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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 67e8161 | It was the stupidest thing the cat had ever heard of, an AA program in prison. | David Sedaris | ||
| 35c93e5 | She regarded her grandchildren as if we were savings bonds, something certain to multiply in value through the majesty of arithmetic. Ya Ya and her husband had produced one child, who in turn had yielded five, a wealth of hearty field hands destined to return to the village, where we might crush olives or stucco windmills or whatever it was they did in her hometown. She was always pushing up our sleeves to examine our muscles, frowning at t.. | David Sedaris | ||
| 0d068ba | Whereas our other grandparents asked what grade we were in or which was our favorite ashtray, Ya Ya never expressed any interest in that sort of thing. Childhood was something you endured until you were old enough to work, and money was the only thing that mattered. | David Sedaris | ||
| 13fbf77 | We would pass the afternoon at Ya Ya's table, eating stringy boiled meat served with spinach pie. The food tasted as though it had been cooked weeks beforehand and left to age in a musty trunk. Her meals had been marinated in something dank and foreign and were cooked not in pots and pans, but in the same blackened kettles used by witches. Once we'd been served, she performed an epic version of grace. Delivered in both Greek and broken Engl.. | David Sedaris | ||
| 91c07f4 | Lisa and I groaned, cursing our stupidity. Once again we'd been duped. There was nothing worse than spending an afternoon on a golf course. We knew what was in store for us and understood that the next few hours would pass like days or maybe even weeks. Our watches would yawn, the minute and hour hands joining each other in a series of periodic naps. | David Sedaris | ||
| f87c7ae | Seeing the pros in person was no more interesting than eating an ice-cold hamburger, | David Sedaris | ||
| 28dab35 | Every clue was italicized with a burst of surging trumpets, and under questioning, the suspects snapped like toothpicks, buckling in less time than it took to soft-boil an egg. | David Sedaris | ||
| dfdb090 | That," the chief counselor said, "is what happens to people who play around." If this was the punishment for a boy and a girl, I felt certain the penalty for two boys somehow involved barbed wire, a team of donkeys, and the nearest volcano." | David Sedaris | ||
| a352116 | Every gathering has its moment. As an adult, I distract myself by trying to identify it, dreading the inevitable down-swing that is sure to follow. The guests will repeat themselves one too many times, or you'll run out of dope or liquor and realize that it was all you ever had in common. | David Sedaris | ||
| 2c0efe7 | inhabited by hopeless, motor-mouthed simpletons, drifting from a bad place to somewhere even worse. If you're lucky, people on the bus will wake you in order to borrow a cigarette. The man occupying the window seat is likely to introduce himself with the line "What the hell are you staring at?" | David Sedaris | ||
| 5f89729 | In binghamton, new york, winter meant snow, and though I was young when we left, I was able to recall great heaps of it, and use that memory as evidence that North Carolina was, at best, a third-rate institution. What little snow there was would usually melt an hour or two after hitting the ground, and there you'd be in your windbreaker and unconvincing mittens, forming a lumpy figure made mostly of mud. Snow Negroes, we called them. The | David Sedaris | ||
| f7cf60e | I'd been at the plant for three weeks when Curly invited me to his trailer for a drink. He lived just outside Hood River in a double-wide he shared with his mother, a woman he often spoke about. "I told Mother what you said about Dorothy's mouth looking like a gunshot wound and, Lord, she just about bust a gut, she was laughing so hard. She is one funny lady, my mother. Nothing tickles her funny bone better than a knock-knock joke. You know.. | David Sedaris | ||
| 3cabe8d | He also made a 1-2-3-4 cake, which calls for one cup of butter, two cups of sugar, three cups of flour, and four eggs. I ate half of it, which amounts to one entire stick of butter. | David Sedaris | ||
| 0dd0e3f | On Maui, one November, Hugh and I went swimming, and turned to find a gigantic sea turtle coming up between us. As gentle as a cow she was, and with a cow's dopey, almost lovesick expression on her face. That, to me, was worth the entire trip, worth my entire life, practically. For to witness majesty, to find yourself literally touched by it--isn't that what we've all been waiting for? | David Sedaris | ||
| bb119e9 | If you're looking for sympathy you can find it between shit and syphilis in the dictionary. | David Sedaris | ||
| f536378 | Out in the world where it's so beautiful and complex and painful that sometimes you just need to sit down and write about it. | David Sedaris | ||
| 9fb7d9f | The man spoke with an accent, and though I couldn't exactly place it, I knew that he was poor. His voice had snakes in it. And dysentery, and mangoes. | David Sedaris | ||
| db50f49 | There's a short circuit between my brain and my tongue, thus "Leave me the fuck alone" comes out as "Well, maybe. Sure. I guess I can see your point." This," | David Sedaris | ||
| 4b62157 | I think we've both seen this coming for a long... time. The only question left is... what are we going to do about it? Oh, baby, let's run wild. | David Sedaris | ||
| b52b5d7 | While I was gone Hugh, Manuela, and Dario attended Franck's surprise fortieth-birthday party. One of the guests was a sophisticated mother of three who announced that she hated the zoo at the Jardin des Plantes because it was cruel to keep the animals in such small cages. She went on and on and then, at the end of the evening, she unlocked her car and released her golden retriever, who'd spent the last six hours in the trunk. | David Sedaris | ||
| 8847302 | or the class moron will go on to become the president of the United States--though that's more likely to happen at Harvard or Yale, schools that will pretty much let in anybody. | David Sedaris | ||
| 3ef5b87 | Look," I'll say to Jesus, "enough is enough. I suggest we nail some boards together and have ourselves an old-fashioned crucifixion." -- | David Sedaris | ||
| da7c14a | I should be used to the way Americans dress when traveling, yet it still manages to amaze me. It's as if the person next to you had been washing shoe polish off a pig, then suddenly threw down his sponge saying, "Fuck this. I'm going to Los Angeles!" On" | David Sedaris | ||
| e182b78 | Her 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 | ||
| 281a5e8 | In my house, our parents put us to bed with two simple words: "Shut up." That was always the last thing we heard before our lights were turned off. Our artwork did not hang on the refrigerator or anywhere near it, because our parents recognized it for what it was: crap. They did not live in a child's house, we lived in theirs." | David Sedaris | ||
| c29af32 | The dialogue fills the auditorium like an unrefrigerated boxcar of month-old steaks. | David Sedaris | ||
| 8ccc009 | I thought of those people on the bus, going from one shitty place to the next, expecting nothing to change but the landscape. Soon I'd be sitting beside them, sharing my potato chips and thinking of them as my kind of crowd. I | David Sedaris | ||
| 85fed25 | These people were the only contact I had outside of the men and women who picked me up hitchhiking back and forth to work every day. I'd arrive at the shop, listen to Christian radio, get blessed out by Jon and blessed back in by his visiting friends and neighbors. It was like being sent to a foreign country to be immersed in a language that somehow, over time, became your own. "Peace be with you, brethren," "You know what they say in John .. | David Sedaris | ||
| 9e596c1 | I found the ad in a community booster paper. "Sharp, experienced go-getter wanted to strip/refinish woodwork. Enthusiasm a must." I had spent years refinishing, first in Raleigh and then again in Chicago. I always vowed I'd never do it again, but that's the problem with having a skill: once you swear off it, you know you're stuck with it forever. All work seems designed to kill you, but refinishing is tailor-made to provide a long and painf.. | David Sedaris | ||
| f09cb89 | You ever been to Tijuana?" he asked. Most of Dupont's stories began with a question and ended with an insatiable woman, buck naked and begging for more." | David Sedaris | ||
| 7cf08b5 | 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 and videotape a race riot and send a text message and stun someone into submission all at the same time? | David Sedaris | ||
| 8d154c2 | Do you have a feel for the guitar? Do you have any idea what this little baby is capable of?" Without waiting for an answer, he climbed up into his chair and began playing "Light My Fire," adding, "This one is for Joan." | David Sedaris | ||
| 9ca7b8c | he's braw and pulchritudinous, | David Sedaris | ||
| 80bc308 | IT IS HIS BIRTHDAY, and Hugh and I are seated in a New York restaurant, awaiting the arrival of our fifteen-word entrees. He looks very nice, dressed in the suit and sweater that have always belonged to him. As for me, I own only my shoes, pants, shirt, and tie. My jacket belongs to the restaurant and was offered as a loan by the maitre d', who apparently thought I would feel more comfortable dressed to lead a high-school marching band. | David Sedaris | ||
| 5db1b65 | The one titled "Romance" included the following: "Would you like a drink?" "You're a fantastic dancer." "You look like some cousin of mine." The latter would work only if you were Asian, but even then it's a little creepy, the implication being "the cousin I have always wanted to undress and ejaculate on." | David Sedaris | ||
| 9f0293b | Yesterday a woman had her son pee into a cup, which of course tipped over. "That's fine," I said, "but Santa's also going to need a stool sample." | David Sedaris | ||
| 810c877 | I don't know how these couples do it, spend hours each night tucking their kids in, reading them books about misguided kittens or seals who wear uniforms, and then rereading them if the child so orders. In my house, our parents put us to bed with two simple words: "Shut up." | David Sedaris | ||
| b7e0995 | Strip to your underwear," she told me, and I said, "D'accord." As the woman turned to leave, she said something else, and, looking back, I really should have asked her to repeat it, to draw a picture if that's what it took, because once you take your pants off, d'accord isn't really OK anymore." | David Sedaris | ||
| 880c3ac | One of the people I voted for this morning was named Lee Botts. Her campaign slogan is HER BOTTOM LINE IS CLEAN WATER. Someone tampered with the sign she had in front of the school, and now it reads LEE BOTTS. HER BOTTOM IS CLEAN. | David Sedaris | ||
| 554cf9b | The guilt applies only to those things that are being given away for free. | David Sedaris | ||
| 8f7087a | You kids might think you're close, but just wait until your father and I are gone, and you're left to divide up our property. | David Sedaris | ||
| 38c1802 | Man ordering at Butera's deli/prepared-foods counter: "Hey, give me one of them chickens what spins around." | David Sedaris | ||
| 3db3930 | started feeling real sorry for everybody, even though they were screaming and acting silly. I thought about how much work it was to have fun, and how brave we all were for going to the trouble, since the easiest thing would be to just moan and cry and bite the walls, because we're all going to die anyway, sooner or later. Isn't that sad? I saw how every human life is a story, and the story always ends badly. | David Sedaris | ||
| 57b2736 | A guy needs a place where he can gaze into the ocean and sort things out." It" | David Sedaris |