David Sedaris

Quotes

1. He took a sip of my father's weak coffee and spit it back into the mug. "This shit's like making love in a canoe."

   "Excuse me?"

   "It's fucking near water."

   p. 171

2. 

   Harry Rowohlt, the fellow who translated my book into German and is reading with me on my tour, told me that when someone on the bus or at a nearby table in a restaurant talks on a cell phone, he likes to lean over and shout, "Come back to bed, I'm freezing."

   p. 391

3. 

   On several occasions during my visit, she referred to herself as poor, and that depressed me. Most people would say they're broke. That word suggests a temporary setback. Poor, on the other hand, conveys a permanence.

   p. 431

4. 

   If you talk to people, you can have whatever you want.

   p. 21

5. 

   Someone in the back of the room started singing "God Bless America." The thing about "God Bless America" is that, after a certain point, nobody really knows the words. There's always a weird mumbling that follows "Stand beside her and guide her," and lasts until "From the mountains to the prairies."

   p. 455

6. 

   On Wednesday my watch broke, so yesterday I went across the street to the saddest mall in America. Half the stores were shuttered up and the fountain had been drained. The food court was gone except for a place called Granny's Fudgery, a wooden cart surrounded by card tables. I imagine the mall started going downhill when it accepted Walmart as a tenant. Anything you could find at Bill's Card Shop and the Record Bin could also be found there, where a customer could pay less and buy everything in one shot. I'd been to only one Walmart in my life before this and I was shocked at how ugly it was, even by American standards. It was a mammoth jumble of absolute shit made more chaotic by brightly colored signs and promotional displays. Yesterday's Walmart was even worse than the first, but the employees were incredibly friendly.

   p. 428

7. 

   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.

   p. 6

8. 

   ... name association was big, as were my presumed interests in vaudeville and politics. In St. Louis the Bow tie was characterized as "very Charlie McCarthy", while in Chicago a young man defined it as "the pierced eyebrow of the Republican party".

9. 

   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.

   p. 94

10. 

    Delinquent style is timeless. Real trouble doesn't walk around with a ponytail. It doesn't have a Mohawk or special shoelace patterns. Real trouble has a bad complexion and a Windbreaker.

    p. 153

11. 

    My problem was that I already loved an apartment. The one we had was perfect, and searching for another left me feeling faithless and sneaky, as if I were committing adultery. After a viewing, I'd stand in our living room, looking up at the high, beamed ceiling and trying to explain that the other two-bedroom had meant nothing to me.

    p. 180

12. 

    Sometimes when you're stoned it's fun to sit around and think of who might play you in the movie version of your life. What makes it fun is that no one is actually going to make a movie of your life.

    I'd worried that, in making the movie, the director might get me and my family wrong, but now a worse thought occurred to me: What if he got us right?

    p. 147