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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.

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.
Strength
Teach
Poor
Doesn
Give
Teaches
Giving
Perseverance
Lessons
Poverty

More quotes by Sherman Alexie

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My only purpose is to teach children to rebel against authority figures.
Sherman Alexie
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He looked into the crowd for approval, saw his mother and father. He waved and they waved back. Smiles and Indian teeth. They were both drunk. Everything familiar and welcome. Everything beautiful.
Sherman Alexie
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In the middle of a crazy and drunk life, you have to hang onto the good and sober moments tightly.
Sherman Alexie
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The ordinary can be like medicine.
Sherman Alexie
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I love to scare the already terrified assholes.
Sherman Alexie
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When you construct a mix tape, the first song you come out with has to be a barnburner.
Sherman Alexie
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I realized that I might be a lonely Indian boy, but I was not alone in the loneliness. There were millions of other Americans who had left their birthplaces in search of a dream. (217)
Sherman Alexie
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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.
Sherman Alexie
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It's a weird thing. Reservations were meant to be prisons, you know? Indians were supposed to move onto reservations and die. We were supposed to disappear. But somehow or another, Indians have forgotten the reservations were meant to be death camps.
Sherman Alexie
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I know I'll keep writing poems. That's the constant. I don't know about novels. They're hard. It takes so much concentrated effort. When I'm writing a novel it's pretty much all I can do. I get bored. It takes months. Movies do the same thing. It's all-encompassing. It feels like I'm going to end up writing poems, short stories and screenplays.
Sherman Alexie
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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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I was a controversial figure on my reservation when I was a kid. I was mouthy and opinionated and arrogant. Nothing has changed.
Sherman Alexie
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The poetry, if you will, of life is reduced to this sort of dry, scientific, you know, it's the worst sort of précis of who we are.
Sherman Alexie
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I'm quite aware of my differences. I wouldn't classify them as weird
Sherman Alexie
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Like any good shaman, professional baseball player, or politician, my mother always answered questions with questions.
Sherman Alexie
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When you resort to violence to prove a point, you’ve just experienced a profound failure of imagination.
Sherman Alexie
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Read. Read 1000 pages for every 1 page that you write.
Sherman Alexie
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...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 Signals
Sherman Alexie
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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.
Sherman Alexie
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The percentage of Indian kids doing some sort of artistic work is much higher than in the general population - painting, drawing, dancing, singing. The creation of art is still an everyday part of Indian culture, unlike the dominant culture, where art is sort of peripheral.
Sherman Alexie