Quotes by Sherman Alexie

We are taught to take the bread
into our bodies
as proof of Jesus's body...

Suddenly, we are wed
and I am just as surprised as you
that marriage has become our bread...

Look. I don't know what
would help me believe
that we have become sacred...

If that was Easter
then the church was full
as we stood against the wall

praying for an empty pew.
If that was Easter
then I rose that morning

in love with you
though I rise every morning
from the water, more or less

in love with you.
If that was Easter
then you were asked

to be the Eucharistic minister.
If that was Easter
then you surprised me

by placing salmon on my tongue.
Then I surprised you
by swallowing it whole.

Amen, amen, amen.

Non-Indian writers usually say "Great Spirit," "Mother Earth," "Two-Legged, Four-Legged, and Winged." Mixed-blood writers usually say "Creator, "Mother Earth," "Two-Legged, Four- Legged, and Winged." Indian writers usually say "God," "Mother Earth," "Human Being, Dog, and Bird."

Let us now celebrate the literary allusion.
Let us now celebrate the trope and willful
enjambment. Let us now celebrate
the assonance and alliteration of all of it.
Let us now celebrate the sound of our own voices.

Being a coffee addict and living in Seattle is like being an alcoholic and having a studio apartment in the middle of a brewery.
And here in Seattle, you go into a coffee shop, and you get people who are ordering their double caffeinated cappuccino organic soy wheat free-range coffee bean grown in one-acre, you know, freedom-fighting plots in Colombia. But I like my coffee straight and black. I like it simple.

Last September 16th, I was walking in downtown Seattle when this pick-up truck pulls up in front of me. Guy leans out the window and yells, "Go back to your own country," and I was laughing so hard because it wasn't so much a hate crime as a crime of irony.

And none of these people, not one of them, had loved any of the others well enough.  Failures, he thought, we're all failures...  He wanted his love to be the wine and bread, and the blood and flesh.  He reached for her, a dangerous stranger in a city of dangerous strangers, but she turned away from him and walked unsteadily through the crowd. How many loveless people walk among the barely loved?

Frank knew he was guilty of arrogance and misanthropy, but he compensated by being kind to strangers and tipping really well at restaurants.

"Boise Cascade," said the other Republican husband.
"Sierra Club," said his Democrat wife.
'Wait, wait," I said. "So one of you fights for trees and the other fights against trees?"
"No, no," he said. "We make the paper she writes on to file lawsuits against the paper we make."

Unlike landed white men, she didn't need to climb mountains to experience mystic panic. All she needed was to set her alarm dock for the next morning, wake when it rang, and go to class.

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.