Top 400 Sherman Alexie Quotes (2025 Update)
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201. “Spiritual matters should be private.”

— Sherman Alexie

202. “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

203. “Dear wife, I’m sorry that I am mysteriously incapable of folding clean laundry, but I iron, oh, I iron. Sweetheart, I’ll make your white shirt so crisp and sharp that it will split atoms as you walk.”

— Sherman Alexie

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

— Sherman Alexie

205. “Everything, everything, everything can be installation art.”

— Sherman Alexie

206. “Here’s the score. Once a thing tastes blood, it will come for more.”

— Sherman Alexie

207. “Well, in the early days of humans, the community was our only protection against predators, and against the starvation. We survived because we trusted one another.”

— Sherman Alexie

208. “That word means ‘earth-dream’. And, depending on how you use it, it means we, the people, are dreaming the earth into being. And it also means the earth is dreaming us, the people, into being. We are dreaming each other. And making each other real. And it means other things, too, that I don’t understand. That I might never understand. But I am going to keep learning.”

— Sherman Alexie

209. “He smiled mysteriously. Adults are so good at smiling mysteriously. Do they go to college for that?”

— Sherman Alexie

210. “I thought I’d been condescended to as an Indian – that was nothing compared to the condescension for writing young adult literature.”

— Sherman Alexie

211. “Branch by branch, Rowdy and I climbed toward the top of the tree, to the bottom of the sky.”

— Sherman Alexie

212. “Junior based all of his decisions on his dreams and visions, which created a lot of problems.”

— Sherman Alexie

213. “And, sometimes, when I’m being the best version of myself, I will remember that bullies are created – that bullies seek to torture because they’ve been tortured.”

— Sherman Alexie

214. “But a person can be genocided-can have every connection to his past severed- and live to be an old man whose rib cage is a haunted house built around his heart.”

— Sherman Alexie

215. “And the tombstone will never answer. Because the dead have only the voices we give to them.”

— Sherman Alexie

216. “If you can catch crazy, I’m a walking epidemic.”

— Sherman Alexie

217. “I wanted to do a weird book and reestablish my independent, small-press roots.”

— Sherman Alexie

218. “I think a lot of Indians want Indian artists to be cultural cheerleaders rather than cultural investigators.”

— Sherman Alexie

219. “Words can be like that, you know? Whenever I get into arguments now, I remember her and I also remember Muhammad Ali. He knew the power of his fists but, more importantly, he knew the power of his words, too.”

— Sherman Alexie

220. “You know, people speak in poetry all the time. They just don’t realize it.”

— Sherman Alexie

221. “What about me?” I asked. “Am I mean?” “You aren’t mean to me with words,” she said. “You’re mean to me with your silences.”

— Sherman Alexie

222. “I was emotionally erect.”

— Sherman Alexie

223. “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.”

— Sherman Alexie

224. “Unlike landed white men, she didn’t need to climb mountains to experience mystic panic. All she needed was to set her alarm dock for the next morning, wake when it rang, and go to class.”

— Sherman Alexie

225. “I was crying because I had broken my best friend’s heart.”

— Sherman Alexie

226. “My heart is beating a punk rock song against my chest.”

— Sherman Alexie

227. “You have to treat your car with love. And I don’t mean love of an object. You see, that’s just wrong. That’s materialism. You have to love your car like it’s sentient being, like it can love you back. Now, that’s some deep-down agape love.”

— Sherman Alexie

228. “I was dancing for my soul and for the soul of my tribe. I was dancing for what we Indians used to be and who we might become again.”

— Sherman Alexie

229. “I don’t have to participate in another culture’s ceremonies in order to respect that culture.”

— Sherman Alexie

230. “How does one survive these revelations? One just lives.”

— Sherman Alexie

231. “Hell, sometimes it feels like the whole country is on fire. Like a constant conflagration is burning too close to all poor people. Shouldn’t rich-ass America be taking care of everybody?”

— Sherman Alexie

232. “Dozens of species of insects give virgin birth. Crayfish give virgin birth. Some honeybees give virgin birth. And Komodo dragons – yeah, those big lizards give virgin birth, too. Jeez, one human gives virgin birth and that jump-starts one of the world’s greatest religions. But when a Komodo dragon gives virgin birth, do you know what it’s thinking? It’s thinking, ‘This is Tuesday, right? I think this is Tuesday. What am I going to do on Wednesday?”

— Sherman Alexie

233. “My mother once made a quilt from dozens of pairs of second- and third- and fourth- hand blue jeans that she bought us at Goodwill, the Salvation Army, Value Village, and garage sales. My late sister studied my mother’s denim quilt and said, ‘That’s a lot of pants. There’s been a lot of ass in those pants. This is a blanket of asses.”

— Sherman Alexie

234. “My name is Sherman J. Alexie Jr., and I am an insomniac.”

— Sherman Alexie

235. “He may not have loved me perfectly, but he loved me as well as he could.”

— Sherman Alexie

236. “Imagine Columbus landed in 1492 and some tribe or another drowned him in the ocean. Would Lester FallsApart still be shoplifting in the 7-11?”

— Sherman Alexie

237. “Sometimes I caught my mother digging through old photo albums or staring at the wall or out the window. She’d get that look on her face that I knew meant she missed my father. Not enough to want him back. She missed him just enough for it to hurt. On.”

— Sherman Alexie

238. “I had the feeling I was going to be successful, and I didn’t want to be another disappointing Indian.”

— Sherman Alexie

239. “The fear of poetry was multicultural and timeless.”

— Sherman Alexie

240. “After neurosurgery, I have learned that my brain is a boardinghouse where my waking consciousness rents one room with a hot plate and a black-and-white TV while the rest of the rooms are occupied by a random assortment of banshees, ghosts, mimes wearing eagle feathers, and approximately twelve thousand strangers who look exactly like me.”

— Sherman Alexie

241. “I can’t remember how to cry.”

— Sherman Alexie

242. “They’re not starving to death, but they look hollow-eyed and barren, like they’ve been fed just enough food but never enough happiness.”

— Sherman Alexie

243. “I’m a poet who can whine in meter.”

— Sherman Alexie

244. “If a poet falls in a forest, and there’s nobody there to hear him, does he make a metaphor or simile?”

— Sherman Alexie

245. “They put me in a holding cell with a black kid and a white kid and a Chinese kid. We’re the United Nations of juvenile delinquents.”

— Sherman Alexie

246. “I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. I could write “I don’t know” one million times and publish that as my memoir. And, yes, it would be repetitive, experimental, and more metaphor than history, but it would also be emotionally accurate.”

— Sherman Alexie

247. “Only in rock music and the literary world you see so many ugly white guys with beautiful women. That says a lot about the women, their character. They’re attracted to more than surface.”

— Sherman Alexie

248. “I didn’t yet know that romantic heroes – famous and not – are usually aimless nomads in disguise.”

— Sherman Alexie

249. “I was a controversial figure on my reservation when I was a kid. I was mouthy and opinionated and arrogant. Nothing has changed.”

— Sherman Alexie

250. “Hunger is my crime.”

— Sherman Alexie