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"Thomas Builds-the-Fire's stories climbed into your clothes like sad, gave you itches that could not be scratched. If you repeated eve a sentence from one of those stories, your throat was never the same again. Those stories hung in your clothes and hair like smoke, and no amount of laundry soap or shampoo washed them out. Victor and Junior often tried to beat those stories out of Thomas, tied him down and taped his mouth shut. They pretended to be friendly and tried to sweet talk Thomas into temporary silences, made promises about beautiful Indian women and cases of Diet Pepsi. But none of that stopped Thomas, who talked and talked."
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"People think that stories are shaped by people. In fact, it's the other way around."

"Each affects the other, and the other affects the next, and the world is full of stories, but the stories are all one."

"My life is my book, but I can't read it."

"Writers use both their blood and their brains to explore the darkest recesses of their pooling self. Writing allows us to harness the whimsy of the collaborative mind and body, pull our tissue apart like taffy, and expose the composition of our life sustaining organs. Telling our personal story forces us to account for any actions that made us laugh, cry, scream and shout, or hide behind a cloak of mootness. Critical examination of the self allows one to disintegrate the envelope of their present personality and make up a new imaging."

"Every person's story contains chapters of pain and loss, victory and defeat, love and hate, pride and prejudice, courage and fear, faith and self-distrust, charity and kindness, selfishness and jealously. Every person's story also contains folios of hopefulness and truthfulness, deceit and despair, action and change, passion and compassion, excitement and boredom, birth and creation, mutation and defect, generation and preservation, delusions and illusions, imagination and fantasy, bafflement and puzzlement. What makes a person's selfsame story unique is how he or she organizes the pure and impure forces that comprise them, how they respond to internal and external crisis, if they act in a safeguarding and humble manner, or lead a self-seeking and destructive existence."

"The Doktor was very vond, I mean fond of Vluffy, so he gave him a flame-proof doggie-jacket. It was dull grey, but it had a tartan pattern on it. Vluffy liked his doggie-jacket and wore it all the time. When things went 'bang' he could just roll over, dust himself off and quickly scamper off with the doggie jacket flapping on his back. So in short, Vluffy was a very happy little dog who spent a lot of his time hiding under furniture. But the point is that he'd had a lot of time. Much more than those who went (up in smoke) before him."

"We write our personal story as intermittent authors; the narrator is always searching for a unitive point of view. We strive to perceive oneself from a unified perspective, but it is virtually impossible to do so. Human perception of the self is an illusion. We constantly sift through shifting memories. We experience the present under the fragrance cast by the past and under the illusionary aura of the future."
Explore more quotes by Sherman Alexie


"He was going to punish me now. He couldn't beat me up with his old man fists, but he could hurt me with his old man words."


"There are all kinds of addicts, I guess. We all have pain. And we all look for ways to make the pain go away."


"I didn't yet know that romantic heroes-famous and not-are usually aimless nomads in disguise."
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