Quotes from Sherman Alexie

You want the good life? You live where white people live, you go to school where white people go to school, and you shop where white people shop.

That's the whole point of life, you know? To meet new people.

If you care about something enough, it's going to make you cry. But you have to use it. Use your tears. Use your pain. Use your fear. Get mad. Arnold, get mad.

Well, I think the worst part about tribalism is its tendency to fundamentalize, and if I can fight fundamentalism in any of its forms I'm happy.

Poverty doesn't give you strength or teach you lessons about perseverance. No, poverty only teaches you how to be poor.

I don't know what any individual should do about crossing her own borders. I only know that I live a happier, more adventurous life, by crossing borders.

I've come to the point in my life where I encourage young Native Americans to become much more selfish about their personal needs and wants.

When you read a piece of writing that you admire, send a note of thanks to the author.

In a real-world way, my gifts are very limited in terms of what I can do.

I think that white women are more apt to read laterally. So I think there's some strong identification for women, and their political and social positions, and minorities. I think that the political power of, let's say, the average Indian man and a white woman are pretty equal.

If I wasn't writing poems I'd be washing my hands all the time.

She wanted to be buried in a coffin filled with used paperbacks.

You have to love somebody that much to also hate them that much, too.

I learned how to stop crying. I learned how to hide inside of myself. I learned how to be somebody else. I learned how to be cold and numb.

Drinking would shut down my seeing and my hearing and my feeling,' she used to say. 'Why would I want to be in the world if I couldn't touch the world with all of my senses intact?

If it's fiction, then it better be true.

Read. Read 1000 pages for every 1 page that you write.

I think the world is a series of broken dams and floods, and my cartoons are tiny little lifeboats.

When it comes to death, we know that laughter and tears are pretty much the same thing.

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? I think all of us are always five years old in the presence and absence of our parents.

Your past is a skeleton walking one step behind you, and your future is a a skeleton walking one step in front of you. Maybe you don't wear a watch, but your skeletons do, and they always know what time it is.

Teenagers read millions of books every year. They read for entertainment and for education. They read because of school assignments and pop culture fads. And there are millions of teens who read because they are sad and lonely and enraged. They read because they live in an often-terrible world. They read because they believe despite the callow protestations of certain adults that books-especially the dark and dangerous ones-will save them.

I didn't know what to say to her. What do you say to people when they ask how it feels to lose everything? When every planet in your solar system has exploded?

Grief is when you feel so helpless and stupid that you think nothing will ever be right again, and your macaroni and cheese tastes like sawdust, and you can't even jerk off because it seems like too much trouble.