Top 400 Sherman Alexie Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 9 of 9

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

— 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. “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

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

— Sherman Alexie

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

— Sherman Alexie

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

— Sherman Alexie

408. “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

409. “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

410. “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

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

— Sherman Alexie

412. “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

413. “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

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

— Sherman Alexie

415. “Grief is a plastic surgeon.”

— Sherman Alexie

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

— Sherman Alexie

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

— Sherman Alexie

418. “Death is always incongruous.”

— Sherman Alexie

419. “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

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

— Sherman Alexie

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

— Sherman Alexie

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

— Sherman Alexie

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

— Sherman Alexie

424. “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

425. “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

426. “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

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

— Sherman Alexie

428. “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

429. “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

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

— Sherman Alexie

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

— Sherman Alexie

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

— Sherman Alexie

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

— Sherman Alexie

434. “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

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

— Sherman Alexie

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

— Sherman Alexie

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

— Sherman Alexie

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

— Sherman Alexie