Top 80 Tommy Orange Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Kids are jumping out the windows of burning buildings, falling to their deaths. And we think the problem is that they’re jumping.”

— Tommy Orange

2. “Some of us got this feeling stuck inside, all the time, like we’ve done something wrong. Like we ourselves are something wrong. Like who we are deep inside, that thing we want to name but can’t, it’s like we’re afraid we’ll be punished for it.”

— Tommy Orange

3. “Life will do its best to get at you. Sneak up from behind and shatter you, into tiny unrecognizable pieces. You have to be ready to pick everything up pragmatically. Keep your head down and make it work.”

— Tommy Orange

4. “To cry is to waste the feeling. He needs to dance with it. Crying is for when there’s nothing else left to do.”

— Tommy Orange

5. “The trouble with believing is you have to believe that believing will work, you have to believe in belief.”

— Tommy Orange

6. “It was no wonder it was getting worse. You can’t sell life is okay when it’s not.”

— Tommy Orange

7. “Being bipolar is like having an ax to grind with an ax you need to split the wood to keep you warm in a cold dark forest you only might eventually realize you’ll never make your way out of.”

— Tommy Orange

8. “The Drome taught me to look past the first look people give you, find that other one, right behind it. All you gotta do is wait a second longer than you normally do and you can catch it, you can see what they got in mind back there.”

— Tommy Orange

9. “Secrets lie through omission just like shame lies through secrecy.”

— Tommy Orange

10. “And don’t make the mistake of calling us resilient. To not have been destroyed, to not have given up, to have survived, is no badge of honor. Would you call an attempted murder victim resilient?”

— Tommy Orange

11. “This is the thing: If you have the option to not think about or even consider history, whether you learned it right or not, or whether it even deserves consideration, that’s how you know you’re on board the ship that serves hors d’oeuvres and fluffs your pillows, while others are out at sea, swimming or drowning, or clinging to little inflatable rafts that they have to take turns keeping inflated, people short of breath, who’ve never even heard of the words hors d’oeuvres or fluff.”

— Tommy Orange

12. “There There,” by Radiohead. The hook is “Just ’cause you feel it doesn’t mean it’s there.”

— Tommy Orange

13. “We drink alcohol because it helps us feel like we can be ourselves and not be afraid. But we punish ourselves with it.”

— Tommy Orange

14. “It’s important he dress like an Indian, dance like an Indian, even if it is an act, even if he feels like a fraud the whole time, because the only way to be Indian in this world is to look and act like an Indian. To be or not to be Indian depends on it.”

— Tommy Orange

15. “Does what we try most to avoid come after us because we paid too much attention to it with our worry?”

— Tommy Orange

16. “We stayed because the city sounds like a war, and you can’t leave a war once you’ve been, you can only keep it at bay.”

— Tommy Orange

17. “It turns out that who you spend time with ends up mattering more than what you do with that time.”

— Tommy Orange

18. “In 1621, colonists invited Massasoit, the chief of the Wampanoags, to a feast after a recent land deal. Massasoit came with ninety of his men. That meal is why we still eat a meal together in November. Celebrate it as a nation. But that one wasn’t a thanksgiving meal. It was a land-deal meal. Two years later there was another, similar meal meant to symbolize eternal friendship. Two hundred Indians dropped dead that night from an unknown poison.”

— Tommy Orange

19. “Sometimes not having a story is the story.”

— Tommy Orange

20. “We are the memories we don’t remember, which live in us, which we feel, which make us sing and dance and pray the way we do, feelings from memories that flare and bloom unexpectedly in our lives like blood through a blanket from a wound made by a bullet fired by a man shooting us in the back for our hair, for our heads, for a bounty, or just to get rid of us.”

— Tommy Orange

21. “Closing her eyes and ears to the closing of her eyes and ears.”

— Tommy Orange

22. “Maxine makes me read her Indian stuff that I don’t always get. I like it, though, because when I do get it, I get it way down at that place where it hurts but feels better because you feel it, something you couldn’t feel before reading it, that makes you feel less alone, and like it’s not gonna hurt as much anymore.”

— Tommy Orange

23. “We’ve been defined by everyone else and continue to be slandered despite easy-to-look-up-on-the-internet facts about the realities of our histories and current state as a people.”

— Tommy Orange

24. “Being Indian has never been about returning to the land. The land is everywhere or nowhere.”

— Tommy Orange

25. “Time has us. It holds us in it’s mouth like an owl holds a field mouse. We shiver, we struggle for release, and then it pecks out our eyes and intestines for sustenance and we die the death of field mice.”

— Tommy Orange

26. “There’s a secret war on women going on in the world. Secret even to us. Secret even though we know it.”

— Tommy Orange

27. “Everything here is formed in relation to every other living and nonliving thing from the earth.”

— Tommy Orange

28. “Some of us got this feeling stuck inside, all the time, like we’ve done something wrong. Like we ourselves are something wrong. Like who we are deep inside, that thing we want to name but can’t, it’s like we’re afraid we’ll be punished for it. So we hide. We drink alcohol because it helps us feel like we can be ourselves and not be afraid. But we punish ourselves with it. The thing we most don’t want has a way of landing right on top of us.”

— Tommy Orange

29. “We are Alaskan Native Indians, Native Hawaiians, and European expatriate Indians, Indians from eight different tribes with quarter-blood quantum requirements and so not federally recognized Indian kinds of Indians. We are enrolled members of tribes and disenrolled members, ineligible members and tribal council members. We are full-blood, half-breed, quadroon, eighths, sixteenths, thirty-seconds. Undoable math. Insignificant remainders.”

— Tommy Orange

30. “When we go to tell our stories, people think we want it to have gone different. People want to say things like “sore losers” and “move on already,” “quit playing the blame game.” But is it a game? Only those who have lost as much as we have see the particularly nasty slice of smile on someone who thinks they’re winning when they say “Get over it.”

— Tommy Orange

31. “We made powwows because we needed a place to be together. Something intertribal, something old, something to make us money, something we could work toward, for our jewelry, our songs, our dances, our drum.”

— Tommy Orange

32. “There is no there there,” he says in a kind of whisper, with this goofy openmouthed smile Dene wants to punch. Dene wants to tell him he’d looked up the quote in its original context, in her Everybody’s Autobiography, and found that she was talking about how the place where she’d grown up in Oakland had changed so much, that so much development had happened there, that the there of her childhood, the there there, was gone, there was no there there anymore.”

— Tommy Orange

33. “The head crossed the water, and when it reached the other side, it turned around and drank all that water up. The rolling head became confused and drunk. It wanted more. More of anything. More of everything. And it just kept rolling.”

— Tommy Orange

34. “Your face in the mirror, reflected back at you, most people don’t even know what it looks like anymore. That thing on the front of your head, you’ll never see it, like you’ll never see your own eyeball with your own eyeball, like you’ll never smell what you smell like, but me, I know what my face looks like. I know what it means.”

— Tommy Orange

35. “The tragedy of it all will be unspeakable, the fact we’ve been fighting for decades to be recognized as a present-tense people, modern and relevant, alive, only to die in the grass wearing feathers.”

— Tommy Orange

36. “She scans the field for the boys. It’s a blur. She should probably get glasses, probably should’ve gotten glasses a long time ago. She would never tell anyone this, but she enjoys the distance being a blur.”

— Tommy Orange

37. “The quiet of the reservation, the side-of-the-highway towns, rural communities, that kind of silence just makes the sound of your brain on fire that much more pronounced.”

— Tommy Orange

38. “There’s something about seeing Johnny Depp fail so badly that gives me strength.”

— Tommy Orange

39. “We didn’t have last names before they came. When they decided they needed to keep track of us, last names were given to us, just like the name “INDIAN” itself was given to us. These were attempted translations and botched Indian names, random surnames, and names passed down from white American generals, admirals, and colonels, and sometimes troop names, which were sometimes just colors.”

— Tommy Orange

40. “Crying is for when there’s nothing else left to do.”

— Tommy Orange

41. “The Drome first came to me in the mirror when I was six.”

— Tommy Orange

42. “There is a way to acknowledge and celebrate, all the while allowing for the fact that the system does not care.”

— Tommy Orange

43. “The trick is to stay busy, distract then distract the distraction. Get twice removed. It’s about layers. It’s about disappearing in the whir of noise and doing.”

— Tommy Orange

44. “We all came to the Big Oakland Powwow for different reasons. The messy, dangling strands of our lives got pulled into a braid – tied to the back of everything we’d been doing all along to get us here. We’ve been coming from miles. And we’ve been coming for years, generations, lifetimes, layered in prayer and handwoven regalia, beaded and sewn together, feathered, braided, blessed, and cursed.”

— Tommy Orange

45. “In the late 1990s, Saddam Hussein commissioned a Quran to be written in his own blood. Now Muslim leaders aren’t sure what to do with it. To have written the Quran in blood was a sin, but to destroy it would also be a sin.”

— Tommy Orange

46. “This is how time skips. Links just lead to links that can lead you all the way back to the twelfth century.”

— Tommy Orange

47. “Like who we are deep inside, that thing we want to name but can’t, it’s like we’re afraid we’ll be punished for it. So we hide. We drink alcohol because it helps us feel like we can be ourselves and not be afraid. But we punish ourselves with it. The thing we most don’t want has a way of landing right on top of us. That badger medicine’s the only thing that stands a chance at helping. You gotta learn how to stay down there. Way deep down inside yourself, unafraid.”

— Tommy Orange

48. “Yes, things look bad these days. Everyone talks like it’s getting better and that just makes it all the worse that it’s still so bad.”

— Tommy Orange

49. “When we see that the story is the way we live our lives, only then can we start to change, a day at a time. We try to help people like us, try to make the world around us a little better.”

— Tommy Orange

50. “The wound that was made when white people came and took all that they took has never healed.”

— Tommy Orange