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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.

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.
World
Parents
Study
Parent
Dang
Books
Tribe
Poor
Saddest
School
Tribes
Book
Studied
Thing
Absolutely

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I think the world is a series of broken dams and floods, and my cartoons are tiny little lifeboats.
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Okay, so maybe I'm romantic... but somebody is supposed to be romantic. Some warrior is supposed to go to war against the imperial forces of cynicism and irony. I am a sentimental soldier.
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I got hundreds of emails insulting me, accusing me of being some caveman. I am by no means a Luddite. I have two iPods. I have a cell phone. I have cable TV, HDTV!
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Don't live up to your stereotypes.
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The world is divided by two different tribes. The people who are assholes and the people who are not.
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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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If you teach kids how to tell stories, they have a better chance at everything.
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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.
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Do you understand how amazing it is to hear that from an adult? Do you know how amazing it is to hear that from anybody? It's one of the simplest sentences in the world, just four words, but they're the four hugest words in the world when they're put together. You can do it.
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She was in pain and I loved her, sort of loved her, I guess, so I kind of had to love her pain, too.
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He wanted the songs, the stories, to save everybody.
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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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Spiritual matters should be private.
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Listen you have to read a book three times before you know it.
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Religious fundamentalists are unaware that freedom of religion necessarily brings with it the freedom to mock religion.
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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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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.
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I've learned that the worst thing a parent can do is ignore their children
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Sixty percent of all Indians live in urban areas, but nobody's writing about them. They're really an underrepresented population, and the ironic thing is very, very few of those we call Native American writers actually grew up on reservations, and yet most of their work is about reservations.
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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.
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