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I don't have to participate in another culture's ceremonies in order to respect that culture.

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.
Culture
Another
Order
Ceremonies
Ceremony
Participate
Respect

More quotes by 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.
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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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Spiritual matters should be private.
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My father was a basketball player, so I loved basketball because he did. It was a direct transference. But, more than that, basketball, in the United States at least, plays the same function that soccer does everyone else in the world. It's the sport of poverty. It's the sport born of poverty. It's the cheapest sport.
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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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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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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.
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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?
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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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Let us now celebrate the literary allusion.
Sherman Alexie
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Books and beer are the best and worst defense.
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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)
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I don't know what any individual should do about crossing her own borders. I only know that I live a happier, more adventurous life, by crossing borders.
Sherman Alexie
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He made me realize that hard work--that the act of finishing, of completing, of accomplishing a task--is joyous
Sherman Alexie
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And believe me, a good piece of chicken can make anybody believe in the existence of God.
Sherman Alexie
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The ordinary can be like medicine.
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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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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My parents banned nothing, though the Christian fundamentalists in my tribe held book-and-record burnings every now and again. So, yes, fundamentalist assholes can also be brown-skinned.
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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
Sherman Alexie