Top 400 Sherman Alexie Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “I know the answer has a lot to do with basic human decency, and also with the seductive nature of fame, but I think the answer has most to do with compartmentalism. It’s easy for a white racist to fall in love with and accept one member of a minority – one Indian – and their real and perceived talents and flaws. But it’s much tougher for a racist to accept a dozen Indians. And impossible for a white racist to accept the entire race of Indians – or an entire race of any nonwhite people.”

— Sherman Alexie

302. “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

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

— Sherman Alexie

304. “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

305. “I often wonder why I am the one who remember all the pain?”

— Sherman Alexie

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

— Sherman Alexie

307. “A really good stand-up comic is a poet; it’s about the use of language. It can be really poetic. And I like politically conscious comedy.”

— Sherman Alexie

308. “The streetlight outside my house shines on tonight and I’m watching it like it could give me a vision. James ain’t talked ever and he looks at that streetlight like it was a word and maybe like it was a verb. James wanted to streetlight me and make me bright and beautiful so all the moths and bats would circle me like I was the center of the world an held secrets.”

— Sherman Alexie

309. “But I am more afraid of the quieter forms of right-wing anger and sociopathy that have found power with Donald Trump’s election. I never directly feared for my life and career during a Republican presidency until Trump won the office. I have never felt so scared for the peace and safety of the entire world.”

— Sherman Alexie

310. “Jesus, I thought, is there a better and more succinct definition of grief than It hurts a little to breathe, but we’re okay?”

— Sherman Alexie

311. “What inspires a poem for me is usually a moment.”

— Sherman Alexie

312. “As for romance, Frank had dated a few women over the years but found them to be too inconsistent and illogical, so he dated a few men and found them to be even more random and frightening.”

— Sherman Alexie

313. “Can a book rightfully be called a book if it never gets read? If a tree falls in a forest and gets pulped to make paper for a book that never gets read, but there’s nobody to read it, does it make a sound?”

— Sherman Alexie

314. “All art is exploitation.”

— Sherman Alexie

315. “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

316. “How often had men sat around dinner tables and discussed women’s lives, their choices, and the reasons why one woman reached across the bed to touch another woman?”

— Sherman Alexie

317. “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

318. “All the anger in the world has come to my house. It’s there in my closet. In my refrigerator. In the water. In the sheets. It’s in my clothes. Can you smell it? I can never run away from it. It’s in my hair. I can feel it between my teeth. Can you taste it? I hear it all the time. All the time the anger is talking to me. It’s the devil. I’m the devil. If I could I’d crawl into a hole if I knew God was in there. Where’s the hole?”

— Sherman Alexie

319. “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

320. “So I guess you were hopelessly romantic and easily distracted, a B-plus mother, certainly good enough to get into Matriarchal State University but not quite good enough for St. Mary’s College of the Blessed Womb Warriors.”

— Sherman Alexie

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

— Sherman Alexie

322. “We didn’t domesticate cats. They domesticated themselves. But not totally, you know? You take a good look at any house cat, and you can tell there’s eventually going to be a day when it goes back wild, you know? When it reverts to its true nature. You fall over and die in a house with your dog, and your dog will lie down beside your dead body, maybe right on top of it, and starve to death. But a house cat will feast on your eyes as soon as its stomach starts growling.”

— Sherman Alexie

323. “Every Indian kid has access to MySpace and Facebook. But that doesn’t mean they have access to books and great teachers. This idea about bringing digital tech into schools is great, but once again I’ll say that this is not how people actually learn.”

— Sherman Alexie

324. “He said his prayers just in case his parents had been wrong about God all those years.”

— Sherman Alexie

325. “I thought maybe if you wore different clothes at school,′ Paul said, ‘maybe you could start a trend. You’d be original.’ ‘Oh, my God,’ she said. ‘It’s high school, Dad. People get beat up for being original.”

— Sherman Alexie

326. “In a real-world way, my gifts are very limited in terms of what I can do.”

— Sherman Alexie

327. “Because I’m an American, I know there’s all sorts of international folks who would gladly kidnap and behead me.”

— Sherman Alexie

328. “I’m not a pacifist by any measure, but I’m also fully aware that the reasons I might go to war could be very dubious.”

— Sherman Alexie

329. “He was my best friend and I needed him.”

— Sherman Alexie

330. “It was July. Crazy hot and dry. It hadn’t rained in, like, sixty days. Drought hot. Scorpion hot. Vultures flying circles in the sky hot.”

— Sherman Alexie

331. “She’d teach him nineteen different ways to spell matriarchy.”

— Sherman Alexie

332. “When you construct a mix tape, the first song you come out with has to be a barnburner.”

— Sherman Alexie

333. “Whites and Indians laughed at most of the same jokes, but they laughed for different reasons.”

— Sherman Alexie

334. “When I had no money, and a great book came out, I couldn’t get it. I had to wait. I love the idea that I have hardcover books here and at home that I haven’t read yet. That’s how I view that I’m rich. I have hardcover books I may never read.”

— Sherman Alexie

335. “At what point do we just re-create the people who have disappeared from our lives?”

— Sherman Alexie

336. “Perhaps everybody, indigenous and not, lives on their own kind of reservation.”

— Sherman Alexie

337. “And ready to seizure at any moment. But still useful, and maybe even a little bit beautiful and sacred and magical.”

— Sherman Alexie

338. “My profanity has an aesthetic.”

— Sherman Alexie

339. “Sir, in your thirty-nine years as a parent, you broke your children’s hearts, collectively and individually, 612 times and you did this without ever striking any human being in anger. Does this absence of physical violence make you a better man than you might otherwise have been?”

— Sherman Alexie

340. “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

341. “Do you understand how one small dog – afraid of the wolves who had attacked him and those who would attack him anew – might stand on his hind legs, might evolve in a moment, so he could run away and never return?”

— Sherman Alexie

342. “I was successful and acceptable and loved because I was – and still am – great at negotiating with whiteness. But that means my white friends often mistakenly believe that my ability to successfully negotiate the white world means that I am white – or more white than Native. My white friends can mistakenly believe that my intellectual and artistic abilities are intrinsically white.”

— Sherman Alexie

343. “Great pain is repetitive. Grief is repetitive.”

— Sherman Alexie

344. “And trust me, there are times when the last thing you want to hear is the truth.”

— Sherman Alexie

345. “He’s a big, goofy dreamer, too, just like me. He likes to pretend he lives inside the comic books. I guess a fake life inside a cartoon is a lot better than his real life. So I draw cartoons to make him happy, to give him other worlds to live inside. I draw his dreams. And he only talks about his dreams with me. And I only talk about my dreams with him.”

— Sherman Alexie

346. “Well, you should be more careful where you drive,” the officer said. “You’re making people nervous. You don’t fit the profile of the neighborhood.” I wanted to tell him that I didn’t really fit the profile of the country but I knew it would just get me into trouble.”

— Sherman Alexie

347. “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

348. “If a tree falls in a forest and gets pulped to make paper for a book that never gets read, but there’s nobody there to read it, does it make a sound?”

— Sherman Alexie

349. “I cry because I’m crying.”

— Sherman Alexie

350. “Scholars talk about the endless cycle of poverty and racism and classism and crime. But I don’t see it as a cycle, as a circle. I see it as a locked room filled with the people who share my DNA. This room has recently been set afire and there’s only one escape hatch, ten feet off the ground. And I know I have to build a ladder out of the bones of my fallen family in order to climb to safety.”

— Sherman Alexie