Quotes from Sherman Alexie

If the government wants to hide somebody, there's probably no place more isolated than my reservation, which is located approximately one million miles north of Important and two billion miles west of Happy.

But now I want it to pour. I want it to storm. I want to be clean.

Being colonized automatically makes you bipolar.

I am surrounded by people who trust me to be a respectful stranger

Listen said Mather. I understand what you're going through, I really do. An Indian woman in college. I understand. I'm a Marxist. Really, said Marie. I'm a Libra.

That's right I am a book kisser. Maybe that's kind of perverted or maybe it's just romantic and highly intelligent.

After neurosurgery, I have learned that my brain is a boardinghouse where my waking consciousness rents one room with a hot plate and a black-and-white TV while the rest of the rooms are occupied by a random assortment of banshees, ghosts, mimes wearing eagle feathers, and approximately twelve thousand strangers who look exactly like me.

Overnight, I became a good player. I suppose it had something to do with confidence. I mean, I'd always been the lowest Indian on the reservation totem pole - I wasn't expected to be good so I wasn't. But in Reardan, my coach and the other players wanted me to be good. They needed me to be good. They expected me to be good. And so I became good. I wanted to live up to expectations. I guess that's what it comes down to. The power of expectations.

My hopes and dreams floated up in a mushroom cloud. What do you do when the world has declared nuclear war on you?

What is it like to be a Spokane Indian without wild salmon? It is like being a Christian if Jesus had never rolled back the stone and risen from his tomb.

I heard it on the wind. I heard it from the birds. I felt it in the sunlight.

And ready to seizure at any moment. But still useful, and maybe even a little bit beautiful and sacred and magical.

After years of sleeping together, I still love to stay up late after you've passed into sleep so I can hear you say things you would never repeat when awake. It's like loving two people, each distinct and beautiful, as night from day as you from me, all of us together forming a continuous grace.

Well, I don't mean boner in the sexual sense," Gordy said. "I don't think you should run through life with a real erect penis. But you should approach each book—you should approach life—with the real possibility that you might get a metaphorical boner at any point.

I mean, yeah, my dad would sometimes go on a drinking binge and be gone for a week, but those white dads can completely disappear without ever leaving the living room.

Reservations were meant to be prisons, you know? Indians were supposed to move onto reservations and die. We were supposed to disappear.

Great pain is repetitive. Grief is repetitive. And, maybe, this repetition can become a chant inside a healing ceremony.

He sang 'Stairway to Heaven' in four different languages but never knew where that staircase stood.

Okay, so it's like each of these books is a mystery. Every book is a mystery. And if you read all the books ever written, it's like you've read one giant mystery. And no matter how much you learn, you just keep on learning there is so much more you need to learn.

That word means 'earth-dream'. And, depending on how you use it, it means we, the people, are dreaming the earth into being. And it also means the earth is dreaming us, the people, into being. We are dreaming each other. And making each other real. And it means other things, too, that I don't understand. That I might never understand. But I am going to keep learning.

But I am more afraid of the quieter forms of right-wing anger and sociopathy that have found power with Donald Trump's election. I never directly feared for my life and career during a Republican presidency until Trump won the office. I have never felt so scared for the peace and safety of the entire world.

La pobreza no te hace fuerte ni te da lecciones de perseverancia. No, la pobreza sólo te enseña a ser pobre.

I don't recall the moment when I officially became a storyteller—a talented liar—but here I must quote Simon Ortiz, the Acoma Pueblo writer, who said, "Listen. If it's fiction, then it better be true.

How does one survive these revelations? One just lives.