Quotes from Ten Little Indians

“She wanted to be buried in a coffin filled with used paperbacks. ”
― Sherman Alexie, quote from Ten Little Indians

“Corliss wondered what happens to a book that sits unread on a library shelf for thirty years. Can a book rightfully be called a book if it never gets read?...

'How many books never get checked out," Corliss asked the librarian.

'Most of them,' she said.

Corliss never once considered the fate of library books. She loved books. How could she not worry about the unread? She felt like a disorganized scholar, an abusive mother, and a cowardly soldier.

'Are you serious?' Corliss asked. 'What are we talking about here? If you were guessing, what is the percentage of books in this library that never get checked out?'

'We're talking sixty percent of them. Seriously. Maybe seventy percent. And I'm being optimistic. It's probably more like eighty or ninety percent. This isn't a library, it's an orphanage.'

The librarian talked in a reverential whisper. Corliss knew she'd misjudged this passionate woman. Maybe she dressed poorly, but she was probably great in bed, certainly believed in God and goodness, and kept an illicit collection of overdue library books on her shelves.”
― Sherman Alexie, quote from Ten Little Indians

“...And nostalgia is a cancer. Nostalgia will fill your heart up with tumors. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's what you are. You're just an old fart dying of terminal nostalgia.”
― Sherman Alexie, quote from Ten Little Indians

“Like any good shaman, professional baseball player, or politician, my mother always answered questions with questions.”
― Sherman Alexie, quote from Ten Little Indians

“We didn’t domesticate cats. They domesticated themselves. But not totally, you know? You take a good look at any house cat, and you can tell there’s eventually going to be a day when it goes back wild, you know? When it reverts to its true nature. You fall over and die in a house with your dog, and your dog will lie down beside your dead body, maybe right on top of it, and starve to death. But a house cat will feast on your eyes as soon as its stomach starts growling.”
― Sherman Alexie, quote from Ten Little Indians

“[F]rank knew he was guilty of arrogance and misanthropy, but he compensated by being kind to strangers and tipping really well at restaurants.”
― Sherman Alexie, quote from Ten Little Indians

“She’d wanted to completely shave her head: I don’t want long hair, I don’t want short hair, I don’t want hair at all, and I don’t want to be a girl or a boy, I want to be a yellow and orange leaf some little kid picks up and pastes in his scrapbook.”
― Sherman Alexie, quote from Ten Little Indians

“So I guess you were hopelessly romantic and easily distracted, a B-plus mother, certainly good enough to get into Matriarchal State University but not quite good enough for St. Mary's College of the Blessed Womb Warriors.”
― Sherman Alexie, quote from Ten Little Indians

“As for romance, Frank had dated a few women over the years but found them to be too inconsistent and illogical, so he dated a few men and found them to be even more random and frightening.”
― Sherman Alexie, quote from Ten Little Indians

“If you want to make a white man cry, despite the amount of time it’s been since he last wept aloud, then all you have to do is employ “baseball” and “father” in three consecutive sentences.”
― Sherman Alexie, quote from Ten Little Indians

“If human beings possessed endless possibilities, then cities contained exponential hopes.”
― Sherman Alexie, quote from Ten Little Indians

“Exoticism was hard to find in Pullman, Washington. ”
― Sherman Alexie, quote from Ten Little Indians

“She’d been a resourceful thief, a narcissistic Robin Hood who stole a rich education from white people and kept it.”
― Sherman Alexie, quote from Ten Little Indians

“She knew Indians were obsessed with authenticity. Colonized, genocided, exiled, Indians formed their identities by questioning the identities of other Indians. Self-hating,”
― Sherman Alexie, quote from Ten Little Indians

“She endured a contentious and passionate relationship with this library. The huge number of books confirmed how much magic she’d been denied for most of her life, and now she hungrily wanted to read every book on every shelf. An impossible task, to be sure, Herculean in its exaggeration, but Corliss wanted to read herself to death. She wanted to be buried in a coffin filled with used paperbacks. She”
― Sherman Alexie, quote from Ten Little Indians

“Can a book rightfully be called a book if it never gets read?”
― Sherman Alexie, quote from Ten Little Indians

“If a tree falls in a forest and gets pulped to make paper for a book that never gets read, but there’s nobody there to read it, does it make a sound?”
― Sherman Alexie, quote from Ten Little Indians

“Sharon was Apache, and I was Spokane, but we practiced our tribal religions like we practiced Catholicism: We loved all of the ceremonies but thought they were pitiful cries to a disinterested god.”
― Sherman Alexie, quote from Ten Little Indians

“If a poet falls in a forest, and there’s nobody there to hear him, does he make a metaphor or simile?”
― Sherman Alexie, quote from Ten Little Indians

“Late at night I go out and listen to the wind. That’s all the wisdom I need. I mean, I love books, but shoot, most of the world’s wisdom is not contained in books.”
― Sherman Alexie, quote from Ten Little Indians

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About BookQuoters

BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.