, he chose her, day after day. Choice: that was the thing.”

— Sherman Alexie

2. “If you care about something enough, it’s going to make you cry. But you have to use it. Use your tears. Use your pain. Use your fear. Get mad. Arnold, get mad.”

— Sherman Alexie

3. “Poverty doesn’t give you strength or teach you lessons about perseverance. No, poverty only teaches you how to be poor.”

— Sherman Alexie

4. “Life is a constant struggle between being an individual and being a member of the community.”

— Sherman Alexie

5. “Do you know why the Indian rain dances always worked? Because the Indians would keep dancing until it rained.”

— Sherman Alexie

6. “Books and beer are the best and worst defense.”

— Sherman Alexie

7. “Listen you have to read a book three times before you know it.”

— Sherman Alexie

8. “Don’t live up to your stereotypes.”

— Sherman Alexie

9. “I’ve learned that the worst thing a parent can do is ignore their children.”

— Sherman Alexie

10. “You have to dream big to get big.”

— Sherman Alexie

11. “Read. Read 1000 pages for every 1 page that you write.”

— Sherman Alexie

12. “Everybody likes to have a place to think, to meditate, to eat a burrito...”

— Sherman Alexie

13. “The ordinary can be like medicine.”

— Sherman Alexie

14. “I learned how to stop crying. I learned how to hide inside of myself. I learned how to be somebody else. I learned how to be cold and numb.”

— Sherman Alexie

15. “There’s always time to change your life.”

— Sherman Alexie

16. “Nervous means you want to play. Scared means you don’t want to play.”

— Sherman Alexie

17. “The dream he needed most was the dream that frightened him more.”

— Sherman Alexie

18. “When you resort to violence to prove a point, you’ve just experienced a profound failure of imagination.”

— Sherman Alexie

19. “When it comes to death, we know that laughter and tears are pretty much the same thing.”

— Sherman Alexie

20. “That’s the whole point of life, you know? To meet new people.”

— Sherman Alexie

21. “Is revenge a circle inside of a circle inside of a circle?”

— Sherman Alexie

22. “If one reads enough books one has a fighting chance. Or better, one’s chances of survival increase with each book one reads.”

— Sherman Alexie

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23. “Nostalgia is always doomed and dooming.”

— Sherman Alexie

24. “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.”

— Sherman Alexie

25. “I grabbed my book and opened it up. I wanted to smell it. Heck, I wanted to kiss it. Yes, kiss it. That’s right, I am a book kisser. Maybe that’s kind of perverted or maybe it’s just romantic and highly intelligent.”

— Sherman Alexie

26. “The abused can become abusers. It’s a tragic progression.”

— Sherman Alexie

27. “I don’t want long hair, I don’t want short hair, I don’t want hair at all, and I don’t want to be a girl or a boy. I want to be a yellow and orange leaf some little kid picks up and pastes in his scrapbook.”

— Sherman Alexie

28. “If you let people into your life a little bit, they can be pretty damn amazing.”

— Sherman Alexie

29. “He made me realize that hard work – that the act of finishing, of completing, of accomplishing a task – is joyous.”

— Sherman Alexie

30. “If you’re good at it, and you love it, and it helps you navigate the river of the world, then it can’t be wrong.”

— Sherman Alexie

31. “We all know the Indians were colonized by the Europeans, but every colonized Indian has been colonized by the Indian reaction to colonization.”

— Sherman Alexie

32. “I loved the smell of ocean water. Salt always smells like memory.”

— Sherman Alexie

33. “I don’t know what any individual should do about crossing her own borders. I only know that I live a happier, more adventurous life, by crossing borders.”

— Sherman Alexie

34. “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.”

— Sherman Alexie

35. “Pain is never added to pain. It multiplies.”

— Sherman Alexie

36. “Most of my heroes are just decent people. Decency is rare and underrated.”

— Sherman Alexie

37. “If one reads enough books, one has a fighting chance.”

— Sherman Alexie

38. “All I owe the world is my art.”

— Sherman Alexie

39. “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.”

— Sherman Alexie

40. “The world, even the smallest parts of it, is filled with things you don’t know.”

— Sherman Alexie

41. “We Indians really should be better liars, considering how often we’ve been lied to.”

— Sherman Alexie

42. “I think the world is a series of broken dams and floods, and my cartoons are tiny little lifeboats.”

— Sherman Alexie

43. “We all have to find our own ways to say good-bye.”

— Sherman Alexie

44. “Do you understand how amazing it is to hear that from an adult? Do you know how amazing it is to hear that from anybody? It’s one of the simplest sentences in the world, just four words, but they’re the four hugest words in the world when they’re put together. You can do it.”

— Sherman Alexie

45. “We’re all travelling heavy with illusions.”

— Sherman Alexie

46. “When anybody, no matter how old they are, loses a parent, I think it hurts the same as if you were only five years old, you know? I think all of us are always five years old in the presence and absence of our parents.”

— Sherman Alexie

47. “Funny how a little politeness can change people’s minds.”

— Sherman Alexie

48. “Humor was an antiseptic that cleaned the deepest of personal wounds.”

— Sherman Alexie

49. “If you speak and write in English, or Spanish, or Chinese, or any other language, then only a certain percentage of human beings will get your meaning. But when you draw a picture everybody can understand it.”

— Sherman Alexie

50. “I write in blood because I remember what it felt like to bleed.”

— Sherman Alexie