Sherman Alexie

“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.”

“The white people always want to fight someone and they always get the dark-skinned people to do the fighting.”

“I'm a method writer. In order to write about the emotion, I have to experience it. I get physically tired and exhausted, devoting hours and hours and hours to it.”

“All art is exploitation.”

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

“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.”

“Nostalgia is always doomed and dooming.”

“I don't have to participate in another culture's ceremonies in order to respect that culture.”

“My father is an amazing man.”

“How much do we remember of what hurts us most? I've been thinking about pain, how each of us constructs our past to justify what we feel now. How each successive pain distorts the preceding.”

“I wanted to ask my father about his regrets. I wanted to ask him what was the worst thing he'd ever done. His greatest sin. I wanted to ask him if there was any reason why the Catholic Church would consider him for sainthood. I wanted to open up his dictionary and find the definitions for faith, hope, goodness, sadness, tomato, son, mother, husband, virginity, Jesus, wood, sacrifice, pain, foot, wife, thumb, hand, bread, and sex. "Do you believe in God?" I asked my father."God has lots of potential," he said."When you pray," I asked him. "What do you pray about?""That's none of your business," he said. We laughed. We waited for hours for somebody to help us. What is an Indian? I lifted my father and carried him across every border.”

“My grandmother's last act on earth was a call for forgiveness, love, and tolerance.”

“Everyone I have lost in the closing of a doorthe click of the lockis not forgotten, theydo not die but remainwithin the soft edgesof the earth, the ashof house fires and cancerin sin and forgivenesshuddled under old blanketsdreaming their way intomy hands, my heartclosing tight like fists.- "Indian Boy Love Song #1”

“Great pain is repetitive. Grief is repetitive.”

“A lot of people have no idea that right now Y.A. (young adult). is the Garden of Eden of literature.”

“It's not oil that runs the world, it's shame.”

“If God were good, why would he create Rush Limbaugh?”

“[Or perhaps my friends should have realized that they shouldn't have left behind the FRICKING REASON FOR THEIR PROTEST!And that thought just cracked me up.]It was like my friends had walked over the backs of baby seals in order to get to the beach where they could protest against the slaughter of baby seals.”

“The form I most enjoy writing is the sonnet or sonnet-like forms, where you have a - you know, three stanzas or two stanzas that lead into a concluding couplet.”

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