Top 400 Sherman Alexie Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “Poverty was our spirit animal.”

— Sherman Alexie

352. “Why did you punch him?” she asked. “He was bullying me.” “You should have just walked away.” “He called me ‘chief.’ And ‘squaw boy.’ ” “Then you should have kicked him in the balls.”

— Sherman Alexie

353. “So maybe they are mute with post-traumatic stress. Maybe they don’t know how to talk about Mike. I often wonder why I’m the one who remembers All the pain. Why am I the one who remains obsessed By the bloody nose, but rarely remembers any joy?”

— Sherman Alexie

354. “Am I defined by what I’ve seen, or do I define the world by what I’ve witnessed? O, what beautiful or terrible thing waits around the next corner? Who isn’t in love with this mystery?”

— Sherman Alexie

355. “I made a list of my favorite books: 1. The Grapes of Wrath 2. Catcher in the Rye 3. Fat Kid Rules the World 4. Tangerine 5. Feed 6. Catalyst 7. Invisible Man 8. Fools Crow 9. Jar of Fools.”

— Sherman Alexie

356. “Sharon was Apache, and I was Spokane, but we practiced our tribal religions like we practiced Catholicism: We loved all of the ceremonies but thought they were pitiful cries to a disinterested god.”

— Sherman Alexie

357. “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

358. “When people consider the meaning of genocide, they might only think of corpses being pushed into mass graves. 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

359. “I cry because I’m crying.”

— Sherman Alexie

360. “Self-preservation was my religion.”

— Sherman Alexie

361. “I wanted to live up to expectations. I guess that’s what it comes down to. The power of expectations. And.”

— Sherman Alexie

362. “It’s war paint,” Rowdy always says.”

— Sherman Alexie

363. “Son, things have never been like how you think they used to be.”

— Sherman Alexie

364. “Despite all the talk of diversity and division – of red and blue states, of black and white and brown people, of rich and poor, gay and straight – Paul believed that Americans were shockingly similar. How can we be so different, thought Paul, if we all know the lyrics to the same one thousand songs?”

— Sherman Alexie

365. “What’s real? I ain’t interested in what’s real. I’m interested in how things should be.”

— Sherman Alexie

366. “Silence was his short bow and quiver of arrows.”

— Sherman Alexie

367. “I stupidly hoped that time would stand still if I stayed still.”

— Sherman Alexie

368. “Love at first sight is always romantic, right? But have you ever heard about people becoming best friends at first sight? Have you ever heard of two Indian boys becoming instant best friends? Becoming best friends the first time they ever talk to each other? After they’ve only said maybe ten words to each other?”

— Sherman Alexie

369. “I’m not an Indian warrior chief. I’m not some demure little Indian woman healer talking spider this, spider that, am I? I’m not babbling about the four directions. Or the two-legged, four-legged, and winged. I’m talking like a twentieth-century Indian woman. Hell, a twenty-first century Indian, and you can’t handle it, you wimp.”

— Sherman Alexie

370. “Everybody prayed; everybody lied about it. Even atheists prayed on airplanes and bingo nights.”

— Sherman Alexie

371. “The two funniest tribes I’ve ever been around are Indians and Jews, so I guess that says something about the inherent humor of genocide.”

— Sherman Alexie

372. “But I don’t know how much joy she experienced while loving me. I don’t know how much joy I was capable of feeling or providing.”

— Sherman Alexie

373. “He was like some kind of Star Wars alien creature with invisible tentacles that sucked your thoughts out of your brain.”

— Sherman Alexie

374. “Death is always incongruous.”

— Sherman Alexie

375. “I didn’t know what to do or say, so I just sat as quietly as he did. The silence got so big and real that it felt like three people sat on the porch.”

— Sherman Alexie

376. “I figured any nightmare would be better than my reality.”

— Sherman Alexie

377. “What greater grief than the loss of one’s native land?”

— Sherman Alexie

378. “So, back in the day, weird people threatened the strength of the tribe. If you weren’t good for making food, shelter, or babies, then you were tossed out on your own.” “But we’re not primitive like that anymore.” “Oh, yes, we are. Weird people still get banished.” “You mean weird people like.”

— Sherman Alexie

379. “I don’t grieve everybody that I have lost.”

— Sherman Alexie

380. “I take it, no fool ever made a bargain for his soul with the devil; the fool is too much of a fool, or the devil too much of a devil – I don’t know which.”

— Sherman Alexie

381. “After all, one doesn’t choose his culture nearly as much as one trips and falls into it.”

— Sherman Alexie

382. “One morning she sewed while her son and husband watched television. It was so quiet that when her son released a tremendous fart, a mouse, startled from his hiding place beneath my aunt’s sewing chair, ran straight up her pant leg.”

— Sherman Alexie

383. “I wasn’t there when the old Indian man from Worley said it, but I know it must be true: Every highway in the world crosses some reservation, cuts it in half.”

— Sherman Alexie

384. “I declared a truce with her, at least within myself. Or maybe it’s only a partial truce because a half-truce is really just a surrender, right?”

— Sherman Alexie

385. “God, I wanted to be forgiven, but an apology offered to a dead man is only a selfish apology to yourself.”

— Sherman Alexie

386. “I took a job teaching private-school white teenagers how to edit video. They used their newly developed skills to make documentaries about poor brown people in other countries. It’s not oil that runs the world, it’s shame.”

— Sherman Alexie

387. “Of course, she didn’t care about me. She mostly made fun of me. But that just made me love her even more. She was out of my league, and even though I was only twelve, I knew that I’d be one of those guys who always fell in love with the unreachable, ungettable, and uninterested.”

— Sherman Alexie

388. “Love and death,” my father said. “It’s all love and death.”

— Sherman Alexie

389. “My parents sold blood for money to buy food. Poverty was our spirit animal.”

— Sherman Alexie

390. “We were supposed to make you give up being Indian. Your songs and stories and language and dancing. Everything. We weren’t trying to kill Indian people. We were trying to kill Indian culture.”

— Sherman Alexie

391. “We didn’t talk. Didn’t need to talk.”

— Sherman Alexie

392. “Can a book rightfully be called a book if it never gets read?”

— Sherman Alexie

393. “We are all given one thing by which our lives are measured, one determination. Mine are the stories which can change or not change the world. It doesn’t matter which as long as I continue to tell the stories.”

— Sherman Alexie

394. “There are so many new skyscrapers being built in our city of rain, I wonder if everybody’s spirit animal is now the construction crane.”

— Sherman Alexie

395. “I mean, you have to love somebody that much to also hate them that much, too.”

— Sherman Alexie

396. “Mostly, I just think Mr. P is a lonely old man who used to be a lonely young man. And for some reason I don’t understand, lonely white people love to hang around lonelier Indians.”

— Sherman Alexie

397. “But it happens mostly because “being American” means “being white,” even for a brown boy like me.”

— Sherman Alexie

398. “We order Diet since my father and I are both diabetic. Genetics, you know?”

— Sherman Alexie

399. “Be Still, be still, she would say between her teeth, but Arnold loved his body too much to remain still.”

— Sherman Alexie

400. “Remember this: men and pornography are like plants and sunshine. To me, porn is photosynthesis.”

— Sherman Alexie