David Sedaris Quotes

“Like all of my friends, she's a lousy judge of character.”

“He die one day, and then he go above of my head to live with your father."
He weared the long hair, and after he died, the first day he come back here for to say hello to the peoples."
He nice, the Jesus.”

“Sometimes the sins you haven't committed are all you have left to hold onto.”

“Writing gives you the illusion of control, and then you realize it's just an illusion, that people are going to bring their own stuff into it.”

“There is still the outside world to contend with. A world of backfiring cars, and their human equivalents.”

“On a busy day twenty-two thousand people come to visit Santa, and I was told that it is an elf's lot to remain merry in the face of torment and adversity. I promised to keep that in mind.”

“The drama bug strikes hardest with Jews, homosexuals and plump women who wear their hair in bangs. These are people who, for one reason or another, desperately crave attention”

“Remember that the most important thing is to try and love other people as much as they love you.”

“We were not a hugging people. In terms of emotional comfort it was our belief that no amount of physical contact could match the healing powers of a well made cocktail.”

“Speed eliminates all doubt. Am I smart enough? Will people like me? Do I really look all right in this plastic jumpsuit?”

“If I could believe in myself, why not give other improbabilities the benefit of the doubt?”

“I just looked at the pattern of my life, decided I didn't like it, and changed.”

“As a child I assumed that when I reached adulthood, I would have grown-up thoughts.”

“If you aren't cute, you may as well be clever.”

“Real love amounts to withholding the truth, even when you're offered the perfect opportunity to hurt someone's feelings”

“If you read someone else's diary, you get what you deserve.”

“All of us take pride and pleasure in the fact that we are unique, but I'm afraid that when all is said and done the police are right: it all comes down to fingerprints.”

“A good [short story] would take me out of myself and then stuff me back in, outsized, now, and uneasy with the fit.”

“I hate you' she said to me one afternoon. 'I really, really hate you.' Call me sensitive, but I couldn't help but take it personally.”

“I'm the most important person in the lives of almost everyone I know and a good number of the people I've never even met.”

“Boys who spent their weekends making banana nut muffins did not, as a rule, excel in the art of hand-to-hand combat.”

“It's just a penis, right? Probably no worse for you than smoking.”

“This left me alone to solve the coffee problem - a sort of catch-22, as in order to think straight I need caffeine, and in order to make that happen I need to think straight.”

“At the end of a miserable day, instead of grieving my virtual nothing, I can always look at my loaded wastepaper basket and tell myself that if I failed, at least I took a few trees down with me.”

“I'd tried to straighten him out, but there's only so much you can do for a person who thinks Auschwitz is a brand of beer.”

“High school taught me a valuable lesson about glasses: Don't wear them. Contacts have always seemed like too much work, so instead I just squint, figuring that if something is more than ten feet away, I'll just deal with it when I get there.”

“I find it ridiculous to assign a gender to an inanimate object incapable of disrobing and making an occasional fool of itself. Why refer to lady crack pipe or good sir dishrag when these things could never live up to all that their sex implied?”

“It's safe to assume that by 2085 guns will be sold in vending machines but you won't be able to smoke anywhere in America.”

“All I do is lie, and that has made me immune to compliments.”

“I love things made out of animals. It's just so funny to think of someone saying, "I need a letter opener. I guess I'll have to kill a deer.”

“The Korean man nodded, the way you do when you’re a foreigner and understand that someone has finished a sentence.”

“It was my friend Frank, a writer in San Francisco, who finally set me straight. When asked about my new look he put down his fork and stared at me for a few moments. "A bow tie announces to the world you can no longer get an erection.”

“The rabbit of Easter. He bring of the chocolate.”

“He looked as though his life had not only passed him by but paused along the way to spit in his face.”

“Being locked up is one thing, but to have no concept of confinement, to be ignorant of its terms and never understand that struggle is useless - that's what hell must be like.”

“Often I'd take out my magnifying glass and stare into the chaos that was her face.”

“It is funny the things that run through your mind when you're sitting in your underpants in front of a pair of strangers.”

“What's the trick to remembering that a sandwich is masculine? What qualities does it share with anyone in possession of a penis? I'll tell myself that a sandwich is masculine because if left alone for a week or two, it will eventually grow a beard.”

“Oh, for Christ's sake,' I hear. 'Can we please just try to have a good time?' This is like ordering someone to find you attractive, and it doesn't work. I've tried it.”

“A zoo is a good place to make a spectacle of yourself, as the people around you have creepier, more photogenic things to look at.”

“You can't brace yourself for famine if you've never known hunger.”

“I find it ridiculous to assign a gender to an inanimate object incapable of disrobing and making an occasional fool of itself.”

“whenever I read a passage that moves me, I transcribe it in my diary, hoping my fingers might learn what excellence feels like.”

“I won't put in a load of laundry, because the machine is too loud and would drown out other, more significant noises - namely, the shuffling footsteps of the living dead.”

“College is the best thing that can ever happen to you," my father used to say, and he was right, for it was there that I discovered drugs, drinking, and smoking..”

“Their house had real hard-cover books in it, and you often saw them lying open on the sofa, the words still warm from being read.”

“And when Hugh would grow progressively Gandhi on me, I'd remind him that these were pests---disease carriers who feasted upon the dead and then came indoors to dance upon our silverware.”

“but I have no mind for business and considered staying awake to be enough of an accomplishment.”

“I was just struggling with my inner vachette and pondering the depths of my own inhumanity.”

“Say what you will about the south, but in North Carolina a hot dog is free to swing anyway it wishes.”

“At first, writing for The New Yorker was very scary to me. I couldn't imagine anything that I would write in that typeface.”

“In other parts of the country people tried to stay together for the sake of the children. In New York they tried to work things out for the sake of the apartment.”

“In the beginning, I was put off by the harshness of German. Someone would order a piece of cake, and it sounded as if it were an actual order, like, "Cut the cake and lie facedown in that ditch between the cobbler and the little girl."”

“People are often frightened of Parisians, but an American in Paris will find no harsher critic than another American.”

“This was the consequence of seeing too much and understanding the horrible truth: No one is safe. The world is not manageable.”

“I needed to temper (my dad's) enthusiasm a bit (about attending Princeton), and so I announced that I would be majoring in patricide… My mom was actually jealous.”

“Given enough time, I guess anything can look good. All it has to do is survive.”

“What I really hated, of course, was my mind. There must have been an off switch somewhere, but I was damned if I could find it.”

“There seemed to be some correlation between devotion to God and a misguided zeal for marshmallows.”

“I'd always thought that I understood this, but lately I realize that what I call "understanding" is basically just fantasizing.”

“she took pictures of germs, viruses, and people reacting to germs and viruses. On weekends, for extra money, she photographed weddings, which really wasn't that much of a stretch”