That's how I do this life sometimes by making the ordinary just like magic and just like a card trick and just like a mirror and just like disappearing. Every Indian learns how to be a magician and learns how to misdirect attention and the dark hand is always quicker than the white eye and no matter how close you get to my heart you will never find out my secrets and I'll never tell you and I'll never show you the same trick twice. I'm traveling heavy with illusions.
Interpretation
Life is often shaped by illusions and the art of perception, where the ordinary can feel magical.
In this quote, Sherman Alexie reflects on the nature of life and the intricate ways in which individuals present themselves and their experiences. He uses the metaphor of magic to suggest that much of what we encounter may not be as it seems, and that personal secrets and complexities remain hidden even when we seem close to one another. The reference to illusions and misdirection highlights a deeper understanding of how people navigate their own realities and perceptions, often obscuring the truth from others and even from themselves.
In practice
This quote can be shared during a discussion about the complexities of human relationships.
Gordie, the white boy genius, gave me this book by a Russian dude named Tolstoy, who wrote, 'Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.' Well, I hate to argue with a Russian genius, but Tolstoy didn't know Indians, and he didn't know that all Indian families are unhappy for the same exact reasons: the frikkin' booze.
My wife was the first romantic partner who understood both American and native parts of me - not so much the positive stuff, but the damage.
I draw because words are too unpredictable. I draw because words are too limited. If you speak and write in English, or Spanish, or Chinese, or any other language, then only a certain percentage of human beings will get your meaning. But when you draw a picture everybody can understand it. If I draw a cartoon of a flower, then every man, woman, and child in the world can look at it and say, "That's a flower.
We all have to find our own ways to say good-bye.
I write books for teenagers because I vividly remember what it felt like to be a teen facing everyday and epic dangers. I don't write to protect them. It's far too late for that. I write to give them weapons-in the form of words and ideas-that will help them fight their monsters. I write in blood because I remember what it felt like to bleed.
A lot of people have no idea that right now Y.A. (young adult). is the Garden of Eden of literature.
Suns are extinguished or become corrupted, planets perish and scatter across the wastes of the sky; other suns are kindled, new planets formed to make their revolutions or describe new orbits, and man, an infinitely minute part of a globe which itself is only an imperceptible point in the immense whole, believes that the universe is made for himself.
It used to be, everyone was entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. But that's not the case anymore. Facts matter not at all. Perception is everything.
Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state...
It watches," he added suddenly. "The house. It watches every move you make.
Am I motivated by what I really want out of life - or am I mass-motivated?
The welfare state is not really about the welfare of the masses. It is about the egos of the elites.
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