Quotes from Sherman Alexie

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.

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote that the sign of a superior mind "is the ability to hold two opposing ideas at the same time.

It really made me wish I was Roman or Greek, you know? A classical Greek god would have killed his lying, cheating father and then given him forgiveness. And a classical Greek god would have better abs, too. That's what Greek gods are all about, you know? Patricide and low body fat.

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.

Hey, Mom, I'm a married woman now. I want to have ten babies and live here forever and ever. How weird is that? It's almost ROMANTIC. 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.

You can't teach at our school if you don't live in the compound. It was like some kind of prison-work farm for our liberal, white, vegetarian do-gooders and conservative, white missionary saviors.

He was going to punish me now. He couldn't beat me up with his old man fists, but he could hurt me with his old man words.

What's real? I ain't interested in what's real. I'm interested in how things should be.

Imagine Columbus landed in 1492 and some tribe or another drowned him in the ocean. Would Lester FallsApart still be shoplifting in the 7-11?

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

He was my best friend and I needed him.

Because I want to be remembered.

What do you have to worry about? That you're lonely? That you have a mortgage? That your wife doesn't love you? F you, F you. I have to worry about having enough to eat!

Don't live up to your stereotypes.

Shit, he said. I don't know why you're feeling sorry for yourself because you ain't had to fight a war. You're lucky. Shit, all you had was that damn Desert Storm. Should have called it Dessert Storm because it just made the fat cats get fatter. It was all sugar and whipped cream with a cherry on top. And besides that, you didn't even have to fight in it. All you lost during that was was sleep because you stayed up all night watching CNN.

Did you know that you can be killed by a benign tumor? Imagine that news headline: Native American poet killed by oxymoron.

Here's a fact: Some people want to live more Than others do.

When people consider the meaning of genocide, they might only think of corpses being pushed into mass graves. But a person can be genocided - can have every connection to his past severed - and live to be an old man whose ribcage is a haunted house around his heart.

How can we imagine a new language when the language of the enemy keeps our dismembered tongues tied to his belt?

It made me cry for myself.

The connection was good. I could hear her breathing in the spaces between our words. How do you talk to the real person whose ghost has haunted you? How do you tell the difference between the two?

And that's when I knew that I was going to be okay.

One play can determine the course of a game. One play can change your momentum forever.

How can you tell the difference between the good guys and the bad guys when they say the same things?