"I was crying because I had broken my best friend's heart."

"Son," Mr. P said. "You're going to find more and more hope the farther and farther you walk away from this sad, sad, sad reservation."

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

"[Or perhaps my friends should have realized that they shouldn't have left behind the FRICKING REASON FOR THEIR PROTEST!And that thought just cracked me up.]It was like my friends had walked over the backs of baby seals in order to get to the beach where they could protest against the slaughter of baby seals."

"I hate my country. There are so many rich people who don't share their shit. They're like spoiled little ten-year-old bullies on the playground. They hog the monkey bars and the slide and the seesaw. And if you complain even a little bit, if you try to get just one spin on the merry-go-round, the bullies beat the shit out of you."

"I'm quite aware of my differences. I wouldn't classify them as weird."

"It was so quiet, a reservation kind of quiet, where you can hear somebody drinking whiskey on the rocks three miles away."

"Well," she said, "how can I be sure there aren't invisible people in the world? Scientists didn't believe in the mountain gorilla for hundreds of years. And now look. So if scientists can be wrong, then all of us can be wrong. I mean, what if all those invisible people ARE scientists? Think about that one."

"But how can I get enough experience if they don't give me a chance to get experience?"

"Because I want to be remembered."

"So I draw because I feel like it might be my only real chance to escape the reservation."

"They wanted to help me with my pain."

"If it's fiction, then it better be true."

"Like the coffin was settling down for a long, long nap, for a forever nap."

"My only purpose is to teach children to rebel against authority figures."

"Then she tells me that Jesus isstill herebecause Jesus wasonce here.And parts of Jesus arestill floating in the air.She tells me Jesus' DNA ispart of the collective DNA.She tells we are all partof Jesus, we are all Jesus in part.She tells me to breathe deepduring all our stormsbecause you can sometimes taste Jesusin a good, hard rain."

"My father was sleepless most of his life. So by the age of five, I was awake with him all night long, watching bad television or we'd lie in the same bed, and I'd read my comic books while he read his latest spy or mystery novel."

"Somebody dies and people eat your food. Funny how that works."

"I often wonder why I am the one who remember all the pain?"

"It's not oil that runs the world, it's shame."

"Oh, no, no, you've got that all wrong. You're not required to respect elders. After all, most people are idiots, regardless of age. In tribal cultures, we just make sure that elders remain an active part of the culture, even if they're idiots. Especially if they're idiots. You can't just abandon your old people, even if they have nothing intelligent to say. Even if they're crazy."

"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."

"Teenagers read millions of books every year. They read for entertainment and for education. They read because of school assignments and pop culture fads."

"Shit," he said. "I don't know why you're feeling sorry for yourself because you ain't had to fight a war. You're lucky. Shit, all you had was that damn Desert Storm. Should have called it Dessert Storm because it just made the fat cats get fatter. It was all sugar and whipped cream with a cherry on top. And besides that, you didn't even have to fight in it. All you lost during that was was sleep because you stayed up all night watching CNN."

"Great pain is repetitive. Grief is repetitive."

"When it comes to death, we know that laughter and tears are pretty much the same thing.And so, laughing and crying, we said good-bye to my grandmother. And when we said goodbye to one grandmother, we said good-bye to all of them.Each funeral was a funeral for all of us.We lived and died together.All of us laughed when they lowered my grandmother into the ground.And all of us laughed when they covered her with dirt.And all of us laughed as we walked and drove and rode our way back to our lonely, lonely houses."

"Junior based all of his decisions on his dreams and visions, which created a lot of problems."

"Here's a fact: Some people want to live moreThan others do."

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

"So I heard the boom of my father's rifle when he shot my best friend. A bullet only costs about two cents, and anybody can afford that."

"The white people always want to fight someone and they always get the dark-skinned people to do the fighting."

"If I wasn't writing poems I'd be washing my hands all the time."

"And believe me, a good piece of chicken can make anybody believe in the existence of God."

"But my grandmother wanted us to forgive her murderer."

"I used to think the world was broken down by tribes,' I said. 'By Black and White. By Indian and White. But I know this isn't true. The world is only broken into two tribes: the people who are assholes and the people who are not."

"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..."

"I always 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."

"If God were good, why would he create Rush Limbaugh?"

"How much do we remember of what hurts us most? I've been thinking about pain, how each of us constructs our past to justify what we feel now. How each successive pain distorts the preceding."

"I'm a method writer. In order to write about the emotion, I have to experience it. I get physically tired and exhausted, devoting hours and hours and hours to it."

"He loved her, of course, but better than that, he chose her, day after day. Choice: that was the thing."

"Poetry = Anger x Imagination."

"Writing is a lonely business."

"What if someone picks on me?" I askedThen I'll pick on them".What if someone picks my nose?" I asked.The I'll pick your nose, too" Rowdy said."

"My father was always depressed. When he was home and sober, he was mostly in his room."

"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."

"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 would guess, perhaps too optimistically, that nearly ever racist believes it is morally wrong to be racist. And since nearly every person thinks of themselves as being moral, then a racist must consciously and subconsciously employ tortured logic in order to explain away their racism--in order to believe themselves to be nonracist."

"And then I realized that my sister was trying to LIVE a romance novel. Man, that takes courage and imagination. Well, it also took some degree of mental illness, too, but I was suddenly happy for her. And a little scared. Well, a lot scared."

"Years ago, homosexuals were given special status within the tribe. They had powerful medicine. I think it's even more true today, even though our tribe has assimilated into homophobia. I mean, a person has to have magic to assert their identity without regard to all the bullshit, right?"