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1 " It's not oil that runs the world, it's shame. "
― Sherman Alexie , War Dances
2 " Pain is never added to pain. It multiplies. "
3 " After our earliest ancestors crawled out of the oceans, how soon did they feel the desire to crawl back in? "
4 " Paul believed American greatness and the ghosts of that greatness surrounded him. But who could publicly express such a belief and not be ridiculed as a patriotic fool? Paul believed in his fellow Americans, in their extraordinary decency, in their awesome ability to transcend religion, race, and class, but what leftist could state such things and ever hope to get laid by any other lefty? "
5 " Yes, I was bewildered. When was the last time a white American male was truly bewildered or would admit to such a thing? We had taken the world from covered wagons to space shuttles in seventy-five years. After such accomplishment, how could we ever get lost in the wilderness again? How could we not invent a device to guide our souls through the darkness? "
6 " Remember this: men and pornography are like plants and sunshine. To me, porn is photosynthesis. "
7 " Wouldn't the crow, that ubiquitous trickster, make a more compelling and accurate national symbol for the United States than the bald eagle? "
8 " I took a job teaching private-school white teenagers how to edit video. They used their newly developed skills to make documentaries about poor brown people in other countries. It's not oil that runs the world, it's shame. "
9 " Despite all the talk of diversity and division--of red and blue states, of black and white and brown people, of rich and poor, gay and straight--Paul believed that Americans were shockingly similar. How can we be so different, thought Paul, if we all know the lyrics to the same one thousand songs? "
10 " She's gone, she's gone.'" Paul sang the chorus of that Hall & Oates song. He sang without irony, for he was a twenty-first-century American who'd been taught to mourn his small and large losses by singing Top 40 hits. "
11 " Why do poets think They can change the world? The only life I can save Is my own. "
12 " Tragedies are fucked at the box office," the executive said. Sherwin didn't know if that was true. It didn't feel true. Or maybe it was truer than Sherwin wanted to believe. Weren't Americans afraid of tragedy? "
13 " After all, one doesn't choose his culture nearly as much as one trips and falls into it. "
14 " I think I'm engaged To thirty-six women, my harem: Platonic, bookish, and enraged. "
15 " Standing on the shore, I prayed for my dead. I praised them. I stupidly hoped that the lake would heal my small wounds. Then I stripped off my clothes and waded naked into the water.Jesus, I don't want to die today or tomorrow, but I don't want to live forever. "
16 " But none of them laughed as hard about my beautiful brain as I knew my father would have. I miss him, the drunk bastard. I would always feel closest to the man who had most disappointed me. "
17 " I was young and frightened and craved respect and its ugly cousin, approval, so I did as I was told. "
18 " Your mother is a better man than me. Mothers are almost always better men than men are. "
19 " Nothing ever really happens, you know. Life is infinitesimal and incremental and inconsequential. "
20 " If you really want a woman to love you, then you have to dance. And if you don't want to dance, then you're going to have to work extra hard to make a woman love you forever, and you will always run the risk that she will leave you at any second for a man who knows how to tango. "
