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

Sherman Alexie Quotes

The two funniest tribes I’ve ever been around are Indians and Jews, so I guess that says something about the inherent humor of genocide.

— Sherman Alexie

I take it, no fool ever made a bargain for his soul with the devil; the fool is too much of a fool, or the devil too much of a devil – I don’t know which.

— Sherman Alexie

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

I draw because words are too unpredictable. I draw because words are too limited.

— 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?

— Sherman Alexie

Love at first sight is always romantic, right? But have you ever heard about people becoming best friends at first sight? Have you ever heard of two Indian boys becoming instant best friends? Becoming best friends the first time they ever talk to each other? After they’ve only said maybe ten words to each other?

— Sherman Alexie

I figured any nightmare would be better than my reality.

— Sherman Alexie

We were supposed to make you give up being Indian. Your songs and stories and language and dancing. Everything. We weren’t trying to kill Indian people. We were trying to kill Indian culture.

— Sherman Alexie

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

— Sherman Alexie

Scholars talk about the endless cycle of poverty and racism and classism and crime. But I don’t see it as a cycle, as a circle. I see it as a locked room filled with the people who share my DNA. This room has recently been set afire and there’s only one escape hatch, ten feet off the ground. And I know I have to build a ladder out of the bones of my fallen family in order to climb to safety.

— Sherman Alexie

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

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

— Sherman Alexie

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

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

— Sherman Alexie

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

Despite all the talk of diversity and division – of red and blue states, of black and white and brown people, of rich and poor, gay and straight – Paul believed that Americans were shockingly similar. How can we be so different, thought Paul, if we all know the lyrics to the same one thousand songs?

— Sherman Alexie

Paul believed American greatness and the ghosts of that greatness surrounded him. But who could publicly express such a belief and not be ridiculed as a patriotic fool? Paul believed in his fellow Americans, in their extraordinary decency, in their awesome ability to transcend religion, race, and class, but what leftist could state such things and ever hope to get laid by any other lefty?

— Sherman Alexie

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

— Sherman Alexie

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

— Sherman Alexie

Lynn’s parents refused to accept Sean Casey’s Indian blood and, in fact, exhibited a kind of denial that was nearly pathological in its intensity.

— Sherman Alexie
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