David Sedaris: Likeness

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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."”

“Like anyone nostalgic for a time he didn't live through, I chose to weed out the little inconveniences: polio, say, or the thought of eating stewed squirrel. The world was simply grander back then, somehow more civilized, and nicer to look at.”

“If finding an apartment is like falling in love, buying one is like proposing on your first date and agreeing not to see each other until the wedding.”

“My hands tend to be full enough dealing with people who hate me for who I am. Concentrate too hard on the millions of people who hate you for what you are and you're likely to turn into one of those unkempt, sloppy dressers who sag beneath the weight of the two hundred political buttons they wear pinned to their coats and knapsacks.”

“"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? What produced in others a feeling of exhilaration left Jason and me with a mortifying feeling of guilt. We fled the room as if, in our fumblings, we had uncapped some virus we still might escape if we ran fast enough. Had one of the counselors not caught me scaling the fence, I felt certain I could have made it back to Raleigh by morning, skittering across the surface of the ocean like one of those lizards often featured on television wildlife programs.”

“They were nothing like the French people I had imagined. If anything, they were too kind, too generous and too knowledgeable in the fields of plumbing and electricity.”

“Sure, some people are nice. Real nice. Nice like carpets so you can walk all over them.”

“I can't seem to fathom that the things important to me are not important to other people as well, and so I come off sounding like a missionary, someone whose job it is to convert rather than listen.”