David Sedaris: Thing

“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.”

“Weird doors open. People fall into things.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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..”

“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.”

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

“After a few months in my parents' basement, I took an apartment near the state university, where I discovered both crystal methamphetamine and conceptual art. Either one of the these things are dangerous, but in combination they have the potential to destroy entire civilizations.”

“on genders of nouns: Why refer to Lady Crack Pipe or Good Sir Dishrag when these things could never live up to all that their sex implied?”

“After coming home, I listened to the radio and cleaned up a little. A woman on All Things Considered wrote a book of advice called If You Want to Write and mentioned the importance of keeping a diary. It was valuable, she said, because after a while you'd stop being forced and pretentious and become honest and unafraid of your thoughts.”

“Another old-fashioned practice I maintain is carrying a notebook, a small one I keep in my shirt pocket and never leave the house without. In it I register all the little things that strike me, not in great detail but just quickly. The following morning I'll review what I jotted down and look for the most meaningful moment in the previous day, the one in which I felt truly present.
It's worth mentioning that this is my edit. It wasn't easy revisiting what are now 156 volumes of my diary.”

“Because I was lazy, I'd adopted the philosophy that things just happen.”

“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.”