Top 400 Sherman Alexie Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “We spend our lives with the person who has the same scars in the same places.”

— Sherman Alexie

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

— Sherman Alexie

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

— Sherman Alexie

404. “It sucks to be poor, and it sucks to feel that you somehow deserve to be poor. You start believing that you’re poor because you’re stupid and ugly. And then you start believing that you’re stupid and ugly because you’re Indian. And because you’re Indian you start believing you’re destined to be poor. It’s an ugly circle and there’s nothing you can do about it.”

— Sherman Alexie

405. “But God has a way of making things even out, I guess.”

— Sherman Alexie

406. “Grief is a plastic surgeon.”

— Sherman Alexie

407. “After our earliest ancestors crawled out of the oceans, how soon did they feel the desire to crawl back in?”

— Sherman Alexie

408. “I want all kinds of strangers to love me. The Indian horses screamed.”

— Sherman Alexie

409. “My white friends were visibly distressed by that loud singer and drummer. One of my friends, whom I shall call Tara, leaned forward and whispered, “I hate Indians.” My four other white friends gasped, but it took Tara a few moments to remember that she was sitting beside me, her Indian friend. She burst into tears and spent the rest of the night apologizing. “It’s okay,” I kept saying. But it wasn’t. I was hurt, ashamed, and angry.”

— Sherman Alexie

410. “The professor ignored Lynn’s comments and proceeded with his lecture.”

— Sherman Alexie

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

— Sherman Alexie

412. “Like the coffin was settling down for a long, long nap, for a forever nap.”

— Sherman Alexie

413. “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

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

— Sherman Alexie

415. “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

416. “I really miss those cafeterias they use to have in Kmart. I don’t know why they stopped having those. If there is a Heaven then I firmly believe it’s a Kmart cafeteria.”

— Sherman Alexie

417. “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

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

— Sherman Alexie

419. “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

420. “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

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

— Sherman Alexie

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

— Sherman Alexie

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

— Sherman Alexie

424. “Sometimes you don’t something is true until you hear it for the first time.”

— Sherman Alexie

425. “But mostly it feels sad, often hopeless, and hot with loneliness.”

— Sherman Alexie

426. “Ah, friend, this world – this one universe – Is already too expansive for me. When I die, let my mourners know That I shrugged at the possibility Of other universes. Hire a choir – Let them tell the truth But tell it choral – Let the assembled voices sing About my theology: I’m the fragile and finite mortal Who wanted no part of immortality. 27.”

— Sherman Alexie

427. “If you weren’t good for making food, shelter, or babies, then you were tossed out on your own.”

— Sherman Alexie

428. “But my grandmother wanted us to forgive her murderer.”

— Sherman Alexie

429. “Maybe his heart was okay; maybe it had missed only one dance step in a lifetime of otherwise lovely coronary waltzes.”

— Sherman Alexie

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

— Sherman Alexie

431. “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

432. “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

433. “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

434. “He was a white man and, therefore, he was allowed to be romantic.”

— Sherman Alexie

435. “Death is always incongruous.”

— Sherman Alexie

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

— Sherman Alexie

437. “Gay people could do anything. They were like Swiss army knives.”

— Sherman Alexie

438. “Zsa Zsa was charismatic in the banal and voracious way that reality stars like Kim Kardashian are charismatic now.”

— Sherman Alexie