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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 0b22bd4 | All I can say is that if it helps to have friends, it helps even more to have friends who are governors! | David Sedaris | ||
| 39a6c69 | Missing a nose. With these children Santa has to be careful not to ask, "And what would you like for Christmas?" | David Sedaris | ||
| 7fb1ed3 | Like prisoners and shepherds, many of them didn't care who they had sex with, the idea being that what happens in the dark stays in the dark. It's the next morning you have to worry about--the name-calling, the slamming of doors, the charge that you somehow cast a spell. | David Sedaris | ||
| 80d47be | even if I were informed, what's the likelihood of changing anyone's opinion, especially a couple of strangers'? If my own little mind is nailed shut, why wouldn't theirs be? | David Sedaris | ||
| 711b5be | we flew to Los Angeles, where I secured a new passport. The picture in my stolen one wasn't half bad, but in the new one I look like a penis with an old person's face drawn on it. | David Sedaris | ||
| 8dd0273 | It's not that I don't have opinions about these things. I just don't feel they're in any way special. Sure, I follow the news. I read the papers and listen to the radio, but I'm not privy to any inside information. When it comes to politics, all I can offer is emotion. My perspective might be slightly different, but so is anyone's when they live overseas. | David Sedaris | ||
| 4061c43 | Dad said that the guy who can play guitar is going to be the life of the party. He's confusing life with death. | David Sedaris | ||
| 674ae74 | It hardly seemed fair, because, unlike a horse or a Seeing Eye dog, the whole glory of being a bird is that nobody would ever put you to work. | freedom sedaris work | David Sedaris | |
| fdc85c1 | What if I'd wasted my entire life comparing myself with people who didn't really matter? Try as I might, I still can't wrap my mind around it. | David Sedaris | ||
| d9d5b91 | The iPhone 2 led to the 3, but I didn't get the 4 or 5 because I'm holding out for the 7, which, I've heard on good authority, can also be used as a Taser. This will mean I'll have just one less thing to carry around. And isn't that technology's job? To lighten our burden? To broaden our horizons? To make it possible to talk to your attorney and listen to a Styx album and check the obituaries in the town where your parents continue to live .. | David Sedaris | ||
| 2e7bf3c | I'm sure my father said plenty of normal things to me when I was growing up, but what stuck, probably because he said it, like, ten thousand times, was "Everything you touch turns to crap." His other catchphrase was "You know what you are? A big fat zero." Excerpt From: David Sedaris. "Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls." iBooks." | David Sedaris | ||
| aaea3b6 | So which do you like better,State or Carolina? She was referring to the athletic rivalry between the Triangle area's two largest universities..."Definitely State. State all the way." | David Sedaris | ||
| 4ead7c6 | Occasionally I'd tune in to a music station, but I always preferred the sound of people talking, even if the subject was something I didn't care about | David Sedaris | ||
| 38ae1bf | I might reinvent myself to strangers, but to this day, as far as my family is concerned, I'm still the one most likely to set your house on fire. | David Sedaris | ||
| 167e123 | I am not a terribly physical person. Helen wasn't either. We'd never hugged or even shaken hands, so it was odd to find myself rubbing her bare shoulder and then her back. It was, I though, like stroking some sort of sea creature, the flesh slick and fatty beneath my palms. In my memory, there was something on the stove, a cauldron of tomato gravy, and the smell of it mixed with the camphor of the Tiger Balm. The windows were steamed, Tony .. | David Sedaris | ||
| b29da0f | Broke a nail clean off, and when it grew back it looked like a Brazil nut. | David Sedaris | ||
| a84c192 | My confessions did nothing to alter this situation, but for the first time in my life I felt that somebody actually knew me. Three somebodies, to be exact. Two were roaming the highway in a Cadillac, doing God knows what with a CB radio, but the other was as close to me as my own skin, and I could now feel the undiluted pleasure of her company. | honesty knowing-someone pleasure truth | David Sedaris | |
| 5cbf3df | The problem isn't gaining weight, it's gaining it in the right place. | David Sedaris | ||
| e625021 | The walking tour guides one through the city's various landmarks, reciting bits of information the listener might find enlightening. I learned, for example, that in the late 1500s my little neighborhood square was a popular spot for burning people alive. Now lined with a row of small shops, the tradition continues, though in a figurative rather than literal sense. | david-sedaris france funny-quotes humor satire | David Sedaris | |
| 81b2668 | They did not live in a child's house, we lived in theirs. | David Sedaris | ||
| 4c5cabf | He secretly thinks he looks like Marlon Brando, but take a good look a young Marlin Perkins is more like it! Maybe that's what he sees in Annette Kelper--he's an animal lover. | David Sedaris | ||
| a994d15 | The fetus was minute - a congregation of loitering cells - and as with anything that informal, there was a good chance that it might disperse. | David Sedaris | ||
| e183cf6 | To be fair, he had never actually promised to be monogamous. That was my idea, and though I tried my hardest to convert him, the allure of other people was just too great. | David Sedaris | ||
| ca54243 | You spend hours wrestling with yourself, trying to keep your vision intact, your intensity undiminished. Sometimes I have to stick my head under the tap to get my wits back. And for what? You know what publishing is like these days. Paper costs going up all the time. Nothing gets printed unless it can be made into a movie. Everything is media. Crooked politicians sell their unwritten memoirs for thousands. I've got a great idea for a novel... | David Sedaris | ||
| 3008d7f | but wasn't everyone in England supposed to be a detective? Wasn't every crime, no matter how complex, solved in a timely fashion by either a professional or a hobbyist? That's the impression you get from British books and TV shows. Sherlock Holmes, Miss Marple, Hetty Wainthropp, Inspector George Gently: they come from every class and corner of the country. There's even Edith Pargeter's Brother Cadfael, a Benedictine monk who solved crimes i.. | england | David Sedaris | |
| 6f4c28f | Nobody likes having a problem, but having a convoluted, bureaucratic one is even more galling. | problems | David Sedaris | |
| bd3bb64 | The two of you grew apart,' my mother would say. She made it sound as if we'd veered off in different directions, though in fact we had the exact same destination. I just never made it. | David Sedaris | ||
| 63b8df3 | Boxes of records made me think that LPs should be outlawed or at least limited to five per person, and I soon came to despise the type who packs even her empty shampoo bottles, figuring she'll sort things out and throw them away once she's settled into her new place. | David Sedaris | ||
| 64d0d59 | What you call your personality, you know?--it's not the actual bones, or teeth, something solid. It's more like a flame. A flame can be upright, and a flame can flicker in the wind, a flame can be extinguished so there's no sign of it, like it had never been. | David Sedaris | ||
| 88c25c8 | Here I am, just turned fifty, and I forgot that my father isn't dead yet! | David Sedaris | ||
| 491461d | The next summer we went to France for six weeks, and I added another 420 words, most of them found in the popular gossip magazine, 'Voici'. "Man-eater", I'd say. "Gold digger, roustabout, louse". "Who are you talking about?" my neighbors would ask. "What social climber? Where?" | David Sedaris | ||
| 8d23d31 | Behind the naive vanities, the daydreams, they had very badly wanted to be writers. Had wanted it without knowing at all what it was they wanted, their fervor making up for their ignorance. His older self was cooler, more noncommittal, for he had learned that to publicize your goals means running the risk of falling short of them. | David Sedaris | ||
| 267eaa8 | The people I hung out with in my early twenties were middle-class and, at least to our minds, artistic. We'd all turned our backs on privilege, but comfortably, the way you can when you still have access to it. | David Sedaris | ||
| e2fed17 | Shit is the tofu of cursing and can be molded to whichever condition the speaker desires. | David Sedaris | ||
| 5c3c1b7 | The offices were like a national holding center for the trainably banal, occupied by people who decorated their cubicles with quilted, heart-shaped picture frames and those tiny plush bears with the fierce spring grip that cling to lamps and computer terminals, personalized to read "Terri's bear" or "I wuv you very beary much!" | David Sedaris | ||
| b92c360 | We started when I was in the fourth grade, which would have made me ten, I guess. It's different for everyone, but at that age, though I couldn't have said that I was gay, I knew that I was not like the other boys in my class or my Scout troop. While they welcomed male company, I shrank from it, dreaded it, feeling like someone forever trying to pass, someone who would eventually be found out, and expelled from polite society. Is this how a.. | David Sedaris | ||
| 2c49b08 | It was like watching someone you hate getting mugged: three seconds of hard-core violence, and when it was over you just wanted it to happen again. | David Sedaris | ||
| c895c1d | Moving heavy objects allowed me to feel manly in the eyes of other men. With the women it didn't matter, but I enjoyed subtly intimidating the guys with bad backs who thought they were helping out by telling us how to pack the truck. The thinking was that because we were furniture movers, we obviously weren't too bright. In addition to being strong and stupid, we were also thought of as dangerous. It might have been an old story to Patrick .. | intimidating manly manual-labor movers unintelligent | David Sedaris | |
| d4586e5 | The better country club operated on the principle that Raleigh mattered, that its old families were fine ones, and that they needed a place where they could enjoy one another's company without being pawed at. Had we not found this laughable, our country club might have felt desperate. | David Sedaris | ||
| 4c75556 | It was, I thought, what evil must smell like. | David Sedaris | ||
| 65a7ce8 | Built around 1780... a two-hour train ride from Paris... the neighbor keeps his horses in my backyard... pies made with apples from my own trees..." I caught the highlights of Hugh's broadcast and understood that my first goal was to make him my boyfriend, to trick or blackmail him into making some sort of commitment. I know it sounds calculating, but if you're not cute, you might as well be clever." | humor relationships | David Sedaris | |
| a5e7bd5 | There were no computers in my high school, and the first two times I attempted college, people were still counting on their fingers and removing their shoes when the numbers got above ten. | David Sedaris | ||
| 590e1fb | What they do at 6:00 a.m. is anyone's guess. I only know that they're incredibly self-righteous about it and talk about the dawn as if it's a personal reward, bestowed on account of their great virtue. | David Sedaris | ||
| f221e8a | I said that Santa no longer traffics in coal. Instead, if you're bad he comes to your house and steals things. | David Sedaris |