Sherman Alexie Quotes

Some things are meant to be broken. Imperfect. Chaotic.

Just when normal life felt almost possible - when the world held some kind of order, meaning, even loveliness (the prismatic spray of light through an icicle; the stillness of a sunrise), some small thing would go awry and veil of optimism was torn away, the barren world revealed. They learned, somehow, to wait those times out. There was no cure, no answer, no reparation. (161)

Pull a string, a puppet moves ... each man must realize that it can all disappear very quickly: the cat, the woman, the job, the front tire, the bed, the walls, the room; all our necessities including love, rest on foundations of sand - and any given cause, no matter how unrelated: the death of a boy in Hong Kong or a blizzard in Omaha ... can serve as your undoing. all your chinaware crashing to the kitchen floor, your girl will enter and you'll be standing, drunk, in the center of it and she'll ask: my god, what's the matter? and you'll answer: I don't know, I don't know.

I mistrust total competence. I've always felt life is a series of small disasters we try to get through.

Things are strongest where they're broken.

But that inadequacy, or feeling of inadequacy, never really goes away. You just have to trudge ahead in the rain, regardless.

Nothing is written stone, child. Even if it were, the stones can be shattered

If it (the good circumstances) changes will you be able to keep onto your happiness just as much? Because if not then your happiness is really built on sand.

My life is not balanced and not everything is perfect all the time.

Life didn't promise to be wonderful.

My view is that we're entering into a situation of enormous instability, insecurity, fragility.

We probably looked like starving orphan children. Hey! We were starving orphan children.

If you wake up / And the day feels broken / Just lean into the crack

I don't know what should have happened in my life, but I do know that I'm dancing as fast as I can.

I like it that order exists somewhere even if it shatters near me.

Once you had put the pieces back together, even though you may look intact, you were never quite the same as you'd been before the fall.

Here are the things I know for sure: When you think you're right, you are most likely wrong. Things that break - be they bones, hearts, or promises - can be put back together but will never really be whole. And, in spite of what I said, you can miss a person you've never known. I learn this over and over again.

I think the world is a series of broken dams and floods, and my cartoons are tiny little lifeboats.

True adventure begins when everything goes wrong.

For me, it is as though at every moment the actual world had completely lost its actuality. As though there was nothing there; asthough there were no foundations for anything or as though it escaped us. Only one thing, however, is vividly present: the constant tearing of the veil of appearances; the constant destruction of everything in construction. Nothing holds together, everything falls apart.

Human ability is an unequal match for the violent and unforeseen vicissitudes of the world.

You know when you're sitting on a chair and you lean back so you're just on two legs and you lean too far so you almost fall over but at the last second you catch yourself? I feel like that all the time.

Any order is a balancing act of extreme precariousness.