David Sedaris citations

Page 2

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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”

“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.”

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

“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.”