Quotes from David Sedaris

Since when do politics affect a mammals ability to sustain a flame? That aside, who says a burning mouse can't run a distance of twelve feet?

True art was based upon despair, and the important thing was to make yourself and those around you as miserable as possible.

Do you think it was my fault that she drank? my father asked not long ago. It's the assumption of an amateur, someone who stops after his second vodka tonic and quits taking his pain medication before the prescription runs out. It's almost laughable, this insistence on a reason. I think my mother was lonely without her children—her fan club. But I think she drank because she was an alcoholic.

The thought of killing myself had slowed me down to five miles per hour. The thought of killing someone else stopped me completely.

Shopping has nothing to do with money. If you have it, you go to stores and galleries, and if not, you haunt flea markets or Goodwills. Never, though, do you not do it, choosing instead to visit a park or a temple or some cultural institution where they don't sell things.

I later learn that what I suffered was called blunt force trauma. It's remarkably similar to how I felt after the election, as if I'd been slammed into a wall or hit by a car. Both pains persist-show no signs, in fact, of ever going away. The damage is permanent. I will never be the same as I was before the accident/election.

A person doesn't consciously choose what he focuses on. Those things choose you, and, once they do, nothing, it seems, can shake them.

A few years later, in the midst of a brief academic setback, she trained him to act as her emotional cheerleader. I'd call and hear him in the background, screaming, We love you, Lisa! and You can do it!

The woman had decided that I was a hard-ass, one of those guys who refuse under any circumstances to do anyone a favor. But it's not true. I just prefer that the favor be my idea, and that it leaves me feeling kind rather than bullied and uncomfortable.

Rather than admit defeat, I decided to change goals.

I would clear the table and Hugh would do the dishes, neither of us speaking and both of us wondering if this just might be the one to do it. 'I hear you guys broke up over a plastic hand,' people would say, and my rage would renew itself.

When it happens to you it's a national tragedy— Why aren't the papers reporting this? you wonder. Only when it happens to someone else do you realize what a dull story it really is.

My only comfort was the knowledge that I was not alone. Huddled in the hallways and making the most of our pathetic French, my fellow students and I engaged in the sort of conversation commonly overheard in refugee camps. Sometime me cry alone at night. That be common for I, also, but be more strong, you. Much work and someday you talk pretty. People start love you soon. Maybe tomorrow, okay.

Either he was suffering a terrible case of gas or he had a pint-size child practicing the trumpet in his back pocket.

a new group, flexitarians, who eat meat if not too many people are watching.

Neither were we allowed to choose what we ate. I have a friend whose seven-year-old will only consider something if it's white. Had I tried that, my parents would have said, You're on, and served me a bowl of paste, followed by joint compound, and, maybe if I was good, some semen.

You have how many children in your family? the teacher would ask. I'm guessing you must be Catholic, am I right?

The nice thing about crowds is that someone can throw a bottle and you don't take it personally.

If you see devils, they lock you up, but in America, if you see angels, they put you on morning TV.

Leeches are singing in my asshole.

If I'd been burned alive because of bad grades, my parents would have killed me, especially my father, who meant well but was just a little too gung ho for my taste.

What's wrong? he said. I'll tell you what's wrong: you're killing us. But I thought that's what you wanted? We did, my mother wept, but not this way. It hadn't occurred to me until that moment, but I seemed to have come full circle. What started as a dodge had inadvertently become my life's work, an irony I never could have appreciated had my extraordinary parents not put me through Princeton.

With practice I will eventually realize my goal; in the meantime, come to Paris and you will find me, headphones plugged tight in my external audio meatus, walking the quays and whispering, 'Has anything else been inserted into your anus? Has anything else been inserted into your anus?

I'd asked the same question a few years earlier in Amsterdam and learned that in the Netherlands you're more apt to bring a disease into it. "Like if someone drives in a crazy way, it's normal to call them a cholera sufferer," a Dutch woman told me. "Either that or a cancer whore.