Quote

In the middle of the night, when you're ambiguously ethnic, like me, when you're brown, beige, mauve, siena, one of those lighter browns in the Crayola box. You have to be careful of the cops and robbers, because nobody's quite sure what you are, but everybody has assumptions.

Sherman Alexie

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Sherman Alexie
Age: 58
Born: 1966
Born: October 7
Film Director
Film Producer
Novelist
Poet
Screenwriter
Writer
Wellpinit
Washington
Sherman Joseph Alexie
Jr.
Nobody
Cops
Quite
Ethnic
Middle
Assumptions
Mauve
Everybody
Cop
Beige
Sure
Assumption
Browns
Night
Brown
Lighters
Like
Boxes
Lighter
Careful
Robbers

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I'm a poet who can whine in meter
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And I couldn't make fun of her for that dream. It was my dream, too. And Indian boys weren't supposed to dream like that. And white girls from small towns weren't supposed to dream big, either. We were supposed to be happy with our limitations. But there was no way Penelope and I were going to sit still. Nope, we both wanted to fly.
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In a real-world way, my gifts are very limited in terms of what I can do.
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Unlike landed white men, she didn't need to climb mountains to experience mystic panic. All she needed was to set her alarm dock for the next morning, wake when it rang, and go to class.
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If I wasn't writing poems I'd be washing my hands all the time.
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I think all of us are always five years old in the presence and absence of our parents.
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In the middle of a crazy and drunk life, you have to hang onto the good and sober moments tightly.
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Poverty doesn’t give you strength or teach you lessons about perseverance. No, poverty only teaches you how to be poor.
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I had the feeling I was going to be successful, and I didn't want to be another disappointing Indian.
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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.
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He wanted the songs, the stories, to save everybody.
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and then she asks me how many sexual partners I've had and I say one or two depending on your definition of what I did to Custer . . .
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it's way too early for him to be talking anyhow but I see in his eyes something and I see in his eyes a voice and I see in his eyes a whole new set of words
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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.
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Like officer Dave.He's never said much about his life, but I can tell he's scarred. And he knows I'm scarred too. The wounded always recognize the wounded. We can smell each other.
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I suddenly understood that if every moment of a book should be taken seriously, then every moment of a life should be taken seriously as well.
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If one reads enough books, one has a fighting chance.
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Listen you have to read a book three times before you know it.
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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.
Sherman Alexie
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Bush has not read enough books to have a developed moral sense. The fewer books you read, the easier it is to become fundamental. In some ways my antiwar stand here is also a stand on anti-literacy. Someone should get G.W. into a reading program, get him to join a book club. Have him read Hamlet, King Lear.
Sherman Alexie