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

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

— Sherman Alexie

253. “Hunger is my crime.”

— Sherman Alexie

254. “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

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

— Sherman Alexie

256. “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

257. “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

258. “My father is an amazing man.”

— Sherman Alexie

259. “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

260. “Late at night I go out and listen to the wind. That’s all the wisdom I need. I mean, I love books, but shoot, most of the world’s wisdom is not contained in books.”

— Sherman Alexie

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

— Sherman Alexie

262. “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

263. “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

264. “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

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

— Sherman Alexie

266. “But despite the fact that Reardan is a tiny town, people can still be strangers to each other.”

— Sherman Alexie

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

— Sherman Alexie

268. “I pretended I belonged.”

— Sherman Alexie

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

— Sherman Alexie

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

— Sherman Alexie

271. “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

272. “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

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

— Sherman Alexie

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

— Sherman Alexie

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

— Sherman Alexie

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

— Sherman Alexie

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

— Sherman Alexie

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

— Sherman Alexie

279. “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

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

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

— Sherman Alexie

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

— Sherman Alexie

290. “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

291. “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

292. “He looked into the crowd for approval, saw his mother and father. He waved and they waved back. Smiles and Indian teeth. They were both drunk. Everything familiar and welcome. Everything beautiful.”

— Sherman Alexie

293. “We shuffled past white customers who stared at us with hate, pity, disgust, and anger – the Four Horsemen of the Anti-Indian Apocalypse.”

— Sherman Alexie

294. “We are taught to take the bread into our bodies as proof of Jesus’s body.”

— Sherman Alexie

295. “I prayed to Our Father and I called my father. And one father remained silent and the other quickly came to get me.”

— Sherman Alexie

296. “All art is exploitation.”

— Sherman Alexie

297. “If you want to make a white man cry, despite the amount of time it’s been since he last wept aloud, then all you have to do is employ “baseball” and “father” in three consecutive sentences.”

— Sherman Alexie

298. “Marie felt a sudden urge to smash the glass, break down the door, pull down the building. She wanted to tear apart the world. Mather would have never treated a white student that badly, nor would he have shut the door in the face of a man. At that moment, she wanted Dr. Mather to disappear. She wanted every white man to disappear. She wanted to burn them all down to ash and feast on their smoke. Hateful, powerful thoughts. She wondered what those hateful, powerful thoughts could create.”

— Sherman Alexie

299. “Can a writer forget something that he’s written in one of his own books? Yes, of course.”

— Sherman Alexie

300. “It made me cry for myself.”

— Sherman Alexie