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"He felt split in two, one crazy man eating hair and one rational man watching a crazy man eat hair. He chewed and swallowed the last pieces of his father's life. He felt like he was building a museum of pain, a freak show, where he was the only visitor viewing the only mutant screaming the only prayer he knew: Come back, Daddy. Come back, Daddy. Come back, Daddy. Come back, Daddy. Come back, Daddy. Come back, Daddy. Come back, Daddy. Come back Daddy..."
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"His abusemakes her an anvilwithout spark."

"Many call it the 1000 yard stare and can't realize the pain when PTSD takes us there."

"I've seen a lot of stuff, maybe I've seen too much. I see most humans in a bad light because I've seen what they can do, how evil they can be, I've seen the Holocaust and I've seen Jonestown, I've seen the Vietnam War and I've seen Hiroshima, I've seen the Chernobyl disaster, I've seen the World Trade Center attack, I've been alive too long, over a hundred years is a long time to be alive, Alecto sighed, staring at the cigarette he was holding."

"I'd still thought that everything I thought about that night-the shame, the fear-would fade in time. But that hadn't happened. Instead, the things that I remembered, these little details, seemed to grow stronger, to the point where I could feel their weight in my chest. Nothing, however stuck with me more than the memory of stepping into that dark room and what I found there, and how the light then took that nightmare and made it real."

"But I don't know what to him about the aftermath of killing a person. About how they never leave you."

"That was the dirty secret associated with her past. Not that she'd been abused but that somehow she felt that she deserved it because she'd let it happen. Even now, it shamed her, and there were times when she felt hideously ugly, as though the scars that had been left behind were visible to everyone."

"If the most connected we've ever felt with another person was in that brief moment of apology and regret after physical abuse, then we'll seek that abuse for the rest of our lives."

"I tried writing fiction as a little kid, but had a teacher humiliate me, so didn't write again until I was a senior in college."

"Wait-a-minute!Reality kicked in after marking its spot `position vacant' for the short and pleasant while. He groaned mournfully as he found himself staring at the inside of his own eyelids. The first thing that occurred to him was the terrible bone-wracking pain running up and down his spine. Pain? No, curiously enough. It was the memory of it that seemed to hurt so much. Maybe that's what scared him. Or maybe it was the creaking of the ship around him."
Explore more quotes by Sherman Alexie


"Sure, we thought the acresThat we tilled were sacred,But how could we have knownThat wheat can haunt like ghosts."


"Did she say anything before she died?" he asked."Yes," the surgeon said. "She said, 'Forgive him'""Forgive him?" my father asked."I think she was referring to the drunk driver who killed her."Wow.My grandmother's last act on earth was a call for forgiveness, love and tolerance.She wanted us to forgive Gerald, the dumb-ass Spokane Indian alcoholic who ran her over and killed her.I think My Dad wanted to go find Gerald and beat him to death.I think my mother would have helped him.I think I would have helped him, too.But my grandmother wanted us to forgive her murderer.Even dead, she was a better person than us."


"You meet me after school right here", I said."Why?" he asked.I couldn't believe he was so stupid."Because we're going to finish this fight.""You're crazy," Roger said.He got to his feet and walked away. His gang stared at me like I was a serail killer, and they followed their leader.I was absolutely confused.I had followed the rules of fighting. i had behaved exactly the way I was supposed to behave. But these white boys had ignored the rules. In fact, they followed a whole other set of mysterious rules where people apparently DID NOT GET INTO FISTFIGHTS."


"(I think Rowdy might be the most important person in my life. maybe more important than my family.) Can your best friend be more importamt than your family?"
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