Top 400 Sherman Alexie Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “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

352. “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

353. “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

354. “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

355. “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

356. “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

357. “I draw because words are too unpredictable. I draw because words are too limited.”

— Sherman Alexie

358. “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

359. “But, like water falling drop by drop onto your face for hours and days and weeks, that tiny insults slowly came to have enormous power over me.”

— Sherman Alexie

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

— Sherman Alexie

361. “We all justify our sins, venal or mortal.”

— Sherman Alexie

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

— Sherman Alexie

363. “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

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

— Sherman Alexie

365. “Nobody knew the truth. Of course, you can’t lie forever. Lies have short shelf lives. Lies go bad.”

— Sherman Alexie

366. “Poverty was our spirit animal.”

— Sherman Alexie

367. “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

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

— Sherman Alexie

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

— Sherman Alexie

370. “Why don’t you call somebody with the Coeur d’Alene tribe? A historian or somebody? Or be really crazy and ask one of our cousins what they know.” “I can’t,” I said. “I’m too embarrassed to let them know how much I don’t know.” “They’re sure gonna.”

— Sherman Alexie

371. “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

372. “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

373. “It’s not like anybody’s going to notice if you go away,” he said. “So you might as well gut it out.” Isn’t.”

— Sherman Alexie

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

— Sherman Alexie

375. “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

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

— Sherman Alexie

377. “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

378. “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

379. “Self-preservation was my religion.”

— Sherman Alexie

380. “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

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

— Sherman Alexie

382. “8. Marriage is filled with, among other things, laundry and unanswered questions.”

— Sherman Alexie

383. “Or maybe I could have anesthetized myself with homework and extra credit and binge-reading.”

— Sherman Alexie

384. “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

385. “What scares me least? The Afterlife. Really. Who cares? I’m going to be a good person no matter what is supposed to happen after I die.”

— Sherman Alexie

386. “I’d wanted to say something epic and honest. But epics are rarely honest, and honesty should never be epic.”

— Sherman Alexie

387. “Paul believed American greatness and the ghosts of that greatness surrounded him. But who could publicly express such a belief and not be ridiculed as a patriotic fool? Paul believed in his fellow Americans, in their extraordinary decency, in their awesome ability to transcend religion, race, and class, but what leftist could state such things and ever hope to get laid by any other lefty?”

— Sherman Alexie

388. “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

389. “When anybody, no matter how old they are, loses a parent, I think it hurts the same as if you were only five years old, you know?”

— Sherman Alexie

390. “There is a good day to die and there is a good day to play the piano.”

— Sherman Alexie

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

— Sherman Alexie

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

— Sherman Alexie

393. “Junior talks about it – relating to dozens if not hundreds of tribes. Even as the world tries to define you, narrow the definition of you, don’t do it to yourself. True.”

— Sherman Alexie

394. “The old Indian women dipped wooden spoons into stews and stirred and stirred. The stews made of random vegetables and commodity food, of failed dreams and predictable tears.”

— Sherman Alexie

395. “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

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

— Sherman Alexie

397. “How many books do you have here?” Corliss asked. “Two million, one hundred thousand, and eleven,” the librarian said proudly, but Corliss was frightened. What happens to the world when that many books go unread? And what happens to the unread authors of those unread books?”

— Sherman Alexie

398. “Lynn’s parents refused to accept Sean Casey’s Indian blood and, in fact, exhibited a kind of denial that was nearly pathological in its intensity.”

— Sherman Alexie

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

— Sherman Alexie

400. “Grief is scary and beautiful, too, I thought, but did not text.”

— Sherman Alexie