Top 400 Sherman Alexie Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “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

252. “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

253. “And that’s when I knew that I was going to be okay.”

— Sherman Alexie

254. “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.”

— Sherman Alexie

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

— Sherman Alexie

256. “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

257. “My career means, if you’re a non-Indian writing about Indians, at least there’s one Indian in your rearview mirror.”

— Sherman Alexie

258. “Hunger is my crime.”

— Sherman Alexie

259. “Like a good Indian, he knew when to talk and when to remain silent. Like a good Indian, he knew there was never a good time to talk.”

— Sherman Alexie

260. “That’s one more thing people don’t know about Indians: We love to talk dirty.”

— Sherman Alexie

261. “I would guess, perhaps too optimistically, that nearly ever racist believes it is morally wrong to be racist. And since nearly every person thinks of themselves as being moral, then a racist must consciously and subconsciously employ tortured logic in order to explain away their racism – in order to believe themselves to be nonracist.”

— Sherman Alexie

262. “He doesn’t hurt you because you’re the only good thing in his life. He doesn’t want to give that up. It’s the only thing he hasn’t given up.”

— Sherman Alexie

263. “Man, I’ve always cried too easily. I cry when I’m happy or sad. I cry when I’m angry. I cry because I’m crying. It’s weak. It’s the opposite of warrior.”

— Sherman Alexie

264. “Your mother is a better man than me. Mothers are almost always better men than men are.”

— Sherman Alexie

265. “That’s just a fancy way of calling me a liar,” I said. “If the moccasin fits, then wear it,” she said.”

— Sherman Alexie

266. “Each of us – rich and poor, gay and straight, black and white – we are fragile and finite. We all go through this glorious life without guarantees, without promises of rescue or redemption. We have freedom of speech and religion, and the absolute freedom to leave behind our loved ones, or to force them to unhappily pursue us.”

— Sherman Alexie

267. “Who cares if a man wants to marry another man? All i want to know is who’s going to ick up all the dirty socks?”

— Sherman Alexie

268. “But I stopped crying when I noticed that very few people were being openly emotional. I’d never seen that many stoic people at a funeral. I’d never experienced a silent and polite funeral. My tribe doesn’t bury our dead that way. We wail, weep, and tell dirty jokes at graveside.”

— Sherman Alexie

269. “If human beings possessed endless possibilities, then cities contained exponential hopes.”

— Sherman Alexie

270. “Even Crazy Horse, the famous Oglala warrior, was named for his father. But nobody called him Junior, for rather logical reasons. “Look! There’s the most feared and mysterious Indian of all time! Behold! It is Junior!”

— Sherman Alexie

271. “I wasn’t afraid of the dark nearly as much as I was afraid of the monsters who hunted by night and day.”

— Sherman Alexie

272. “I keep writing and rewriting, drawing and redrawing, and rethinking and revising and reediting. It became my grieving ceremony.”

— Sherman Alexie

273. “I suppose, in many ways, one never stops loving the people they loved during their youth. Or hating the people they hated.”

— Sherman Alexie

274. “Nothing ever really happens, you know. Life is infinitesimal and incremental and inconsequential.”

— Sherman Alexie

275. “I think you forget things on purpose,” my mother’s ghost said.”

— Sherman Alexie

276. “When you read a piece of writing that you admire, send a note of thanks to the author.”

— Sherman Alexie

277. “The form I most enjoy writing is the sonnet or sonnet-like forms, where you have a – you know, three stanzas or two stanzas that lead into a concluding couplet.”

— Sherman Alexie

278. “I pretended I belonged.”

— Sherman Alexie

279. “She never opened up a canyon in her soul and silently disappeared into the dark recesses.”

— Sherman Alexie

280. “They wanted to help me with my pain.”

— Sherman Alexie

281. “Elvis Presley is still showing up in 7-11 stores across the country, even though he’s been dead for years, so I figure music just might be the most important thing there is.”

— Sherman Alexie

282. “We lived in a small house, so there was no escape from the goddamn racket of her loneliness.”

— Sherman Alexie

283. “Seattle is Sweden! Extremely liberal, progressive, and very white, with a strong undercurrent of racism.”

— Sherman Alexie

284. “What do you say to people when they ask you how it feels to lose everything?”

— Sherman Alexie

285. “But people forget.”

— Sherman Alexie

286. “The contemporary motto for the mullet-wearer is “business in front, party in the back” but the Indian mullet warrior motto was “I don’t want my hair to get in my eyes as I’m kicking your ass.”

— Sherman Alexie

287. “He felt split in two, one crazy man eating hair and one rational man watching a crazy man eat hair. He chewed and swallowed the last pieces of his father’s life. He felt like he was building a museum of pain, a freak show, where he was the only visitor viewing the only mutant screaming the only prayer he knew: Come back, Daddy. Come back, Daddy. Come back, Daddy. Come back, Daddy. Come back, Daddy. Come back, Daddy. Come back, Daddy. Come back Daddy...”

— Sherman Alexie

288. “But he wasn’t ugly, just misplaced and marked by loneliness.”

— Sherman Alexie

289. “She wanted to find a way to love them in death, because she forgot how to love them in life.”

— Sherman Alexie

290. “Political Correctness has forced racists to become poets.”

— Sherman Alexie

291. “Well, I think the worst part about tribalism is its tendency to fundamentalize, and if I can fight fundamentalism in any of its forms I’m happy.”

— Sherman Alexie

292. “Sometimes we meet a character and we fall so hopelessly in love with him or her that we want to be that character, no matter how tough they have it, no matter how they might mess things up.”

— Sherman Alexie

293. “I wasn’t shocked and I’m still not shocked. It’s total exploitation, with everything up for grabs. Health care, gone. Destroy the environment in search of more profit. State-sponsored violence. Targeted incarceration. You know what’s happening, though: The whole country is becoming a reservation.”

— Sherman Alexie

294. “I don’t think the revisionist historians are accurate. I think their agendas are clouded by selfishness and anger and rage.”

— Sherman Alexie

295. “It made me cry for myself.”

— Sherman Alexie

296. “She kissed him like he was a warrior; she kissed him like she was a warrior.”

— Sherman Alexie

297. “In order to know somebody through their words, I mean, it has to be an, it has to be a letter, you know? It has to be a long e-mail. It has to be a five-page hand-written letter, you know, it has to be overwhelming and messy and sloppy as humans are.”

— Sherman Alexie

298. “Seymour looked around the Tucson McDonald’s. There were white people and Mavajos; there were people who preferred their Quarter Pounders with cheese and those who didn’t care for cheese at all; and there were those who desperately wish that McDonald’s would introduce onion rings to its menu.”

— Sherman Alexie

299. “Our love will be loud, and it will be bright.”

— Sherman Alexie

300. “Susan Alexie died of tuberculosis on August 30, 1945. I don’t know why the exact date of her death is not on her gravestone. Perhaps it had been about money. Those extra letters and numbers might have been too expensive. 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