He wondered if she would dream about a man who never left her, about some unemployed agoraphobic Indian warrior who liked to wash dishes. - Sherman Alexie

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-orange leaf some little kid picks up and pastes in his scrapbook.

My father was always depressed. When he was home and sober, he was mostly in his room…You always knew they were coming: he was never violent, but short-tempered. It wasn't a violent house, but a violent reservation.

…It wasn't just the influence of tribal cultures, it was the assimilation into fundamentalist Christianity, which is even more warrior culture, even more honor culture, and even more suspicious of difference. So I was getting bombarded not only by the more fundamentalist aspects of my tribe, but the more fundamentalist aspects of our assimilation into Christianity. So that was going on all around us, and, in fact, in second grade we had this ex-nun teacher who put us into stress positions as torture.