110+ Sherman Alexie Quotes On Education, Friendship And Civil War

Sherman Alexie is an American writer, poet, and filmmaker. He is a Spokane/Coeur d'Alene Indian and his work focuses on the lives of Native Americans living in the United States. His most famous works include The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, and Flight. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Sherman Alexie on education, love, friendship.

Top 10 Sherman Alexie Quotes

1. Everybody likes to have a place to think, to meditate, to eat a burrito.
2. Life is a constant struggle between being an individual and being a member of the community.
3. What kind of life can you have in a house without books?
4. If one reads enough books one has a fighting chance. Or better, one's chances of survival increase with each book one reads.
5. Well, I think the worst part about tribalism is its tendency to fundamentalize, and if I can fight fundamentalism in any of its forms I'm happy.
6. If you're good at it, and you love it, and it helps you navigate the river of the world, then it can't be wrong.
7. He made me realize that hard work--that the act of finishing, of completing, of accomplishing a task--is joyous
8. I thought I’d been condescended to as an Indian - that was nothing compared to the condescension for writing Y.A.
9. Every movie is a road movie. Every novel is a mystery. Every tortilla chip is sacred.
10. If one reads enough books, one has a fighting chance.

Sherman Alexie Short Quotes

• Nervous means you want to play. Scared means you don't want to play.
• All art is exploitation.
• White Americans have a short memory.
• Most of my heroes are just decent people. Decency is rare and underrated.
• And believe me, a good piece of chicken can make anybody believe in the existence of God.
• My father was always depressed. When he was home and sober, he was mostly in his room.
• Poetry = Anger x Imagination
• Sometimes it's called passing out and sometimes it's just pretending to be asleep
• Let us now celebrate the literary allusion.
• We are taught to take the bread into our bodies as proof of Jesus's body.

Sherman Alexie Quotes About Love

If you really want a woman to love you, then you have to dance. And if you don’t want to dance, then you’re going to have to work extra hard to make a woman love you forever, and you will always run the risk that she will leave you at any second for a man who knows how to tango. — Sherman Alexie

Yep, my daddy was an undependable drunk. But he'd never missed any of my organized games, concerts, plays, or picnics. He may not have loved me perfectly, but he loved me as well as he could. (189) — Sherman Alexie

The people who loved me when I was seven years old love my books, and the people who didn't like me when I was seven years old don't like my books. — Sherman Alexie

Corliss had never once considered the fate of library books. She'd never wondered how many books go unread. She loved books. How could she not worry about the unread? She felt like a disorganized scholar, an inconsiderate lover, an abusive mother, and a cowardly soldier. — Sherman Alexie

When I had no money, and a great book came out, I couldn't get it. I had to wait. I love the idea that I have hardcover books here and at home that I haven't read yet. That's how I view that I'm rich. I have hardcover books I may never read. — Sherman Alexie

The cello looks like a woman to me. And, you know, the curves. And so I am in a way, and it's funny to admit this, I am sexually attracted to the cello, the curves really get me. So as I watched him play, you know, Yo Yo Ma is sort of making love to a beautiful woman. — Sherman Alexie

That's one more thing people don't know about Indians: We love to talk dirty. — Sherman Alexie

You have to love somebody that much to also hate them that much, too. (191) — Sherman Alexie

She was in pain and I loved her, sort of loved her, I guess, so I kind of had to love her pain, too. — Sherman Alexie

He loved her, of course, but better than that, he chose her, day after day. Choice: that was the thing. — Sherman Alexie

Sherman Alexie Quotes About Life

If you care about something enough, it’s going to make you cry. But you have to use it. Use your tears. Use your pain. Use your fear. Get mad. Arnold, get mad. — Sherman Alexie

In a sense, you're always mythologizing your life; it's always an effort to make yourself epic. At least in fiction you can lie and sort of justify your delusion about your "epicness." But when you're writing a memoir, you're trying to make your life epic and it's not - nobody's life is. — Sherman Alexie

I've come to the point in my life where I encourage young Native Americans to become much more selfish about their personal needs and wants. — Sherman Alexie

That's the whole point of life, you know? To meet new people. — Sherman Alexie

In the middle of a crazy and drunk life, you have to hang onto the good and sober moments tightly. — Sherman Alexie

Like officer Dave.He's never said much about his life, but I can tell he's scarred. And he knows I'm scarred too. The wounded always recognize the wounded. We can smell each other. — Sherman Alexie

The poetry, if you will, of life is reduced to this sort of dry, scientific, you know, it's the worst sort of précis of who we are. — Sherman Alexie

I suddenly understood that if every moment of a book should be taken seriously, then every moment of a life should be taken seriously as well. — Sherman Alexie

You want the good life? You live where white people live, you go to school where white people go to school, and you shop where white people shop. — Sherman Alexie

My father was sleepless most of his life. So by the age of five, I was awake with him all night long, watching bad television or we'd lie in the same bed, and I'd read my comic books while he read his latest spy or mystery novel. — Sherman Alexie

Sherman Alexie Quotes About Writing

If I wasn't writing poems I'd be washing my hands all the time. — Sherman Alexie

I'm a method writer. In order to write about the emotion, I have to experience it. I get physically tired and exhausted, devoting hours and hours and hours to it. — Sherman Alexie

I guess a witness is all I am. I think as a writer, you're pretty removed. Writing is a very selfish, individualistic pursuit. So in that sense I'm a witness because I'm not participating. — Sherman Alexie

I write in blood because I remember what it felt like to bleed. — Sherman Alexie

Read. Read 1000 pages for every 1 page that you write. — Sherman Alexie

Writing is a lonely business. — Sherman Alexie

The form I most enjoy writing is the sonnet or sonnet-like forms, where you have a - you know, three stanzas or two stanzas that lead into a concluding couplet. — Sherman Alexie

All I owe the world is my art. — Sherman Alexie

Sherman Alexie Quotes About Died

It's a weird thing. Reservations were meant to be prisons, you know? Indians were supposed to move onto reservations and die. We were supposed to disappear. But somehow or another, Indians have forgotten the reservations were meant to be death camps. — Sherman Alexie

she braided my sister's hair with hands that smelled deep roots buried in the earth she told me the old stories how time never mattered when she died they gave me her clock — Sherman Alexie

...And nostalgia is a cancer. Nostalgia will fill your heart up with tumors. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's what you are. You're just an old fart dying of terminal nostalgia. — Sherman Alexie

Somebody dies and people eat your food. Funny how that works. — Sherman Alexie

Sherman Alexie Quotes About Lived

Well, as a native, as a colonized people you do live in the in between. The thing is I'm native. But necessarily because I'm a member of the country, I'm also a White American. — Sherman Alexie

I recognize now that the conditions that Indians are living in are the conditions that poor people everywhere are living in. — Sherman Alexie

How self-centered, how arrogant... Imagine the awesome privilege of living in a society where you get to choose what you eat at each and every meal. When I was a kid, I was a vegetarian and a vegan for long stretches... I was a commodity cheese-atarian. — Sherman Alexie

I know a lot about being white - because I have to, I live in the white world. A white person doesn't live in the Indian world. I have to be white every day. — Sherman Alexie

And then I realized that my sister was trying to LIVE a romance novel. Man, that takes courage and imagination. Well, it also took some degree of mental illness, too, but I was suddenly happy for her. And a little scared. Well, a lot scared. — Sherman Alexie

Sherman Alexie Famous Quotes And Sayings

"I used to think the world was broken down by tribes," I said. "By black and white. By Indian and white. But I know that isn't true. The world is only broken into two tribes: The people who are assholes and the people who are not." — Sherman Alexie

Last September 16th, I was walking in downtown Seattle when this pick-up truck pulls up in front of me. Guy leans out the window and yells, "Go back to your own country," and I was laughing so hard because it wasn't so much a hate crime as a crime of irony. — Sherman Alexie

All I try to do is portray Indians as we are, in creative ways. With imagination and poetry. I think a lot of Native American literature is stuck in one idea: sort of spiritual, environmentalist Indians. And I want to portray everyday lives. I think by doing that, by portraying the ordinary lives of Indians, perhaps people learn something new. — Sherman Alexie

I grabbed my book and opened it up. I wanted to smell it. Heck, I wanted to kiss it. Yes, kiss it. That's right, I am a book kisser. Maybe that's kind of perverted or maybe it's just romantic and highly intelligent. — Sherman Alexie

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? I think all of us are always five years old in the presence and absence of our parents. — Sherman Alexie

I don’t want long hair, I don’t want short hair, I don’t want hair at all, and I don’t want to be a girl or a boy. I want to be a yellow and orange leaf some little kid picks up and pastes in his scrapbook. — Sherman Alexie

The percentage of Indian kids doing some sort of artistic work is much higher than in the general population - painting, drawing, dancing, singing. The creation of art is still an everyday part of Indian culture, unlike the dominant culture, where art is sort of peripheral. — Sherman Alexie

Reardan is the rich white farm town that sits in the wheat fields exactly 22 miles away from the Rez. And it's a hick town I suppose filled with farmers and rednecks and racists cops who stop every Indian that drives through. During one week when I was little dad got stopped three times for DWI- Driving While Indian. — Sherman Alexie

The problem is that too many adults think their kids' lives are simple, or they try to make their lives simple, when their emotional lives are just as complicated as ours. They might have a few less tools to deal with it because they're young, but the emotions are all the same, and the subject matter is all the same. — Sherman Alexie

[F]rank knew he was guilty of arrogance and misanthropy, but he compensated by being kind to strangers and tipping really well at restaurants. — Sherman Alexie

A lot of native culture has been destroyed. So you already feel lost inside your culture. And then you add up feeling lost and insignificant inside the larger culture. So you end up feeling lost squared. And to never be recognized, to never have any power, you know, other minority communities actually have a lot of economic, cultural power. — Sherman Alexie

I was studying the sky like I was an astronomer, except it was daytime and I didn't have a telescope, so I was just an idiot. — Sherman Alexie

When you're depressed, you know, it's like the world has ended. Even getting out of bed takes the most massive amount of effort. But when you're manic, oh, it's so addicting. You know, I have finished novels in two weeks in manic stages. — Sherman Alexie

It was so quiet, a reservation kind of quiet, where you can hear somebody drinking whiskey on the rocks three miles away. — Sherman Alexie

Nobody recognizes that a bookstore or library can also be a drowning polar bear. And in this country [US], magazines, newspapers, and bookstores are drowning polar bears. And if people can't see that or don't want to talk about it, I don't understand them at all. — Sherman Alexie

...there are some children who aren't really children at all, they're just pillars of flame that burn everything they touch. And there are some children who are just pillars of ash, that fall apart when you touch them..." ~ Thomas Builds-the-Fire (played by Evan Adams) in Alexie's "Smoke Signals — Sherman Alexie

I end up feeling like a spy in the house of ethnicity, you know? Because people will talk around me as they would talk around the people in their cultural group. So I get to hear all the secrets and jokes and you know, I'm a part of every community because of the way I look. — Sherman Alexie

Yes, I am Irish and Indian, which would be the coolest blend in the world if my parents were around to teach me how to be Irish and Indian. But they're not here and haven't been for years, so I'm not really Irish or Indian. I am a blank sky, a human solar eclipse. — Sherman Alexie

My wife was the first romantic partner who understood both American and native parts of me - not so much the positive stuff, but the damage. — Sherman Alexie

I got hundreds of emails insulting me, accusing me of being some caveman. I am by no means a Luddite. I have two iPods. I have a cell phone. I have cable TV, HDTV! — Sherman Alexie

There are all kinds of addicts, I guess. We all have pain. And we all look for ways to make the pain go away. (107) — Sherman Alexie

I know I'll keep writing poems. That's the constant. I don't know about novels. They're hard. It takes so much concentrated effort. When I'm writing a novel it's pretty much all I can do. I get bored. It takes months. Movies do the same thing. It's all-encompassing. It feels like I'm going to end up writing poems, short stories and screenplays. — Sherman Alexie

Environmentalism is a luxury. Just like being a vegetarian is a luxury. When you have to worry about eating - you're not going to be worried about where the food's coming from, or who made your shoes. Poverty, whether planned or not planned, is a way of making environmentalism moot. — Sherman Alexie

Unlike landed white men, she didn't need to climb mountains to experience mystic panic. All she needed was to set her alarm dock for the next morning, wake when it rang, and go to class. — Sherman Alexie

They put me in a holding cell with a black kid and a white kid and a Chinese kid. We're the United Nations of juvenile delinquents. — Sherman Alexie

A really good stand-up comic is a poet; it's about the use of language. It can be really poetic. And I like politically conscious comedy. — Sherman Alexie

I realized that I might be a lonely Indian boy, but I was not alone in the loneliness. There were millions of other Americans who had left their birthplaces in search of a dream. (217) — Sherman Alexie

When it comes to death, we know that laughter and tears are pretty much the same thing. And so, laughing and crying, we said good-bye to my grandmother. And when we said goodbye to one grandmother, we said good-bye to all of them. Each funeral was a funeral for all of us. We lived and died together. All of us laughed when they lowered my grandmother into the ground. And all of us laughed when they covered her with dirt. And all of us laughed as we walked and drove and rode our way back to our lonely, lonely houses. — Sherman Alexie

When a glass sits on a table here, people don't wonder if it's half filled or half empty. They just hope it's good beer. — Sherman Alexie

Your past is a skeleton walking one step behind you, and your future is a a skeleton walking one step in front of you. Maybe you don't wear a watch, but your skeletons do, and they always know what time it is. — Sherman Alexie

We all have to find our own ways to say good-bye. — Sherman Alexie

I had the feeling I was going to be successful, and I didn't want to be another disappointing Indian. — Sherman Alexie

The streetlight outside my house shines on tonight and I'm watching it like it could give me a vision. James ain't talked ever and he looks at that streetlight like it was a word and maybe like it was a verb. James wanted to streetlight me and make me bright and beautiful so all the moths and bats would circle me like I was the center of the world an held secrets. — Sherman Alexie

I think a lot of Indians want Indian artists to be cultural cheerleaders rather than cultural investigators. — Sherman Alexie

If it's fiction, then it better be true. — Sherman Alexie

Certainly I'm angry at the way Indians have been treated and continue to be treated. But I don't think it's a helpless emotion. — Sherman Alexie

Non-Indian writers usually say "Great Spirit," "Mother Earth," "Two-Legged, Four-Legged, and Winged." Mixed-blood writers usually say "Creator, "Mother Earth," "Two-Legged, Four- Legged, and Winged." Indian writers usually say "God," "Mother Earth," "Human Being, Dog, and Bird." — Sherman Alexie

I think the world is a series of broken dams and floods, and my cartoons are tiny little lifeboats. — Sherman Alexie

But we danced, under wigs and between unfinished walls, through broken promises and around empty cupboards. — Sherman Alexie

The ordinary can be like medicine. — Sherman Alexie

And I couldn't make fun of her for that dream. It was my dream, too. And Indian boys weren't supposed to dream like that. And white girls from small towns weren't supposed to dream big, either. We were supposed to be happy with our limitations. But there was no way Penelope and I were going to sit still. Nope, we both wanted to fly. — Sherman Alexie

Okay, so maybe I'm romantic... but somebody is supposed to be romantic. Some warrior is supposed to go to war against the imperial forces of cynicism and irony. I am a sentimental soldier. — Sherman Alexie

My name is Sherman J. Alexie Jr., and I am an insomniac. — Sherman Alexie

I got in a fight with my girlfriend," I said. "I was just driving around, blowing off steam, you know?" Well, you should be more careful where you drive," the officer said. "You're making people nervous. You don't fit the profile of the neighborhood." I wanted to tell him that I didn't fit the profile of the country but I knew it would just get me into trouble. — Sherman Alexie

I grew up in a storytelling culture, a tribal culture, but also in an American storytelling culture. — Sherman Alexie

A lot of people have no idea that right now Y.A. (young adult). is the Garden of Eden of literature. — Sherman Alexie

I am extremely conscious of my tribalism. And when you talk about tribalism, you talk about living in a black and white world. I mean, Native American tribalism sovereignty, even the political fight for sovereignty and cultural sovereignty is a very us versus them. And I think a lot of people in this country, especially European Americans and those descended from Europeans don't see themselves as tribal. — Sherman Alexie

Drinking would shut down my seeing and my hearing and my feeling," she used to say. "Why would I want to be in the world if I couldn't touch the world with all of my senses intact? — Sherman Alexie

Can you hear the dreams crackling like a campfire? Can you hear the dreams sweeping through the pine trees and tipis? Can you hear the dreams laughing in the sawdust? Can you hear the dreams shaking just a little bit as the day grows long? Can you hear the dreams putting on a good jacket that smells of fry bread and sweet smoke? Can you hear the dreams stay up late and talk so many stories? — Sherman Alexie

These are things you should learn. Your past is a skeleton walking one step behind you; your future is a skeleton walking one step in front of you. Maybe you don’t wear a watch, but your skeletons do, and they always know what time it is. Now, these skeletons are made of memories, dreams, and voices. And they can trap you in the in-between, between touching and becoming. But they’re not necessarily evil, unless you let them be. — Sherman Alexie

and then she asks me how many sexual partners I've had and I say one or two depending on your definition of what I did to Custer . . . — Sherman Alexie

At the halfway point of any drunken night, there is a moment when an Indian realizes he cannot turn back toward tradition and that he has no map to guide him toward the future. — Sherman Alexie

Those Montana Indians were so tough that white people were scared of them. Can you imagine a place where white people are scared of Indians and not the other way around? That's Montana. — Sherman Alexie

Indians have no monopoly on environmentalism. That's one of the great myths. But we were subsistence livers. They're two different things. Environmentalism is a conscious choice and subsistence is the absence of choice. We had to use everything to survive. And now that we've been assimilated and colonized and we have luxuries and excesses, we're just as wasteful as other people. — Sherman Alexie

I'm quite aware of my differences. I wouldn't classify them as weird — Sherman Alexie

The problem for me with liberals is that we've abdicated our moral responsibility to the universe. — Sherman Alexie

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

They've been screaming about the death of literacy for years, but I think TV is the Gutenberg [printing] press. I think TV is the only thing that keeps us vaguely in democracy even if it's in the hands of the corporate culture. If you're an artist you write in your time. Moaning about the fact that maybe people read more books a hundred years ago - that's not true. I think the same percentage has always read. — Sherman Alexie

Estranged from the tribe that gives no protection, What happens to the soul that hates its reflection? — Sherman Alexie

In order to know somebody through their words, I mean, it has to be an, it has to be a letter, you know? It has to be a long e-mail. It has to be a five-page hand-written letter, you know, it has to be overwhelming and messy and sloppy as humans are. — Sherman Alexie

What if someone picks on me?" I asked Then I'll pick on them". What if someone picks my nose?" I asked. The I'll pick your nose, too" Rowdy said. — Sherman Alexie

She wanted to be buried in a coffin filled with used paperbacks. — Sherman Alexie

it's way too early for him to be talking anyhow but I see in his eyes something and I see in his eyes a voice and I see in his eyes a whole new set of words — Sherman Alexie

Pain is never added to pain. It multiplies. — Sherman Alexie

There have been players with Indian heritage, but there hasn't been a Native-American professional basketball player who became a regular for all sorts of social and political reasons. — Sherman Alexie

We Indians really should be better liars, considering how often we've been lied to. — Sherman Alexie

She told me that every other step was just for me.' But that's only half of the dance,' I said. Yeah,' my father said. 'She was keeping the rest for herself. Nobody can give everything away. It ain't healthy. — Sherman Alexie

I'm not a pacifist by any measure, but I'm also fully aware that the reasons I might go to war could be very dubious. — Sherman Alexie

If you let people into your life a little bit, they can be pretty damn amazing. — Sherman Alexie

I used to sleep with my books in piles all over my bed and sometimes they were the only thing keeping me warm and always the only thing keeping me alive. Books are the best and worst defense. — Sherman Alexie

Life Lessons by Sherman Alexie

1. Sherman Alexie's work emphasizes the importance of understanding and respecting different cultures and backgrounds.
2. His stories often demonstrate how people can overcome adversity and find strength in their own unique experiences.
3. Through his writing, Alexie encourages readers to think critically about their own beliefs and to recognize the value of diversity.