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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 276c489 | We are not victims of our biology or circumstances. How we react to the events and circumstances of life can have an enormous impact on our mental and even physical health. | Caroline Leaf | ||
| f07361f | You are wired for love, and fear is a learned and not a natural response (2 Tim. 1:7). You have the | Caroline Leaf | ||
| cd82080 | The process of thinking and choosing is the most powerful thing in the universe after God, and it is a phenomenal gift from God to be treasured and used properly. | Caroline Leaf | ||
| 68a81bb | What you are thinking every moment of every day becomes a physical reality in your brain and body, which affects your optimal mental and physical health. These thoughts collectively form your attitude, which is your state of mind, and it's your attitude and not your DNA that determines much of the quality of your life. | Caroline Leaf | ||
| b1e2d22 | The development of an informal public life depends people finding and enjoying one another outside the cash nexus. | urbanism | Ray Oldenburg | |
| b90ca53 | Wants to set the world on fire, and if it can't happen by tomorrow morning at nine a.m., then life's just unfair and hardly worth living. | David Sedaris | ||
| e8d2b18 | That man tried to picka my frienda's pocketoni! | robbery | David Sedaris | |
| 8820384 | To spend your days in the company of naked men - that was the life for me. | David Sedaris | ||
| d6b036f | I know it sounds calculating, but if you're not cute, you might as well be clever. | David Sedaris | ||
| 07a4df5 | He didn't understand that it's all connected, that one subject leads to another and forms a kind of chain that rises its head and nods like cobra when you're sucking on a bong after three days of no sleep. On acid, it's even wilder and appears to eat things. But not having gone to college, my dad had no concept of a well-rounded liberal arts education. | David Sedaris | ||
| 4db350d | When I was seven years old, my family moved to North Carolina. When he was seven years old, Hugh's family moved to the Congo. We had a collie and a house cat. They had a monkey and two horses named Charlie Brown and Satan. I threw stones at stop signs. Hugh threw stones at crocodiles. The verbs are the same, but he definitely wins the prize when it comes to nouns and objects. | David Sedaris | ||
| d850573 | You're not going to throw this away, are you?" she says, and she'll be talking about the grains of rice in the bottom of the salt shaker. "No, Mrs. Peacock, by all means, you take them. They'll come in handy when your son gets out of prison and marries your niece." | David Sedaris | ||
| 59bf645 | On the off chance my caller would tell me to quit drinking, I positioned myself on the sofa with two six-packs and a bottle of nice scotch. Then I turned on the TV and ate a sandwich made from leftover chicken lo mein. I call it a Chanwich. | David Sedaris | ||
| 1ef517b | You just take and take don't you? Out there with your thumb in the air--not a care in the world, just grabbing whatever you can get. Yes, sir, you just take and take until you're ready to burst. But what about giving? Did you ever think about that? Of course not--you're too busy taking, Mr. Handout, Mr. Gimmee, Gimmee, Gimmee. | David Sedaris | ||
| 3190973 | One year I went as a pirate, but from then on I went as a hobo. It's a word you don't hear anymore. Along with 'tramp,' it's been replaced by 'homeless person,' which isn't the same thing. Unlike someone who was evicted or lost his house in a fire, the hobo roughed it by choice. Being at liberty, unencumbered by bills and mortgages, better suited his drinking schedule, and so he found shelter wherever he could, never a bum, but something mu.. | David Sedaris | ||
| a037467 | Like everything else, holiday gifts escalate. The presents get better and better until one year you decide you don't need anything else and start making donations to animal shelters. Even if you hate dogs and cats, they're somehow always the ones who benefit. | David Sedaris | ||
| 6d76cbe | I hate computers. My hatred is entrenched, and I nourish it daily. I'm comfortable with it, and no community outreach program will change my mind. I hate computers for getting their own section in the New York Times and for lengthening commercials with the mention of a Web site address. Who really wants to find out more about Procter & Gamble? Just buy the toothpaste or laundry detergent, and get on with it. I hate them for creating the wor.. | hate | David Sedaris | |
| f431aaf | I realized I was a teacher when I felt warm during class and got up to open the door. Later on there was noise in the hallway, so I got up and shut it. Students can't open and close the door whenever they feel like it. | college teaching | David Sedaris | |
| 4dc25e3 | I was hoping the people of the world might be united by something more interesting, like drugs or an unarmed struggle against the undead. | David Sedaris | ||
| 86f6477 | Today the teacher called me a sadist. I tried to say that was like the pot calling the kettle black but came out with something closer to "That is like a pan saying to a dark pan, 'You are a pan." | David Sedaris | ||
| 3fa9bde | Upon returning from the store, he would put the meat into the freezer, hide his favorite fruits in the bathroom cabinet, and stuff everything else into the crisper. It was, of course, too late for crisp, but he took the refrigerator drawer at its word, insisting that it was capable of reviving the dead and returning them, hale and vibrant, to the prime of their lives. Subjected to a few days in his beloved crisper, a carrot would become as .. | David Sedaris | ||
| e902a99 | The hippo did, and I heard what sounded at first like a rabble, many voices talking over one another. Then I realized that they weren't talking. "Let me get this straight," the hippo said when I explained what was going on. "Leeches are singing inside my asshole." | David Sedaris | ||
| 2d1dcfc | Then there are vegans, macrobiotics, and a new group, flexitarians, who eat meat if not too many people are watching. | David Sedaris | ||
| a1e87d5 | And I'm here to tell you that, as long as you keep your eyes shut, it's really not that bad. | David Sedaris | ||
| 4e38a6c | On a recent flight from Tokyo to Beijing, at around the time that my lunch tray was taken away, I remembered that I needed to learn Mandarin. "Goddamnit," I whispered. "I knew I forgot something." | David Sedaris | ||
| 0c0a0a5 | Though harsh in other respects, prison would be an excellent place to learn a foreign language - total immersion, and you'd have the new slang before it even hit the streets. | David Sedaris | ||
| 560c46d | Now the room has the contours and atmosphere of all rooms in which people stay awake talking. The fluorescent light is grainy, staring. The clutter on the kitchen table--ketchup bottle, sagging butter dish, tin of Nestle Quik, the rowdy crudded ashtray--the world is narrowed into these, a little universe that the eyes return to again and again. Now it begins, the sorting and testing of words. Remember that words are not symbols of other wor.. | David Sedaris | ||
| 29578b1 | You haven't lived until you've sailed | David Sedaris | ||
| dd8c06d | Nothing irritated her more than these high-and-mighty vegetarians who ate meat sometimes and then decided that it didn't really count. | David Sedaris | ||
| d0a3795 | Every gathering has its moment. As an adult, I distract myself by trying to identify it, dreading the inevitable downsing that is sure to follow. | David Sedaris | ||
| 2ca853f | The reverend insists we occupy the first pew. He rang us up not long ago, tipsy-- he's a tippler-- saying that our faces brought him closer to God. And it's true, we're terribly good-looking people. | David Sedaris | ||
| b109717 | Often I'd take out my magnifying glass and stare into the chaos that was her face. Most people would have found it grotesque, but when you're in love nothing is so abstract or horrible that it can't be thought of as cute. | David Sedaris | ||
| 76163d8 | The woman spoke with a heavy western North Carolina accent, which I used to discredit her authority. Here was a person for whom the word 'pen' had two syllables. He people undoubtedly drank from clay jugs and hollered for Paw when the vittles were ready-- so who was she to advise me on anything? | david-sedaris humor satire speech speech-therapy | David Sedaris | |
| e225f33 | Though we were forbidden to speak anything but French, the teacher would occasionally use us to practice any of her five fluent languages. "I hate you," she said to me one afternoon. Her English was flawless. "I really, really hate you." Call me sensitive, but I couldn't help taking it personally." | french humor languages | David Sedaris | |
| 8994e5c | Still, there were moments when, against all reason, I thought I might be a genius. These moments were provoked not by any particular accomplishment but by cocaine and crystal methamphetamine -- drugs that allow you to lean over a mirror with a straw up your nose, suck up an entire week's paycheck, and think, "God, I'm smart." | David Sedaris | ||
| 69ed110 | My conscience is crosswired with my sweat glands, but there's a short in the system and I break out over things I didn't do, which only makes me look more suspect. | guilt sweat | David Sedaris | |
| 5948a57 | A Japanese woman we'd met in Paris came to the apartment yesterday and spent several hours explaining our appliances. The microwave, the water kettle, the electric bathtub: everything blinks and bleeps and calls out in the middle of the night. I'd wondered what the rice maker was carrying on about, and Reiko told us that it was on a timer and simply wanted us to know that it was present and ready for duty. That was the kettle's story as wel.. | David Sedaris | ||
| 254e915 | The crummy part of swimming is that while you're doing it you can't really see much: the bottom of the pool, certainly, a smudged and fleeting bit of the outside world as you turn your head to breathe. But you can't pick things out - a man's face, for example, watching from the sidelines when, for the first time in your life, you pull ahead and win. | David Sedaris | ||
| 21dc403 | I looked from face to face, exaggerating flaws and reminding myself that these boys did not like me. The hope was that I might crush any surviving atom attraction, but as has been the case for my entire life, the more someone dislikes me the more attractive he becomes. | David Sedaris | ||
| a53b3be | It was one of those situations I often find myself in while traveling. Something's said by a stranger I've been randomly thrown into contact with, and I want to say, "Listen. I'm with you on most of this, but before we continue, I need to know who you voted for in the last election." | humor non-fiction politics short-stories travel | David Sedaris | |
| 8b4a639 | There was a big "Sesame Street Live" extravaganza over at Madison Square Garden, so thousands of people decided to make a day of it and go straight from Sesame Street to Santa. We were packed today, absolutely packed, and everyone was cranky. Once the line gets long we break it up into four different lines because anyone in their right mind would leave if they knew it would take over two hours to see Santa. Two hours -- you could see a movi.. | David Sedaris | ||
| 40ae541 | In 2004,I offered priority (book)-signing to smokers, the reason being that, because they didn't have as long to live, their time was more valuable. Four years later my special treatment was reserved for men who stood five-foot-six and under. "That's right, my little friends," I announced. "There'll be no waiting in line for you." It seemed unfair to restrict myself to men, so I included any woman with braces on her teeth. "What about us?" .. | David Sedaris | ||
| 0506a36 | As a child I assumed that when I reached adulthood, I would have grown-up thoughts. By this I meant that I would stop living in a fantasy world; that, while standing in line for a hamburger or my shot at the ATM, I would not daydream about befriending a gorilla or inventing a pill that would make hair waterproof. | David Sedaris | ||
| a5d60b6 | For the first sixteen years we were together, I'd give Hugh chocolates for Valentine's Day, and he'd give me a carton of cigarettes. Both of us got exactly what we wanted, and it couldn't have been easier. | David Sedaris |