Sherman Alexie Quotes

When you're young, all the accidents, all the pain you take them, but at least you're very strong. In fact through time, it's just adding more and more pain, more and more loss and it makes you more fragile.

Damage hardens us all. It will harden you too, when it finds you—and it will find you

Hope is such a beautiful word, but it often seems very fragile. Life is still being needlessly hurt and destroyed.

You're not going to live your life unscathed.

Appalling things can happen to children. And even a happy childhood is filled with sadnesses.

Everyone gets hurt, but I've probably had the most injuries.

Because nobody goes through life without a scar.

I've got cut half in two, once, and blowed up a time or two, but nothing permanent.

Sometimes you get hit on the nose and nothing happens, then you get hit and something breaks.

Nietzsche famously said "Whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger." But what he failed to stress is that it almost kills you.

The child endures all things.

Nobody can protect anybody else from vileness. Or from pain. All you can do is not let it break you in half and keep on going until you get to the other side.

Born down in a dead man's town, The first kick I took was when I hit the ground, You end up like a dog that's been beat too much, Till you spend half your life just covering up...

This you have to understand. There's only one way to hurt a man who's lost everything. Give him back something broken.

What doesn't kill you is gonna leave a scar.

Unless you are here: this garden refuses to exist. Pink dragonflies fall from the air and become scorpions scratching blood out of rocks. The rainbows that dangle upon this mist: shatter. Like the smile of a child separated from his mother’s milk for the very first time. --from poem Blood and Blossoms

Fire, even if put on head, burns only.

Step by step, heart to heart, left right left. We all fall down like toy soldiers. Bit by bit, torn apart, we never win.

To the children and the innocent it's all the same.

This is how your heart gets snagged, like a balloon on a barbed-wire fence, this is where pieces of you get torn away.

Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that.

The life I've had, the difficulties, the hardships, the pain I've suffered since I was a child. It's a great privilege to have led a difficult life, and many people in my generation have had this privilege - I sometimes wonder if young people today aren't deprived of the dramas that shaped us.

We are all broken by something. We have all hurt someone and have been hurt. We all share the condition of brokenness even if our brokenness is not equivalent.

His characters are ravaged, beaten. They walk through infernos and emerged charred doves.

My father always used to say, "What doesn't kill you, makes you stronger," - 'til the accident.