Quotes from Sherman Alexie

He said his prayers just in case his parents had been wrong about God all those years.

She's the Sandwhich Lady. Excuse me? She delivers sandwiches to the homeless. Really. I can't imagine her in such a role. What do you mean? Well, she always seems so impulsive, so emotional. What's the word I'm searching for? So individualistic. Not tribal at all...

During one week when I was little, Dad got stopped three times for DWI: Driving While Indian.

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

Elvis Presley is still showing up in 7-11 stores across the country, even though he's been dead for years, so I figure music just might be the most important thing there is.

4. On the first night of our honeymoon we lie in bed, too exhausted for sex or conversation. Instead, we listen to the surf, wave after wave after wave.

He smiled mysteriously. Adults are so good at smiling mysteriously. Do they go to college for that?

Adam and Eve covered their privates with fig leaves; the first Indians covered their privates with their tiny hands.

He doesn't hurt you because you're the only good thing in his life. He doesn't want to give that up. It's the only thing he hasn't given up.

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.

Well, in the early days of humans, the community was our only protection against predators, and against the starvation. We survived because we trusted one another.

I know there has never been a human being or a television show, no matter how great, that could measure up to a great book.

I then vowed to finally finish the years-late sequel to my best-selling book The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. I needed that money. My mother needed that money. I hadn't been able to finish the book because of the pathological fear that my sequel would be The Phantom Menace instead of The Empire Strikes Back. But, on the airplane, I thought, Okay, okay, Phantom sucked, but it still made big cash. I'm gonna Yoda this book for my mother.

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.

Of course, she didn't care about me. She mostly made fun of me. But that just made me love her even more. She was out of my league, and even though I was only twelve, I knew that I'd be one of those guys who always fell in love with the unreachable, ungettable, and uninterested.

But epics are rarely honest, and honesty should never be epic.

Junior talks about it—relating to dozens if not hundreds of tribes. Even as the world tries to define you, narrow the definition of you, don't do it to yourself. True

Gay people could do anything. They were like Swiss Army knives!

books can be both mirrors and windows—mirrors in which readers can see themselves on the pages of literature and thereby know their existence in the world is valid and true, and windows into worlds they might never have imagined.

If I had a baseball bat and bulldozer, maybe I could stop him. But without real weapons, without a pistol, a man-eating lion, and a vial of bubonic plague, I had zero change of competing against him.

He'd been just like all of the other performers in the world. He'd wanted to be universally loved. He wasn't all that different from Victor, Thomas, or even Junior. They all got onstage and wanted the audience to believe in them. They all wanted the audience to throw their room keys, panties, confessions, flowers, and songs onstage. They wanted the audience to trust them with their secrets.

What do you say to people when they ask you how it feels to lose everything? When every planet in your solar system has exploded?

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

Mostly, I just think Mr. P is a lonely old man who used to be a lonely young man. And for some reason I don't understand, lonely white people love to hang around lonelier Indians.