Quotes from Sherman Alexie

When you resort to violence to prove a point, you've just experienced a profound failure of imagination.

I used to sleep with my books in piles all over my bed and sometimes they were the only thing keeping me warm and always the only thing keeping me alive. Books are the best and worst defense.

Humor was an antiseptic that cleaned the deepest of personal wounds.

Books and beer are the best and worst defense.

We only know how to lose and be lost.

I feel like a carton of eggs holding up an elephant.

We Indians really should be better liars, considering how often we've been lied to.

Yes, I am Irish and Indian, which would be the coolest blend in the world if my parents were around to teach me how to be Irish and Indian. But they're not here and haven't been for years, so I'm not really Irish or Indian. I am a blank sky, a human solar eclipse.

The world is divided by two different tribes. The people who are assholes and the people who are not.

What's the difference between bulimics and anorexics? I ask. Anorexics are anorexics all the time, she says, I'm only bulimic when I'm throwing up. Wow. She sounds just like my dad! I'm only an alcoholic when I get drunk. There are all kinds of addicts, I guess. We all have pain. And we all look for ways to make the pain go away. Penelope gorges on her pain and then throws it up and flushes it away. My dad drinks his pain away. (107)

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

She was in pain and I loved her, sort of loved her, I guess, so I kind of had to love her pain, too.

there are some children who aren't really children at all, they're just pillars of flame that burn everything they touch. And there are some children who are just pillars of ash, that fall apart when you touch them...

Somebody dies and people eat your food. Funny how that works.

He made me realize that hard work--that the act of finishing, of completing, of accomplishing a task--is joyous

Listen you have to read a book three times before you know it.

Imagination is the politics of dreams; imagination turns every word into a bottle rocket. . . . Imagine every day is Independence Day and save us from traveling the river changed; save us from hitchhiking the long road home. Imagine an escape. Imagine that your own shadow on the wall is a perfect door. Imagine a song stronger than penicillin. Imagine a spring with water that mends broken bones. Imagine a drum which wraps itself around your heart. Imagine a story that puts wood in the fireplace.

That's how I do this life sometimes by making the ordinary just like magic and just like a card trick and just like a mirror and just like the disappearing. Every Indian learns how to be a magician and learns how to misdirect attention and the dark hand is always quicker than the white eye and no matter how close you get to my heart you will never find out my secrets and I'll never tell you and I'll never show you the same trick twice. I'm traveling heavy with illusions.

My school and my tribe are so poor and sad that we have to study from the same dang books our parents studied from. That is absolutely the saddest thing in the world.

At the halfway point of any drunken night, there is a moment when an Indian realizes he cannot turn back toward tradition and that he has no map to guide him toward the future.

In the middle of a crazy and drunk life, you have to hang onto the good and sober moments tightly.

And believe me, a good piece of chicken can make anybody believe in the existence of God.

I know only, like, five Indians in our whole tribe who have never drunk alcohol. And my grandmother was one of them. 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? (158)

Gordie, the white boy genius, gave me this book by a Russian dude named Tolstoy, who wrote, 'Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.' Well, I hate to argue with a Russian genius, but Tolstoy didn't know Indians, and he didn't know that all Indian families are unhappy for the same exact reasons: the frikkin' booze.