Quotes from Sherman Alexie

Survival = Anger × Imagination. Imagination is the only weapon on the reservation.

But she was beautiful, with hair and eyes so dark and long. He imagined she was a reservation eclipse. Full. He needed special glasses to look at her; he could barely survive her reflection. "You're a constellation," he said.

Who cares if a man wants to marry another man? All i want to know is who's going to ick up all the dirty socks?

Sure, we thought the acres That we tilled were sacred, But how could we have known That wheat can haunt like ghosts

Everyone wanted to call her sweetheart. But she only danced for me. That's how it was. 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.

Fuck you,' Samuel said as he stole the ball, drove down the court, and went in for a two-handed, rattle-the-foundations, ratify-a-treaty, abolish-income-tax, close-the-uranium-mines monster dunk.

So I draw because I want to talk to the world. And I want the world to pay attention to me.

Nothing ever really happens, you know. Life is infinitesimal and incremental and inconsequential.

If God were good, why would he create Rush Limbaugh?

My sister is running away to get lost, but I am running away because I want to find something. And my parents love me so much that they want to help me. Yeah, Dad is a drunk and Mom is an ex-drunk, but they don't want their kids to be drunks.

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.

Is there really a difference between that killing and this killing? Does God approve of some killing and not other killing? If I kill these soldiers so that Small Saint and Bow Boy can escape, does that make me a hero?

All of these white kids and teachers, who were so suspicious of me when I first arrived, had learned to care about me. Maybe some of them even loved me. And I'd been so suspicious of them. And now I care about a lot of them. And loved a few of them.

But how can I get enough experience if they don't give me a chance to get experience?

I don't know if hope is white. But I do know that hope for me is like some mythical creature.

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

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.

But it wasn't okay. It was about as far from okay as you can get. If okay was the earth, then I was standing on Jupiter. I don't know why I said it was okay. For some reason, I was protecting the feelings of the man who had broken my heart yet again.

Had she been hanging on to her dream of being a writer, but only barely hanging on, and something made her let go?

The morning of the game, I'd woken up in my rez house so my dad could drive me the twenty-two miles to Reardan, so I could get on the team bus for the ride back to the reservation. Crazy.

Jeez, it was a lot of pressure to put on a kid. I was carrying the burden of my race, you know? I was going to get a bad back from it.

But despite the fact that Reardan is a tiny town, people can still be strangers to each other.

You're always making up stuff from the past," she said. "And the stuff you imagine is always better than the stuff that actually happened.

We all laughed and laughed Because, yes, my mother was Exactly the kind of mortal Who challenged the Gods. She was the reservation Medea. She was the indigenous Antigone. But just imagine how it felt to be Her fragile child. I never stopped Being afraid of her. I never left That dark porch. I am still Sleeping with those dogs.