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

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

— Sherman Alexie

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

— Sherman Alexie

254. “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

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

— Sherman Alexie

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

— Sherman Alexie

257. “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

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

— Sherman Alexie

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

— Sherman Alexie

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

— Sherman Alexie

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

— Sherman Alexie

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

— Sherman Alexie

263. “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

264. “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

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

— Sherman Alexie

266. “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

267. “Hunger is my crime.”

— Sherman Alexie

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

— Sherman Alexie

269. “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

270. “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

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

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

— Sherman Alexie

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

— Sherman Alexie

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

— Sherman Alexie

276. “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

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

— 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. “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

282. “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

283. “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

284. “But people forget.”

— Sherman Alexie

285. “I cannot defeat cancer. Nobody defeats cancer. There is no winning or losing. There is no surviving or not surviving. There are only coin flips: heads or tails; benign or malignant; weight loss or bloating; morphine or oxycodone; extreme rescue efforts or Do Not Resuscitate; live or die.”

— 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. “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. “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

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

— Sherman Alexie

294. “It made me cry for myself.”

— Sherman Alexie

295. “Aren’t all crimes, by definition, hate crimes? I mean, people don’t rob banks because they love tellers.”

— Sherman Alexie

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

— Sherman Alexie

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

— Sherman Alexie

298. “But epics are rarely honest, and honesty should never be epic.”

— Sherman Alexie

299. “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

300. “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