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White Americans have a short memory.

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.
Memory
Americans
Short
Memories
White

More quotes by Sherman Alexie

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In a sense, you're always mythologizing your life it's always an effort to make yourself epic. At least in fiction you can lie and sort of justify your delusion about your epicness. But when you're writing a memoir, you're trying to make your life epic and it's not - nobody's life is.
Sherman Alexie
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Facebook and Twitter and these other social sites bring every, I mean, 140 characters. I mean, I'm on Twitter and I have fun. But I don't think anybody learns anything about me as a person.
Sherman Alexie
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I suddenly understood that if every moment of a book should be taken seriously, then every moment of a life should be taken seriously as well.
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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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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and then she asks me how many sexual partners I've had and I say one or two depending on your definition of what I did to Custer . . .
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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I end up feeling like a spy in the house of ethnicity, you know? Because people will talk around me as they would talk around the people in their cultural group. So I get to hear all the secrets and jokes and you know, I'm a part of every community because of the way I look.
Sherman Alexie
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I love to scare the already terrified assholes.
Sherman Alexie
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One play can change your momentum forever.
Sherman Alexie
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Like officer Dave.He's never said much about his life, but I can tell he's scarred. And he knows I'm scarred too. The wounded always recognize the wounded. We can smell each other.
Sherman Alexie
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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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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.
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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I wanted to do a weird book and reestablish my independent, small-press roots.
Sherman Alexie
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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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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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Let us now celebrate the literary allusion.
Sherman Alexie
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Spiritual matters should be private.
Sherman Alexie
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I write in blood because I remember what it felt like to bleed.
Sherman Alexie