Top 400 Sherman Alexie Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “If it’s fiction, then it better be true.”

— Sherman Alexie

152. “We only know how to lose and be lost.”

— Sherman Alexie

153. “Had she been hanging on to her dream of being a writer, but only barely hanging on, and something made her let go?”

— Sherman Alexie

154. “This is who I am. This is who I have always been. I am in pain. I am always in pain. But I always find my way to the story. And I always find my way home.”

— Sherman Alexie

155. “Every time they ban the book, it becomes national headlines. I sell more books, so it’s actually lucrative for me. We call Banned Books Week in my house “Big-Assed Royalties Week.”

— Sherman Alexie

156. “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.”

— Sherman Alexie

157. “If you kill a black man, the world is silent. You can hear a garage door opening from twenty blocks away. You can pick up a pay phone and only hear the dial tone. Shooting stars sound exactly like the soft laughter of a little girl in Gasworks Park. If you kill a white man, the world erupts with noise: fireworks, sirens, a gavel pounding a desk, the slamming of doors.”

— Sherman Alexie

158. “Traveling between Reardan and Wellpinit, between the little white town and the reservation, I always felt like a stranger. I was half Indian in one place and half white in the other. It was like being Indian was my job, but it was only a part-time job. And it didn’t pay well at all.”

— Sherman Alexie

159. “Oh, no, no, you’ve got that all wrong. You’re not required to respect elders. After all, most people are idiots, regardless of age. In tribal cultures, we just make sure that elders remain an active part of the culture, even if they’re idiots. Especially if they’re idiots. You can’t just abandon your old people, even if they have nothing intelligent to say. Even if they’re crazy.”

— Sherman Alexie

160. “I draw because words are too unpredictable. I draw because words are too limited. 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. If I draw a cartoon of a flower, then every man, woman, and child in the world can look at it and say “that’s a flower.” So I draw because I want to talk to the world and I want the world to pay attention to me.”

— Sherman Alexie

161. “He was going to punish me now. He couldn’t beat me up with his old man fists, but he could hurt me with his old man words.”

— Sherman Alexie

162. “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

163. “If you don’t like the things you remember, then all you have to do is change the memories. Instead of remembering the bad things, remember what happened immediately before.”

— Sherman Alexie

164. “Thing is, I don’t believe in ghosts. But I see them all the time.”

— Sherman Alexie

165. “My grandmother’s last act on earth was a call for forgiveness, love, and tolerance.”

— Sherman Alexie

166. “All of these white kids and teachers, who were so suspicious of me when I first arrived, had learned to care about me. Maybe some of them even loved me. And I’d been so suspicious of them. And now I care about a lot of them. And loved a few of them.”

— Sherman Alexie

167. “She went searching for her dreams, and she didn’t find them, but she made the attempt.”

— Sherman Alexie

168. “Jesus, I don’t want to die today or tomorrow, but I don’t want to live forever.”

— Sherman Alexie

169. “I always think it’s funny when Indians celebrate Thanksgiving. I mean, sure, the Indians and Pilgrims were best friends during that first Thanksgiving, but a few years later, the Pilgrims were shooting Indians. So I’m never quite sure why we eat turkey like everybody else. “Hey, Dad,” I said. “What do Indians have to be so thankful for?” “We should give thanks that they didn’t kill all of us.”

— Sherman Alexie

170. “You should approach each book – you should approach life – with the real possibility that you might get a metaphorical boner at any point.”

— Sherman Alexie

171. “If Heaven ain’t filled with gender-swapping Indians,” I said, “then I don’t want to go there.”

— Sherman Alexie

172. “How can we imagine a new language when the language of the enemy keeps our dismembered tongues tied to his belt?”

— Sherman Alexie

173. “But now I want it to pour. I want it to storm. I want to be clean.”

— Sherman Alexie

174. “Sometimes it’s called passing out and sometimes it’s just pretending to be asleep.”

— Sherman Alexie

175. “Reservations were meant to be prisons, you know? Indians were supposed to move onto reservations and die. We were supposed to disappear.”

— Sherman Alexie

176. “I’m quite aware of my differences. I wouldn’t classify them as weird.”

— Sherman Alexie

177. “How much do we remember of what hurts us most? I’ve been thinking about pain, how each of us constructs our past to justify what we feel now.”

— Sherman Alexie

178. “My father was sleepless most of his life. So by the age of five, I was awake with him all night long, watching bad television or we’d lie in the same bed, and I’d read my comic books while he read his latest spy or mystery novel.”

— Sherman Alexie

179. “If I were a doctor nobody would be inviting me to talk to reservations. I’d be a different person. Writers can influence more people.”

— Sherman Alexie

180. “I’m dying from about ninety-nine kinds of shame.”

— Sherman Alexie

181. “Well of course man. We Indians have lost everything. We lost our native land, we lost our languages, we lost our songs and dances. We lost each other. We only know how to lose and be lost.”

— Sherman Alexie

182. “She’d been a resourceful thief, a narcissistic Robin Hood who stole a rich education from white people and kept it.”

— Sherman Alexie

183. “Because the thing you learn as a hugely ambitious Indian is that you’re often going to be the only Indian in the room, so you’d better get used to it.”

— Sherman Alexie

184. “If God were good, why would he create Rush Limbaugh?”

— Sherman Alexie

185. “I feel like a carton of eggs holding up an elephant.”

— Sherman Alexie

186. “The United States wants all of us to forget the crimes it committed against the indigenous. The United States wants us to forget. The United States wants us to forget. The United States wants us to forget.”

— Sherman Alexie

187. “Overnight, I became a good player. I suppose it had something to do with confidence. I mean, I’d always been the lowest Indian on the reservation totem pole – I wasn’t expected to be good so I wasn’t. But in Reardan, my coach and the other players wanted me to be good. They needed me to be good. They expected me to be good. And so I became good. I wanted to live up to expectations. I guess that’s what it comes down to. The power of expectations. pg 181.”

— Sherman Alexie

188. “One play can determine the course of a game. One play can change your momentum forever.”

— Sherman Alexie

189. “He sang ‘Stairway to Heaven’ in four different languages but never knew where that staircase stood.”

— Sherman Alexie

190. “And no matter how much you learn, you just keep on learning there is so much more you need to learn.”

— Sherman Alexie

191. “Okay, now you’re officially a freak,” I said. “Yes, it’s a small library. It’s a tiny one. But if you read one of these books a day, it would still take you almost ten years to finish.” “What’s your point?” “The world, even the smallest parts of it, is filled with things you don’t know.” Wow.”

— Sherman Alexie

192. “She endured a contentious and passionate relationship with this library. The huge number of books confirmed how much magic she’d been denied for most of her life, and now she hungrily wanted to read every book on every shelf. An impossible task, to be sure, Herculean in its exaggeration, but Corliss wanted to read herself to death. She wanted to be buried in a coffin filled with used paperbacks. She.”

— Sherman Alexie

193. “Like any good shaman, professional baseball player, or politician, my mother always answered questions with questions.”

— Sherman Alexie

194. “My father was always depressed. When he was home and sober, he was mostly in his room.”

— Sherman Alexie

195. “Everyone wanted to call her sweetheart. But she only danced for me. That’s how it was. She told me that every other step was just for me.” “But that’s only half of the dance,” I said. “Yeah,” my father said. “She was keeping the rest for herself. Nobody can give everything away. It ain’t healthy.”

— Sherman Alexie

196. “Facebook and Twitter and these other social sites bring every, I mean, 140 characters. I mean, I’m on Twitter and I have fun. But I don’t think anybody learns anything about me as a person.”

— Sherman Alexie

197. “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.”

— Sherman Alexie

198. “Spiritual matters should be private.”

— Sherman Alexie

199. “It’s one of the simplest sentences in the world, just four words, but they’re the hugest words in the world when they’re put together. You can do it.”

— Sherman Alexie

200. “I don’t recall the moment when I officially became a storyteller – a talented liar – but here I must quote Simon Ortiz, the Acoma Pueblo writer, who said, “Listen. If it’s fiction, then it better be true.”

— Sherman Alexie