Quotes from David Sedaris

Jeremy, Good luck on your first marriage.

The things I've bought from strangers in the dark would curl your hair.

I wanted it, I wanted, I wanted, but the moment it was mine, it ceased to interest me.

Standing in a two-hour line makes people worry that they're not living in a democratic nation.

I didn't know about the rest of the class, but when Bastille Day eventually rolled around, I planned to stay home and clean my oven.

I am a person who feels guilty for crimes I have not committed, or have not committed in years. The police search the train station for a serial rapist and I cover my face with a newspaper, wondering if maybe I did it in my sleep. The last thing I stole was an eight-track tape, but to this day I'm unable to enter a store without feeling like a shoplifter. It's all the anxiety with none of the free stuff.

I see you that have a little swimming mouse

Such movies are always a danger...falling in love is something most adults have actually experienced...The theme is universal and encourages...unhealthy comparisons...why can't our lives be like that? It's a box left unopened, and its avoidance explains the continued popularity of vampire epics and martial-arts extravaganzas.

I thought about this for days, just as I thought of the special-ed teacher I met in Pittsburgh. You know, I said, I hear those words and automatically think Handicapped, or, Learning disabled. But aren't a lot of your students just assholes? You got it, she said. Then she told me about a kid - last day of class - who wrote on the blackboard, Mrs. J____ is a cock master. I was impressed because I'd never heard that term before. She was impressed because the boy had spelled it correctly.

I hoped our lives would continue this way forever, but inevitably the past came knocking. Not the good kind that was collectible but the bad kind that had arthritis.

Standing in a two-hour line makes people worry that they're not living in a democratic nation. People stand in line for two houres and they go over the edge.

I don't know that it had anything to do with us," my father said. But how could it have not? Doesn't the blood of every suicide splash back on our faces?

It's unrealistic to live your life within such strict parameters.

Plenty of animals had pets, but few were more devoted than the mouse, who owned a baby corn snake—"A rescue snake, she'd be quick to inform you. This made it sound like he'd been snatched from the jaws of a raccoon, but what she'd really rescued him from was a life without her love. And what sort of a life would that have been?

My first boyfriend was black as well, but that doesn't prove I'm color-blind, just that I like big butts.

In the Netherlands now, I imagine it's legal to marry your own children. Get them pregnant, and you can abort your unborn grandbabies in a free clinic that used to be a church.

Up close the city constitutes an oppressive series of staircases, but from a distance it inspires fantasies of wealth and power so profound that even our communists are temporarily rendered speechless.

Living in a foreign country is one of those things that everyone should try at least once. My understanding was that it completed a person, sanding down the rough provincial edges and transforming you into a citizen of the world. What I find appealing in life abroad was the inevitable sense of helplessness it would inspire. Equally exciting would be the work involved in overcoming that helplessness. There would be a goal involved, and I like having goals.

I spent months searching for some secret code before I realized that common sense has nothing to do with it. Hysteria, psychosis, torture, depression: I was told that if something is unpleasant it's probably feminine. This encouraged me, but the theory was blown by such masculine nouns as murder, toothache, and rollerblade. I have no problem learning the words themselves, it's the sexes that trip me up and refuse to stick.

Don't tell me I don't know how to hate,' I wanted to say. Then I stopped and asked myself, 'Do you really want that to be your message? Think you can out-hate me, asshole? I was fucking hating people before you were even born!

Watching him was like opening the door to a siniging telegram; you know it's supposed to be entertaining, but you can't get beyond the sad fact that this person actually thinks he bringing some joy into your life. Somewhere he had a mother who sifted through a shoe box of mimeographed playbills, pouring herself another drink and wondering when her son would come to his senses and swallow some drain cleaner.

There are things you forget naturally-computer passwords, your father's continuing relationship with life-and then there are things you can't forget that you wish you could.

I thought the president-elect's identity as a despicable human being was something we could all agree on.

They're hungry for something they know nothing about, but we, we know all too well that the price of fame is the loss of privacy.