Sherman Alexie Quotes

Spiritual matters should be private.

Late at night I go out and listen to the wind. That's all the wisdom I need. I mean, I love books, but shoot, most of the world's wisdom is not contained in books.

You have to dream big to get big.

Swore he told us not to slow dance with our skeletons.

I thought that once I figured out thirteen, then it was history,

How does one survive these revelations? One just lives.

Oh, no, no, you've got that all wrong. You're not required to respect elders. After all, most people are idiots, regardless of age. In tribal cultures, we just make sure that elders remain an active part of the culture, even if they're idiots. Especially if they're idiots. You can't just abandon your old people, even if they have nothing intelligent to say. Even if they're crazy.

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

They wanted to help me with my pain.

Because I'm an American, I know there's all sorts of international folks who would gladly kidnap and behead me.

There is a good day to die and there is a good day to play the piano.

Am I defined by what I've seen, or do I define the world by what I've witnessed? O, what beautiful or terrible thing waits around the next corner? Who isn't in love with this mystery?

Samuel looked at Chief WalksAlong, at all the Tribal Cops, at Lester. He shifted the ball from his left hip to his right. He spun the ball in his hands, felt the leather against his fingertips, and closed his eyes.
"What the hell are you doing?" the Chief asked.
With his eyes still closed, Samuel drove to the basket, around his defenders, and pulled up for a short jumper. The ball rotated beautifully. Years later, Lester still swore that ball stopped in midair, just spun there like it was on a stick, like the ball wanted to make sure everyone noticed its beauty.
"That shot was vain," Lester said.
"That shot was the best story I ever told." Samuel said.

I hate this little town. It's so small, too small. Everything about it is small. The people here have small ideas, small dreams; they all want to marry each other and live here forever.'
'What do you want to do?' I asked.
'I want to leave as soon as I can. I think I was born with a suitcase.'
...
'Where do you want to go?' I asked.
'Everywhere. I want to walk on the Great Wall of China, I want to walk to the top of the pyramids in Egypt, I want to swim in every ocean, I want to climb Mount Everest, I want to go on an African safari, I want to ride a dog sled in Antarctica. I want all of it; every single piece of everything.

I am still looking for a job. They keep telling me I don't have enough experience. But how can I get enough experience if they don't give me a chance to get experience? Oh, well.

I don't think there's a whole lot of class literature at all. I think most of that has become racially based, and people don't think of it as being class literature.

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

Mick had once come across one of Wilson't books and was surprised to see his face on the back cover. Mick was even more surprised when he read the book. It was pretty good, although Mick was kind of tired of hearing about Indians. Still, Mick thought, Aristotle Little Hawk was a good Indian, even if he was just some character in a book. He wished more Indians like Little Hawk hung out in the bar. He knew Wilson claimed he had some Indian blood, said so inside the book. But Mick did not buy that shit. Mick's great-grandmother was a little bit Indian, but that did not make him Indian. Besides, who the hell would want to be Indian when you could just as easily be white?

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.

Traveling between Reardan and Wellpinit, between the little white town and the reservation, I always felt like a stranger. I was half Indian in one place and half white in the other. It was like being Indian was my job, but it was only a part-time job. And it didn't pay well at all.

That's how it was." "How do you kill somebody accidentally?"

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.

Regarding love, marriage, and sex, both Shakespeare and Sitting Bull knew the only truth: treaties get broken.

Hunger is my crime.

In all those stories, I could fly.

I don't know what any individual should do about crossing her own borders. I only know that I live a happier, more adventurous life, by crossing borders.

Joey and Big Ed loved each other with the kind of straight-boy-devotion that started wars, terror attacks, and video game companies.

No, " Miss Warren said. "Your sister, she's dead

A few days earlier, Chess and Thomas had driven to Spokane for a cheap hamburger. They walked in downtown Spokane and stumbled onto a drunk couple arguing.
"Get the fuck away from me!" the drunk woman yelled at her drunk husband, who squeezed his hand into a fist like he meant to hit her.
Thomas and Chess flinched, then froze, transported back to all of those drunken arguments they'd witnessed and survived.
The drunk couple in downtown Spokane pulled at each other's clothes and hearts, but they were white people. Chess and Thomas knew that white people hurt each other, too. Chess knew that white people felt pain just like Indians, Nerve endings, messages to the brain, reflexes. The doctor swung hammer against knee, and the world collapsed.
"You fucker!" the white woman yelled at her husband, who opened his hands and held them out to his wife. An offering. That hand would not strike her. He pleaded with his wife until she fell back into his arms. That white woman and man held each other while Chess and Thomas watched. A hundred strangers walked by and never noticed any of it.
After that, Chess and Thomas had sat in the van in a downtown parking lot. Thomas began to weep, deep ragged tears that rose along his rib cage, filled his mouth and nose, and exploded out.

I began to count mile markers, made mental lists of everything I really needed: a new pair of shoes, a winter coat for the baby, a ticket for a Greyhound traveling back or ahead five hundred years.

He felt split in two, one crazy man eating hair and one rational man watching a crazy man eat hair. He chewed and swallowed the last pieces of his father's life. He felt like he was building a museum of pain, a freak show, where he was the only visitor viewing the only mutant screaming the only prayer he knew: Come back, Daddy. Come back, Daddy. Come back, Daddy. Come back, Daddy. Come back, Daddy. Come back, Daddy. Come back, Daddy. Come back Daddy ...

Well of course man. We Indians have lost everything. We lost our native land, we lost our languages, we lost our songs and dances. We lost each other. We only know how to lose and be lost.

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.

In other nightmares, in his everyday reality, Victor watched his father take a drink of vodka on a completely empty stomach. Victor could hear that near-poison fall, then hit, flesh and blood, nerve and vein. Maybe it was like lightning tearing an old tree into halves. Maybe it was like a wall of water, a reservation tsunami, crashing onto a small beach. Maybe it was like Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Maybe it was like all that. Maybe. But after he drank, Victor's father would breathe in deep and close his eyes, stretch, and straighten his neck and back. During those long drinks, Victor's father wasn't shaped like a question mark. He looked more like an exclamation point.

I often wonder why I am the one who remember all the pain?

When Indian women begin the search for an Indian man, they carry a huge list of qualifications. He has to have a job. He has to be kind, intelligent, and funny. He has to dance and sing. He should know how to iron his own clothes. Braids would be nice. But as the screwed-up Indian men stagger through their lives, Indian women are forced to amend their list of qualifications. Eventually, Indian men need only to have their own teeth to get snagged.

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.

At what point do we just re-create the people who have disappeared from our lives?

I was young and frightened and craved respect and its ugly cousin, approval, so I did as I was told.

Utensil

While feasting
On venison stew
After we buried my mother,
I recognized my spoon

And realized my family
Had been using it
For at least forty-two years.
How does one commemorate

The ordinary? I thanked
The spoon for being a spoon
And finished my stew.
How does one get through

A difficult time? How does
A son properly mourn his mother?
It helps to run the errands--
To get shit done. I washed

That spoon, dried it,
And put it back
In the drawer,
But I did it consciously,

Paying attention
To my hands, my wrists,
And the feel of steel
Against my fingertips.

Then my wife drove us back
Home to Seattle, where I wrote
This poem about ordinary
Grief. Thank you, poem,

For being a poem. Thank you,
Paper and ink, for being paper
And ink. Thank you, desk,
For being a desk. Thank you,

Mother, for being my mother.
Thank you for your imperfect love.
It almost worked. It mostly worked.
Or partly worked. It was almost enough.

Doesn't an Indian tribe finally surrender to colonization by becoming as capitalistic as our conquerors? Isn't indigenous economic sovereignty one of the sneakiest damn oxymorons of all time?

In a real-world way, my gifts are very limited in terms of what I can do.

My only purpose is to teach children to rebel against authority figures.

Sometimes, she wondered what she was missing, if her life was somehow incomplete because she didn't see the reflection of her face in the face of a son or daughter. Maybe. That's what mothers told her: Oh, you don't know what you're missing; it's spiritual; I feel closer to the earth, to the creator of all things. Perhaps all of that was true
it must be true
but Grace also knew that mothering was work, was manual labor, and unpaid manual labor at that. She'd known too many women who'd vanished after childbirth; women whose hopes and fears had been pushed to the back of the family closet; women who'd magically been replaced by their children and their children's desires.

Sixty percent of all Indians live in urban areas, but nobody's writing about them. They're really an underrepresented population, and the ironic thing is very, very few of those we call Native American writers actually grew up on reservations, and yet most of their work is about reservations.

The Staging

In the weeks after my mother's death, I sleep
Four or five hours a night, often interrupted
By dreams, and take two or three naps a day.

It seems like enough. I can survive if I keep
This sleep schedule as it has been constructed
For me. But if it seems my reflexes are delayed,

Or if I sway when I walk, or weep or do not weep,
Please don't worry. I'm not under destruction.
My grief has cast me in a lethargic cabaret.

So pay the cover charge and take your seat.
This mourning has become a relentless production
And I've got seventy-eight roles to play.

Let's get one thing out of the way: Mexican immigration is an oxymoron. Mexicans are indigenous. So, in a strange way, I'm pleased that the racist folks of Arizona have
officially declared, in banning me alongside Urrea, Baca, and Castillo, that their anti-immigration laws are also anti-Indian. I'm also strangely pleased that the folks of Arizona
have officially announced their fear of an educated underclass. You give those brown kids some books about brown folks and what happens? Those brown kids change the world. In the effort to vanish our books, Arizona has actually given them enormous power. Arizona has made our books sacred documents now.

But, no matter what they do, keep walking keep moving. And don't wear a watch. Hell, Indians never need to wear a watch because your skeletons will always remind you about the time. See, it is always now. That's what Indian time is. The past, the future, all of it is wrapped up in the now. That's how it is. We are trapped in the now.

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

Are you asking me out? For a date?" asked Marie. She wasn't surprised. It had happened to her before. She thought David was just another white guy who wanted to rebel against his white middle-class childhood by dating a brown woman. He wouldn't have been the first white guy to do such a thing. She had watched quite a few white guys pursue brown female students, especially Asian nationals, with a missionary passion. Co to college, find a cute minority woman, preferably one with limited English, and colonize her by sleeping with her.

My grandmother's greatest gift was tolerance. Now, in the old days, Indians used to be forgiving of any kind of eccentricity. In fact, weird people were often celebrated. Epileptics were often shamans because people just assumed that God gave seizure-visions to the lucky ones. Gay people were seen as magical too. I mean, like in many cultures, men were viewed as warriors and women were viewed as caregivers. But gay people, being both male and female, were seen as both warriors and caregivers. Gay people could do anything. They were like Swiss Army knives! My grandmother had no use for all the gay bashing and homophobia in the world, especially among other Indians. "Jeez," she said, Who cares if a man wants to marry another man? All I want to know is who's going to pick up all the dirty socks?" (155)

The contemporary motto for the mullet-wearer is "business in front, party in the back" but the Indian mullet warrior motto was "I don't want my hair to get in my eyes as I'm kicking your ass.

I would close my eyes and dream of something strong, dream of horses exploding, rising into the air, their hearts beating survive, survive, survive.

I would steal horses
for you, if there were any left

Listen you have to read a book three times before you know it.

All I owe the world is my art

More and more, he heard his spine playing stick games through his skin, singing old dusty words, the words of all his years.

I think that white women are more apt to read laterally. So I think there's some strong identification for women, and their political and social positions, and minorities. I think that the political power of, let's say, the average Indian man and a white woman are pretty equal.

Sir, in your thirty-nine years as a parent, you broke your children's hearts, collectively and individually, 612 times and you did this without ever striking any human being in anger. Does this absence of physical violence make you a better man than you might otherwise have been?

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.

Hey," Victor said. "Tell me a story."
Thomas closed his eyes and told this story: "There were these two Indian boys who wanted to be warriors. But it was too late to be warriors in the old way. All the horses were gone. So the two Indian boys stole a car and drove to the city. They parked the stolen car in front of the police station and then hitchhiked back home to the reservation. When they got back, all their friends cheered and their parents' eyes shone with pride. You were very brave, everybody said to the two Indian boys. Very brave."
"Ya-hey," Victor said. "That's a good one. I wish I could be a warrior.

I learned how to stop crying.
I learned how to hide inside of myself.
I learned how to be somebody else.
I learned how to be cold and numb.

But why did my mother apportion the truth? Why did she tell me one version of history and tell another to my sister? I imagine my mother's pain and shame were so huge that she could only approach them piece by piece. I also think my mother was afraid to burden any of her children with the entire truth. My mother needed us to know. She needed to tell her story. But each of her children only got one piece--one chapter--of the book. I imagine my other siblings--and perhaps nieces, nephews, and cousins--were also given parts of my mother's most painful and truthful stories.

And, in this way, I recognize the way in which I have protected myself through the careful apportioning of secrets, of personal details, of emotions. I know how I reveal certain parts of myself only to certain groups of people.

Dear wife, I'm sorry that I am mysteriously incapable of folding clean laundry, but I iron, oh, I iron. Sweetheart, I'll make your white shirt so crisp and sharp that it will split atoms as you walk.

I want to rasp into sober cryptology and say something dynamic, but tonight is my laundry night.

Sharing dark skin doesn't necessarily make two men brothers

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.

She thought she could be saved. She thought he could take her hand and owldance her around the circle. She thought she could watch him fancydance, watch his calf muscles grow more and more perfect with each step. She thought he was Crazy Horse.

You can do it." Coach said. "I can do it." "You can do it." "I can do it." Do you understand how amazing it is to hear that from an adult? Do you know how amazing it is to hear that from anybody? It's one of the simplest sentences in the world, just four words, but they're the four hugest words in the world when they're put together. (189)

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.

The earth is our grandmother and that technology has become our mother and that they both hate each other.

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.

The killer simply picked any one of the men in gray suits and followed them from office building to cash machine, from lunchtime restaurant back to office building. Those gray suits were not happy, yet showed their unhappiness only during moments of weakness. Punching the buttons of a cash machine that refused to work. Yelling at a taxi that had come too close. Insulting the homeless people who begged for spare change. But the killer also saw the more subtle signs of unhappiness. A slight limp in uncomfortable shoes. Eyes closed, head thrown back while waiting for the traffic signal. The slight hesitation before opening a door. The men in gray suits wanted to escape, but their hatred and anger trapped them.

You know, people speak in poetry all the time. They just don't realize it.

Driving home, I heard the explosion and thought it was a new story born. But, Adrian, it's the same old story, whispered past the same false teeth. How can we imagine a new language when the language of the enemy keeps our dismembered tongues tied to his belt? How can we imagine a new alphabet when the old jumps off billboards down into our stomachs? Adrian, what did you say? I want to rasp into sober cryptology and say something dynamic but tonight is my laundry night. How do we imagine a new life when a pocketful of quarters weighs our possibilities down?

Also because I'm ambiguously ethnic looking, you know, I come to New York and I can be anything. People generally think I'm half of whatever they are.

The white woman across the aisle from me says 'Look,
look at all the history, that house
on the hill there is over two hundred years old, '
as she points out the window past me

into what she has been taught. I have learned
little more about American history during my few days
back East than what I expected and far less
of what we should all know of the tribal stories

whose architecture is 15,000 years older
than the corners of the house that sits
museumed on the hill. 'Walden Pond, '
the woman on the train asks, 'Did you see Walden Pond? '

and I don't have a cruel enough heart to break
her own by telling her there are five Walden Ponds
on my little reservation out West
and at least a hundred more surrounding Spokane,

the city I pretended to call my home. 'Listen, '
I could have told her. 'I don't give a shit
about Walden. I know the Indians were living stories
around that pond before Walden's grandparents were born

and before his grandparents' grandparents were born.
I'm tired of hearing about Don-fucking-Henley saving it, too,
because that's redundant. If Don Henley's brothers and sisters
and mothers and father hadn't come here in the first place

then nothing would need to be saved.'
But I didn't say a word to the woman about Walden
Pond because she smiled so much and seemed delighted
that I thought to b

The white people always want to fight someone and they always get the dark-skinned people to do the fighting.

Sometimes you don't have enough money to hire a real science teacher. Sometimes you have an old real science teacher who retires or quits and leaves you without a replacement. And if you don't have a real science teacher, then you pick one of the other teachers and make him the science teacher.
And that's why small-town kids sometimes don't know the truth about petrified wood.

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

I saw a man swerve his car and try to hit a stray dog, but the quick mutt dodged between two parked cars and made his escape. God, I thought, did I just see what I think I saw? At the next red light, I pulled up beside the man and stared hard at him. He knew that'd I seen his murder attempt, but he didn't care. He smiled and yelled loud enough for me to hear him through our closed windows: 'Don't give me that face unless you're going to do something about it. Come on, tough guy, what are you going to do?' I didn't do anything. I turned right on the green. He turned left against traffic. I don't know what happened to that man or the dog, but I drove home and wrote this poem. Why do poets think they can change the world? The only life I can save is my own.

Everyone I have lost in the closing of a door the click of the lock is not forgotten, they do not die but remain within the soft edges of the earth, the ash of house fires and cancer in sin and forgiveness huddled under old blankets dreaming their way into my hands, my heart closing tight like fists. - Indian Boy Love Song #1

My career means, if you're a non-Indian writing about Indians, at least there's one Indian in your rearview mirror.

It was July. Crazy hot and dry. It hadn't rained in, like, sixty days. Drought hot. Scorpion hot. Vultures flying circles in the sky hot.

They're all gone, my tribe is gone. Those blankets they gave us, infected with smallpox, have killed us. I'm the last, the very last, and I'm sick, too. So very sick. Hot. My fever burning so hot.
I have to take off my clothes, feel the cold air, splash water across my bare skin. And dance. I'll dance a Ghost Dance. I'll bring them back. Can you hear the drums? I can hear them, and it's my grandfather and grandmother singing. Can you hear them?
I dance one step and my sister rises from the ash. I dance another and a buffalo crashes down from the sky onto a log cabin in Nebraska. With every step, an Indian rises. With every other step, a buffalo falls.
I'm growing, too. My blisters heal, my muscles stretch, expand. My tribe dances behind me. At first they are no bigger than children. Then they begin to grow, larger than me, larger than the trees around us. The buffalo come to join us and their hooves shake the earth, knock all the white people from their beds, send their plates crashing to the floor.
We dance in circles growing larger and larger until we are standing on the shore, watching all the ships returning to Europe. All the white hands are waving good-bye and we continue to dance, dance until the ships fall off the horizon, dance until we are so tall and strong that the sun is nearly jealous. We dance that way.

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

Do you understand how amazing it is to hear that from an adult? Do you know how amazing it is to hear that from anybody? It's one of the simplest sentences in the world, just four words, but they're the four hugest words in the world when they're put together.
You can do it.

Yes, I have often battled Grief. / Both of us used our teeth.

I wasn't afraid of the dark nearly as much as I was afraid of the monsters who hunted by night and day.

World. Put down your fucking guns and pick up your kids.

If you can catch crazy, I'm a walking epidemic.

I am a zero on the rez. And if you subtract zero from zero, you still have zero. So what's the point of subtracting when the answer is always the same?

I feel like a carton of eggs holding up an elephant.

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.

The eyes open to a blue telephone
In the bathroom of this five-star hotel.

I wonder whom I should call? A plumber,
Proctologist, urologist, or priest?

Who is blessed among us and most deserves
The first call? I choose my father because

He's astounded by bathroom telephones.
I dial home. My mother answers. "Hey, Ma,"

I say, "Can I talk to Poppa?" She gasps,
And then I remember that my father

Has been dead for nearly a year. "Shit, Mom,"
I say. "I forgot he's dead. I'm sorry -

How did I forget?" "It's okay," she says.
"I made him a cup of instant coffee

This morning and left it on the table -
Like I have for, what, twenty-seven years -

And I didn't realize my mistake
Until this afternoon." My mother laughs

At the angels who wait for us to pause
During the most ordinary of days

And sing our praise to forgetfulness
Before they slap our souls with their cold wings.

Those angels burden and unbalance us.
Those fucking angels ride us piggyback.

Those angels, forever falling, snare us
And haul us, prey and praying, into dust.

I think I was born with a suitcase.

And he only talks about his dreams with me. And I only talk about my dreams with him.

Years ago, homosexuals were given special status within the tribe. They had powerful medicine. I think it's even more true today, even though our tribe has assimilated into homophobia. I mean, a person has to have magic to assert their identity without regard to all the bullshit, right?

We only know how to lose and be lost.

Lies have short shelf lives. Lies go bad. Lies rot and stink up the joint.