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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 5d5177e | Back in New York I took full advantage of my status as a native speaker. I ran my mouth to shop clerks and listened in on private conversations, realising I'd gone an entire month without hearing anyone complaint that they were "stressed out"." | language native-tongue | David Sedaris | |
| fe2d2db | People who have nothing to prove offer practical baby gifts: sturdy cotton rompers made to withstand the cycle of vomit and regular washing. People who are competing for the titles of best-loved aunts and uncles - people like my sisters and me - send satin pants and delicate hand-crafted sweaters accompanied by notes reading "P.S. The fur collar is detachable." | David Sedaris | ||
| 10011b5 | I had not laid a finger on the boy's head. I have never poked or prodded either a baby or a child, so why did I feel so dirty? Part of it was just my makeup, the deep-seated belief that I deserve a basement room, but a larger, uglier part had to do with the voices I hear on the talk radio, and my tendency, in spite of myself, to pay them heed. The man in the elevator had not thought twice about asking Michael personal questions or about lay.. | David Sedaris | ||
| f4d5821 | If I'm walking down an American street and anyone darker than a peanut shell approaches, I'll say, "Hello." This because, if I don't say it, he or she might think that I'm anxious. Which, of course, I must be, otherwise I'd walk by in silence, just as I do with my fellow Caucasians. Does this make me racist, or simply race conscious? Either way, I'm more afraid of conservatives than I am of black people." -- | racism | David Sedaris | |
| 48317e4 | the lower bunks, both of us longing to be pinned. "You kids think you invented sex," my mother was fond of saying. But hadn't we? With no instruction manual or federally enforced training period, didn't we all come away feeling we'd discovered something unspeakably modern?" | David Sedaris | ||
| 0d0f1e5 | Teaching you is like having a cesarean section every day of the week. | David Sedaris | ||
| f640cc0 | This is a busy week with me and lunatics, whom I tend to see as either signs or messengers. | David Sedaris | ||
| 7474cf0 | You've got her mad now and there's no turning back. All she has to do is go to the authorities, saying you molested her. Is that what you want? One little phone call and your life is ruined.' 'But I didn't do anything. I'm gay, remember?' 'That's not going to save you,' she said. 'Push comes to shove and who do you think they're going to believe, a nine-year-old girl or the full-grown man who gets his jollies carving little creatures out .. | David Sedaris | ||
| e31de11 | Adrienne started teaching a few months ago in Denver and wrote that it leaves you with a constant feeling of deceiving people. That you know nothing they don't, or couldn't learn on their own if they cared to. | teaching | David Sedaris | |
| 0b217e0 | It was like seeing someone who wore a striped tie or parted his hair on the left -- a detail, but not a telling one. | David Sedaris | ||
| 34f8c91 | When I got back to the apartment, the phone rang. It was Dad, who told me I should try to get work as a model. I told him he was being ridiculous and he said no, he'd just been at the barbershop and saw a GQ magazine with a guy on the cover who looked just like me. So I went to the newsstand and found a copy and the person on the cover was not a model but Gary Oldman. | David Sedaris | ||
| b45a115 | Something has changed, and now, when I look at my students, I see only people who are going to eat up my time. | David Sedaris | ||
| 5847e91 | living in a foreign country is one of those things that everyone should try at least once. My understanding was that it completed a person, sanding down the rough provincial edges and transforming you into a citizen of the world. | David Sedaris | ||
| ee5a6e9 | A person needed savings in order to move, but more than that he needed gumption. | David Sedaris | ||
| c5dc9a6 | Nobody dreams of the things he already has. | David Sedaris | ||
| 985df48 | It is what it is," which is ubiquitous now and means absolutely nothing, as far as we can see. "Isn't that the state motto of South Dakota?" I said the second or third time I heard it." | David Sedaris | ||
| 1deb77e | I cried for it all and wondered why so few songs were written about cats. | David Sedaris | ||
| 59d82f6 | Time is cruel to everything but seems to have singled out eyeglasses for special punishment. What looks good now is guaranteed to embarrass you twenty years down the line, which is, of course, the whole problem with fashion. | David Sedaris | ||
| 8964609 | Why go to a store when you could go to a museum?" she might ask. "Um, because the museum doesn't sell shit?" My sisters and I refuse to feel bad about shopping. And why should we? Obviously we have some hole we're trying to fill, but doesn't everyone? And isn't filling it with berets the size of toilet-seat covers, if not more practical, then at least healthier than filling it with frosting or heroin or unsafe sex with strangers?" | David Sedaris | ||
| 42620db | All I do is fly, so one-upping Ann was pretty easy. "A few years back, at a book signing, I met a pilot," I began. "He flew the Newark to Palm Beach route, right? So it's December twenty-third, and as they touch down in Florida, one of the flight attendants takes the microphone and delivers her standard landing speech. 'Please remain seated until the FASTEN SEAT BELT sign has been turned off and be careful when opening the overhead bins. We.. | David Sedaris | ||
| 9bb5cb6 | What are you doing?' Hugh moaned as I stepped out of the dressing room. 'That's three pairs of culottes you'll own now.' All I could say in my defense was 'Maybe I have a busy life. | life | David Sedaris | |
| aac3f57 | I was still hoping that it might be a phase, that I'd wake up the next day and be normal. In the best of times, it seemed like such a short leap. I did fantasize about having a girlfriend--never the sex part, but the rest of it I had down. I knew what she'd look like and how she'd hold her long hair back from the flame when bending over a lit candle. I imagined us getting married the summer after I graduated from college, and then I imagine.. | David Sedaris | ||
| 29c4617 | I'd asked the same question a few years earlier in Amsterdam and learned that in the Netherlands you're more apt to bring a disease into it. "Like if someone drives in a crazy way, it's normal to call them a cholera sufferer," a Dutch woman told me. "Either that or a cancer whore." | David Sedaris | ||
| c3adab9 | I'd come across a strap-on penis. It seemed pretty old and was Band-Aid colored, about three inches long and not much bigger around than a Vienna sausage, which was interesting to me. You'd think that if someone wanted a sex toy she'd go for the gold, sizewise. But this was just the bare minimum, like getting AAA breast implants. Who had this person been hoping to satisfy, her Cabbage Patch doll? I thought about taking the penis home and ma.. | David Sedaris | ||
| 0b46f10 | Everyone in America is extremely concerned with hydration. Go more than five minutes without drinking, and you'll surely be discovered behind a potted plant, dried out like some escaped hermit crab. When I was young no one would think to bring a bottle of water into a classroom. I don't think they even sold bottled water. We survived shopping trips without it, and funerals. Now, though, you see people with those barrels that Saint Bernards .. | David Sedaris | ||
| 7425581 | Below, he could see down the entire Strip, from the radioactive green lion at the base of the MGM Grand to the glowing spire of the Stratosphere. The logjam street traffic just added to the visual effect: a thousand headlights blinking like neurons in the glowing spine that snaked down the center of the city. | Ben Mezrich | ||
| 7eb2448 | I once knew a beautiful young woman that didn't believe in forever. She became my forever. | Ben Mezrich | ||
| 980a54e | Future writers hide inside books and snort up the craft by enjoyment. They read and learn structure and style. Their curiosity points them to subject matter. | James Ellroy | ||
| 4cc1fed | I'm saying it's so big and audacious that we'll most likely never be suspected. I'm saying that even if we are, the powers that be will realize that it can never be conclusively proven. I'm saying that a consensus of denial will build off of it. I'm saying that people will want to remember the man as something he wasn't. I'm saying that we'll present them with an explanation and the powers that be will prefer it to the truth, even though th.. | James Ellroy | ||
| 0c10453 | Silverlake-Echo was several miles due est of Mount lee, a hilly area with lots of twisting streets, greenery and seclusion, the kind of terrain a necrophiliac might find soothing. | James Ellroy | ||
| 3bfbe61 | He was about to pocket a list of local sanitariums when he heard "Traitor," and saw Mickey and Herman Gerstein standing a few feet away. Cohen with a clean shot, but a half dozen witnesses spoiling his chance. Buzz said, "I suppose this means my guard gig's kaput. Huh, Mick?" The man looked hurt as much as he looked mad. "Goyishe shitheel traitor. Cocksucker. Communist. How much money did I give you? How much money did I set up for you that.. | James Ellroy | ||
| c9694de | America was never innocent. We popped our cherry on the boat over and looked back with no regrets. You can't ascribe our fall from grace to any single event or set of circumstances. You can't lose what you lacked at conception. Mass-market nostalgia gets you hopped up for a past that never existed. Hagiography sanctifies shuck-and-jive politicians and reinvents their expedient gestures as moments of great moral weight. Our continuing narrat.. | James Ellroy | ||
| 9bb92d5 | You'd be better served taxing your conscience for those who deserve your regret. | James Ellroy | ||
| 5d31014 | Cliche shouters, sloganeers, fashion-conscious pseudoidealists. Locusts attacking social causes with the wrong information and bogus solutions, their one legit gripe--the Sleepy Lagoon case--almost blown through guilt by association: fellow travelers soliciting actual Party members for picketing and leaflet distribution, nearly discrediting everything the Sleepy Lagoon Defense Committee said and did. Hollywood writers and actors and hangers.. | the-big-nowhere | James Ellroy | |
| 0fedef7 | Howard got sex-crazy in the winter and probably wanted to send him out on a poontang prowl: Schwab's Drugstore, the extra huts at Fox and Universal, Brownie snapshots of well-lunged girls naked from the waist up. His Majesty's yes or no, then standard gash contracts to the yes's--one-liners in RKO turkeys in exchange for room and board at Hughes Enterprises' fuck pads and frequent nighttime visits from The Man himself. | James Ellroy | ||
| a903f8a | Dudley snatched Blanchard's plate. "That lad shouting racial slurs may be offending Dr. Ashida. Please take him someplace secluded and kick the shit out of him." | James Ellroy | ||
| d37fc91 | I settled in to watch a Dragnet rerun. I bought the judge in four of Jack Webb's drunk-driving beefs. I shtupped Jack's ex-wife, soaring songstress Julie London. | James Ellroy | ||
| a9a39d6 | Breuning drove. Dudley sat up front Carlisle sat in back, with three sawed-off shotguns. | James Ellroy | ||
| ceaaf55 | There's a beast in me. I destroy those I cannot control. I must be certain that those close to me share my identical interests. I'm benevolent within that construction. I'm ghastly outside of it. | James Ellroy | ||
| 418effc | I want to burn down the distance between us> | James Ellroy | ||
| f3331dc | Fear and I played peek-a-boo - it always seemed to grab my balls and twist just when it felt like something inside me could banish all the bullshit forever. | James Ellroy | ||
| 05730e2 | The overarching joy and lasting appeal of noir is that it makes doom fun. | James Ellroy | ||
| 69d5eec | If it would've been me, I would've left Hutch out of it. 'Cause Hutch, he was mean. | James Ellroy | ||
| 63d9b48 | Books and I went back. My old man taught me to read at age three-and-a-half. I bloomed into a classic only child/child-of-divorce autodidact. | James Ellroy |