Top 400 Sherman Alexie Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “Love and death,” my father said. “It’s all love and death.”

— Sherman Alexie

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

— Sherman Alexie

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

— Sherman Alexie

404. “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

405. “Yes, I was bewildered. When was the last time a white American male was truly bewildered or would admit to such a thing? We had taken the world from covered wagons to space shuttles in seventy-five years. After such accomplishment, how could we ever get lost in the wilderness again? How could we not invent a device to guide our souls through the darkness?”

— Sherman Alexie

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

— Sherman Alexie

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

— Sherman Alexie

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

— Sherman Alexie

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

— Sherman Alexie

410. “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

411. “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

412. “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

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

— Sherman Alexie

414. “Death is always incongruous.”

— Sherman Alexie

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

— Sherman Alexie

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

— Sherman Alexie

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

— Sherman Alexie

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

— Sherman Alexie

419. “Because someone needs to help you die the right way,” she said. “And we both know that dying ain’t something you ever done before.”

— Sherman Alexie

420. “F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that the sign of a superior mind ‘is the ability to hold two opposing ideas at the same time.’ Do you believe this is true? And is it also true that you once said, ‘The only time white people tell the truth is when they keep their mouths shut’?”

— Sherman Alexie

421. “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

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

— Sherman Alexie

423. “We spend our lives with the person who has the same scars in the same places.”

— Sherman Alexie

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

— Sherman Alexie

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

— Sherman Alexie

426. “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

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

— Sherman Alexie

428. “Grief is a plastic surgeon.”

— Sherman Alexie

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

— Sherman Alexie

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

— Sherman Alexie

431. “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

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

— Sherman Alexie

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

— Sherman Alexie

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

— Sherman Alexie

435. “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

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

— Sherman Alexie

437. “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

438. “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