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If you teach kids how to tell stories, they have a better chance at everything.

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.
Teach
Chance
Tell
Kids
Stories
Better
Everything

More quotes by Sherman Alexie

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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.
Sherman Alexie
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There are all kinds of addicts, I guess. We all have pain. And we all look for ways to make the pain go away. (107)
Sherman Alexie
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I didn't know what to say to her. What do you say to people when they ask how it feels to lose everything? When every planet in your solar system has exploded?
Sherman Alexie
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Religious fundamentalists are unaware that freedom of religion necessarily brings with it the freedom to mock religion.
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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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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she braided my sister's hair with hands that smelled deep roots buried in the earth she told me the old stories how time never mattered when she died they gave me her clock
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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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.
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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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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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.
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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I write books for teenagers because I vividly remember what it felt like to be a teen facing everyday and epic dangers. I don't write to protect them. It's far too late for that. I write to give them weapons-in the form of words and ideas-that will help them fight their monsters. I write in blood because I remember what it felt like to bleed.
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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We are taught to take the bread into our bodies as proof of Jesus's body.
Sherman Alexie
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I think a lot of Indians want Indian artists to be cultural cheerleaders rather than cultural investigators.
Sherman Alexie
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Read. Read 1000 pages for every 1 page that you write.
Sherman Alexie
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I had the feeling I was going to be successful, and I didn't want to be another disappointing Indian.
Sherman Alexie
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I wanted to do a weird book and reestablish my independent, small-press roots.
Sherman Alexie