Sherman Alexie citations

Page 2

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

“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?”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“We only know how to lose and be lost.”

“Books and beer are the best and worst defense.”

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

“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.”

“You should approach each book -- you should approach life -- with the real possibility that you might get a metaphorical boner at any point.”

“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.”

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

“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…”

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

“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”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“I'm a poet who can whine in meter”

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

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

“She told me that every other step was just for me.'
But that's only half of the dance,' I said.
Yeah,' my father said. 'She was keeping the rest for herself. Nobody can give everything away. It ain't healthy.”

“… And nostalgia is a cancer. Nostalgia will fill your heart up with tumors. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's what you are. You're just an old fart dying of terminal nostalgia.”

“Yep, my daddy was an undependable drunk. But he'd never missed any of my organized games, concerts, plays, or picnics. He may not have loved me perfectly, but he loved me as well as he could. (189)”

“But we danced, under wigs and between unfinished walls, through broken promises and around empty cupboards.”