Sherman Alexie
"I used to think the world was broken down by tribes," I said. "By black and white. By Indian and white. But I know that isn't true. The world is only broken into two tribes: The people who are assholes and the people who are not."Collection: Black And White
I write books for teenagers because I vividly remember what it felt like to be a teen facing everyday and epic dangers. I don't write to protect them. It's far too late for that. I write to give them weapons-in the form of words and ideas-that will help them fight their monsters. I write in blood because I remember what it felt like to bleed.Collection: Teenager
When you resort to violence to prove a point, you’ve just experienced a profound failure of imagination.Collection: Profound
If you let people into your life a little bit, they can be pretty damn amazing.Collection: Inspiring
Last September 16th, I was walking in downtown Seattle when this pick-up truck pulls up in front of me. Guy leans out the window and yells, "Go back to your own country," and I was laughing so hard because it wasn't so much a hate crime as a crime of irony.Collection: Country
These are things you should learn. Your past is a skeleton walking one step behind you; your future is 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. Now, these skeletons are made of memories, dreams, and voices. And they can trap you in the in-between, between touching and becoming. But they’re not necessarily evil, unless you let them be.Collection: Dream
If you teach kids how to tell stories, they have a better chance at everything.Collection: Kids
He loved her, of course, but better than that, he chose her, day after day. Choice: that was the thing.Collection: Love
If one reads enough books one has a fighting chance. Or better, one's chances of survival increase with each book one reads.Collection: Book
Most of my heroes are just decent people. Decency is rare and underrated.Collection: Hero
What kind of life can you have in a house without books?Collection: Book
Can you hear the dreams crackling like a campfire? Can you hear the dreams sweeping through the pine trees and tipis? Can you hear the dreams laughing in the sawdust? Can you hear the dreams shaking just a little bit as the day grows long? Can you hear the dreams putting on a good jacket that smells of fry bread and sweet smoke? Can you hear the dreams stay up late and talk so many stories?Collection: Dream
The world, even the smallest parts of it, is filled with things you don't know.Collection: World
Do you know why the Indian rain dances always worked? Because the Indians would keep dancing until it rained.Collection: Rain
I grabbed my book and opened it up. I wanted to smell it. Heck, I wanted to kiss it. Yes, kiss it. That's right, I am a book kisser. Maybe that's kind of perverted or maybe it's just romantic and highly intelligent.Collection: Book
At least half the country thinks the mascot issue is insignificant. But I think it's indicative of the ways in which Indians have no cultural power. We're still placed in the past. So we're either in the past or we're only viewed through casinos.Collection: Country
If you're good at it, and you love it, and it helps you navigate the river of the world, then it can't be wrong.Collection: Rivers
Reardan is the rich white farm town that sits in the wheat fields exactly 22 miles away from the Rez. And it's a hick town I suppose filled with farmers and rednecks and racists cops who stop every Indian that drives through. During one week when I was little dad got stopped three times for DWI- Driving While Indian.Collection: Dad
I'm quite aware of my differences. I wouldn't classify them as weirdCollection: Differences
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.Collection: Hurt
If a parent doesn't want his/her child to read a book then there is always an alternative text to read. But the book banners want to control what every child reads.Collection: Children
I draw because words are too unpredictable. I draw because words are too limited. If you speak and write in English, or Spanish, or Chinese, or any other language, then only a certain percentage of human beings will get your meaning. But when you draw a picture everybody can understand it. If I draw a cartoon of a flower, then every man, woman, and child in the world can look at it and say, "That's a flower.Collection: Children
Summer coming like a car from down the highway.Collection: Summer
The streetlight outside my house shines on tonight and I'm watching it like it could give me a vision. James ain't talked ever and he looks at that streetlight like it was a word and maybe like it was a verb. James wanted to streetlight me and make me bright and beautiful so all the moths and bats would circle me like I was the center of the world an held secrets.Collection: Beautiful
When I had no money, and a great book came out, I couldn't get it. I had to wait. I love the idea that I have hardcover books here and at home that I haven't read yet. That's how I view that I'm rich. I have hardcover books I may never read.Collection: Book
Corliss wondered what happens to a book that sits unread on a library shelf for thirty years. Can a book rightfully be called a book if it never gets read? If a tree falls in a forest and gets pulped to make paper for a book that never gets read, but there's nobody there to read it, does it make a sound?Collection: Book
If one reads enough books, one has a fighting chance.Collection: Book
I don't think the revisionist historians are accurate. I think their agendas are clouded by selfishness and anger and rage.Collection: Thinking
Because I'm an American, I know there's all sorts of international folks who would gladly kidnap and behead me.Collection: Folks
Corliss had never once considered the fate of library books. She'd never wondered how many books go unread. She loved books. How could she not worry about the unread? She felt like a disorganized scholar, an inconsiderate lover, an abusive mother, and a cowardly soldier.Collection: Mother
I'm not a pacifist by any measure, but I'm also fully aware that the reasons I might go to war could be very dubious.Collection: War
I recognize now that the conditions that Indians are living in are the conditions that poor people everywhere are living in.Collection: People
The librarian spoke in a reverential whisper. Corliss knew she'd misjudged this passionate woman. Maybe she dressed poorly, but she was probably great in bed, certainly believed in God and goodness, and kept an illicit collection of overdue library books on her shelves.Collection: Book
They've been screaming about the death of literacy for years, but I think TV is the Gutenberg [printing] press. I think TV is the only thing that keeps us vaguely in democracy even if it's in the hands of the corporate culture. If you're an artist you write in your time. Moaning about the fact that maybe people read more books a hundred years ago - that's not true. I think the same percentage has always read.Collection: Book
I write less about alcohol, less and less and less. You 're an addict - so of course you write about the thing you love most. I loved alcohol the most, loved it more than anybody or anything. That's what I wrote about. And it certainly accounted for some great writing. But it accounted for two or three years of good writing - it would never account for 20 years of good writing. I would have turned into Charles Bukowski. He wrote 10,000 poems and 10 of them were great.Collection: Writing
The problem for me with liberals is that we've abdicated our moral responsibility to the universe.Collection: Responsibility
If I were a doctor nobody would be inviting me to talk to reservations. I'd be a different person. Writers can influence more people.Collection: Doctors
But we danced, under wigs and between unfinished walls, through broken promises and around empty cupboards.Collection: Wall
It was so quiet, a reservation kind of quiet, where you can hear somebody drinking whiskey on the rocks three miles away.Collection: Fear
How self-centered, how arrogant... Imagine the awesome privilege of living in a society where you get to choose what you eat at each and every meal. When I was a kid, I was a vegetarian and a vegan for long stretches... I was a commodity cheese-atarian.Collection: Kids
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)Collection: Pain
In the middle of a crazy and drunk life, you have to hang onto the good and sober moments tightly.Collection: Crazy
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?Collection: People
she braided my sister's hair with hands that smelled deep roots buried in the earth she told me the old stories how time never mattered when she died they gave me her clockCollection: Hair
I hear poetry whenever I turn on the radio. Eminem is a better poet than just about everybody. He's better than Billy Collins; he's better than Richard Wilbur; he's better than me.Collection: Radio
Ialways think it's funny when Indians celebrate Thanksgiving. I mean, sure, the Indians and Pilgrims were best friends during the first Thanksgiving, but a few years later, the Pilgrims were shooting Indians. So I'm never quite sure why we eat Turkey like everybody else. (101)Collection: Mean
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. Well, a lot scared.Collection: Men
I believe in any kid's ability to read any book and form their own judgements. It's the job of a parent to guide his/her child through the reading of every book imaginable. Censorship of any form punishes curiosity.Collection: Children
...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..." ~ Thomas Builds-the-Fire (played by Evan Adams) in Alexie's "Smoke SignalsCollection: Children