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David Sedaris

88 quotes

“I love things made out of animals," Sedaris says, holding a knife with a hoof for a handle. "It's just so funny to think of someone saying, 'I need a letter opener. I guess I'll have to kill a deer.'”
David Sedaris (born 1956) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Shit is the tofu of cursing.”
David Sedaris (born 1956) first seen 2005 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Reading at George Washington University in Washington, DC. 4 April 2005.
“I read "Revolutionary Road" once a year. Aside from its word-by-word construction, I love how his characters deceive themselves.”
David Sedaris (born 1956) first seen 1961 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: from the Praise for Revolutionary Road section at the front of the Vintage 2007 paperback edition of that 1961 novel.
“What did Trish's mother say when her daughter, heartbroken over her breakup with Randy, came to her in search of love and understanding? 'If you're looking for sympathy you can find it between shit and syphilis in the dictionary.'”
David Sedaris (born 1956) first seen 2011 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Story, "The last you'll hear from me" - p.23 [page numbers per the Abacus paperback edition, 2011 reprint]
“Last Christmas I received a set of golf clubs that, my father likes to remind me, cost a goddamned fortune. He says that he would give his right arm for such a beautiful set of clubs.”
David Sedaris (born 1956) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“'Of course he died,' the window washer said. 'You can't take more than a four-storey fall, not in this town anyway. Then Jeffrey Lee got off the phone and said that, given a choice, he'd rather fall from a higher floor as it would allow more time for his life to flash before his eyes. The window man said that all depends on the life you led.”
David Sedaris (born 1956) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It occurred to me that everything we buy has been poked or packaged by some unfortunate nitwit with a hairnet and a wad of cotton stuffed into his ears. Every ear of corn, every chocolate-coated raisin or shoelace. Every barbeque tong, paper hat, and store-bought mitten arrives with a history of abject misery. Vegetarians look at a pork roast thinking about the animal. I'd now look at them wondering whose job it was to package the shallow Styrofoam trays.”
David Sedaris (born 1956) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Because I was lazy, I'd adopted the philosophy that things just happen.”
David Sedaris (born 1956) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“that's the beauty of an art school: as long as you can pay the tuition, they will never, even in the gentlest way, suggest that you have no talent.”
David Sedaris (born 1956) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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. I haven't got the slightest idea how to change people, but still I keep a long list of prospective candidates just in case I should ever figure it out.”
David Sedaris (born 1956) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“'If I had one wish, I'd wish for an unlimited amount of wishes,' I said. She shook her head in a way that suggested she had heard this answer countless times before. 'Don't get greedy on me, Dave, you only get one wish.'”
David Sedaris (born 1956) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“'It is ironic that nudists are just about the last people you'd ever want to see naked.”
David Sedaris (born 1956) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
David Sedaris (born 1956) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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?”
David Sedaris (born 1956) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
David Sedaris (born 1956) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Like all of my friends, she's a lousy judge of character.”
David Sedaris (born 1956) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
David Sedaris (born 1956) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If cooking is an art, I think we're in our Dada phase.”
David Sedaris (born 1956) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Because I'm both a glutton and a masochist, my standard complaint, "That was so bad", is always followed by "And there was so little of it!”
David Sedaris (born 1956) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Friends always say, "How can you eat those? I read in the paper that they're made from hog's lips." "And...?" "And hearts and eyelids.”
David Sedaris (born 1956) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The word phobic has its place when properly used, but lately it's been declawed by the pompous insistence that most animosity is based upon fear rather than loathing. No credit is given for distinguishing between these two very different emotions.”
David Sedaris (born 1956) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You can't kill the Rooster. You might can fuck him up a little sometimes, but you can't kill him.”
David Sedaris (born 1956) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I ain't seen pussy in so long I'd throw stones at it.”
David Sedaris (born 1956) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It was insulting to be told not to take too much of something you didn't really want in the first place.”
David Sedaris (born 1956) first seen 2005 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Essay: "Us and them" - p.7 [page numbers per the Abacus paperback, 2005 UK edition]
“In the coming years our father would continue to promise what he couldn't deliver, and in time we grew to think of him as an actor auditioning for the role of a benevolent millionaire. He'd never get the part but liked the way the words felt in his mouth.”
David Sedaris (born 1956) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Cut corners and it'll always come back to bite you in the ass." That was one of her sayings.”
David Sedaris (born 1956) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Her face was like the weather in one of those places with no discernible seasons.”
David Sedaris (born 1956) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I never went into their apartment, but what I saw from the door was pretty rough - not simply messy or chaotic, but hopeless, the lair of a depressed person.”
David Sedaris (born 1956) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It wouldn't have made any difference," my mother said. "A woman like that, the way she sees it she's a victim. Everyone against her, no matter what.”
David Sedaris (born 1956) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“She's afraid to tell me anything important, knowing I'll only turn around and write about it. In my mind, I'm like a friendly junkman, building things from the little pieces of scrap I find here and there, but my family's started to see things differently. Their personal lives are the so-called pieces of scrap I so casually pick up, and they're sick of it. More and more often their stories begin with the line "You have to swear you will never repeat this." I always promise, but it's generally understood that my word means nothing.”
David Sedaris (born 1956) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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?”
David Sedaris (born 1956) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What really interests me are the local gun laws. Can I carry a concealed weapon and, if so, under what circumstances? What's the waiting period for a tommy gun? Could I buy a Glock 17 if I were recently divorced or fired from my job?”
David Sedaris (born 1956) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
David Sedaris (born 1956) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
David Sedaris (born 1956) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
David Sedaris (born 1956) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
David Sedaris (born 1956) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I thought I'd get a coffee and take it outdoors, but just as I approached, a boy swooped in and began mixing himself a cup of hot chocolate. It was a complicated business, mixing a cup of hot chocolate. You had to spread the powdered cocoa from one end of the table to the other and use as many stirrers as possible, making sure to thoroughly chew the wetted ends before tossing them upon the stack of unused napkins. This is what I like about children: complete attention to one detail and complete disregard of another.”
David Sedaris (born 1956) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“... 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".”
David Sedaris (born 1956) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Our artwork did not hang on the refrigerator or anywhere near it, because our parents recognised it for what it was: crap.”
David Sedaris (born 1956) first seen 2014 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Essay, "Attaboy". p.14 [page numbers per the Abacus paperback edition 2014]
“My dad was like the Marine Corps, only instead of tearing you to pieces and then putting you back together, he just did the first part and called it a day. I'm sure my father said plenty of normal things to me when I was growing up, but what stuck, probably because he said it, like, ten thousand times, was "Everything you touch turns to crap." His other catchphrase was "You know what you are? A big fat zero.”
David Sedaris (born 1956) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I laid my hand over hers on the desktop and then looked down at it, thinking what a great poster this would make. "Togetherness," it might read. I'd expected electricity to pass mutually between us, but all I really felt was self-conscious, and disappointed that more people weren't looking on.”
David Sedaris (born 1956) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“People had their places, and to not understand that, to act in violation of it, demoted you from a nature nut to something even lower, a complete untouchable, basically.”
David Sedaris (born 1956) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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." I'm guessing this comes from having watched too many Second World War movies.”
David Sedaris (born 1956) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Gambling to me is what a telephone pole might be to a groundhog. He sees that it's there but doesn't for the life of him understand why. Friends have tried to explain the appeal, but still I don't get it. Why take chances with money?”
David Sedaris (born 1956) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Look at us," he said, and he let out a long sigh. "A couple of first-class fucking losers." I wanted to defend myself, to at least point out that we were in second class.”
David Sedaris (born 1956) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In 2004, I offered priority signing to smokers, the reason being that, because they didn't have as long to live, their time was more valuable. Four years later my special treatment was reserved for men who stood five-foot-six and under. "That's right, my little friends," I announced. "There'll be no waiting in line for you." It seemed unfair to restrict myself to men, so I included any woman with braces on her teeth. "What about us?" asked the pregnant and the lame. And because it was my show, I told them to wait their fucking turn.”
David Sedaris (born 1956) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But then my focus shifts and I find myself staring. I should be used to the way Americans dress when traveling, yet it still manages to amaze me. It's as if the person next to you had been washing shoe polish off a pig, then suddenly threw down his sponge saying, "Fuck this. I'm going to Los Angeles!”
David Sedaris (born 1956) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Then again, even if I were informed, what's the likelihood of changing anyone's opinion, especially a couple of strangers? If my own little mind is nailed shut, why wouldn't theirs be?”
David Sedaris (born 1956) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A person doesn't consciously choose what he focuses on. Those things choose you, and, once they do, nothing, it seems, can shake them.”
David Sedaris (born 1956) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“My trip reminded me that we are all just animals, that stuff comes out of every hole we have, no matter where we live or how much money we've got. On some level we all know this and manage, quite pleasantly, to shove it towards the back of our minds.”
David Sedaris (born 1956) wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source