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In high school I dated a white woman. She would come to visit me on the rez. And her dad, who was very racist, didn't like that at all. And he told her one time, 'You shouldn't go on the rez if you're white because Indians have a lot of anger in their heart.'

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.
Didn
Racist
School
Shouldn
Come
Dad
Heart
Anger
Would
Told
Time
High
Dated
Like
Woman
Indians
White
Visit

More quotes by Sherman Alexie

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We can all learn from every text. Reading the work that disgusts you can only strengthen your core beliefs. I could teach a semester-long course based only on reading the local telephone book. All stories can be taught in valuable ways.
Sherman Alexie
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White Americans have a short memory.
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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Certainly I'm angry at the way Indians have been treated and continue to be treated. But I don't think it's a helpless emotion.
Sherman Alexie
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Ialways think it's funny when Indians celebrate Thanksgiving. I mean, sure, the Indians and Pilgrims were best friends during the first Thanksgiving, but a few years later, the Pilgrims were shooting Indians. So I'm never quite sure why we eat Turkey like everybody else. (101)
Sherman Alexie
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In a real-world way, my gifts are very limited in terms of what I can do.
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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I look more Indian when I'm serious.
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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One play can change your momentum forever.
Sherman Alexie
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He loved her, of course, but better than that, he chose her, day after day. Choice: that was the thing.
Sherman Alexie
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He wanted the songs, the stories, to save everybody.
Sherman Alexie
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I've learned that the worst thing a parent can do is ignore their children
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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All I try to do is portray Indians as we are, in creative ways. With imagination and poetry. I think a lot of Native American literature is stuck in one idea: sort of spiritual, environmentalist Indians. And I want to portray everyday lives. I think by doing that, by portraying the ordinary lives of Indians, perhaps people learn something new.
Sherman Alexie
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Everybody likes to have a place to think, to meditate, to eat a burrito.
Sherman Alexie
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Estranged from the tribe that gives no protection, What happens to the soul that hates its reflection?
Sherman Alexie
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Let us now celebrate the literary allusion.
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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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.
Sherman Alexie