Quotes from David Sedaris

You haven't lived until you've sailed

Nothing irritated her more than these high-and-mighty vegetarians who ate meat sometimes and then decided that it didn't really count.

I might reinvent myself to strangers, but to this day, as far as my family is concerned, I'm still the one most likely to set your house on fire.

Every gathering has its moment. As an adult, I distract myself by trying to identify it, dreading the inevitable downsing that is sure to follow.

If I'm walking down an American street and anyone darker than a peanut shell approaches, I'll say, Hello. This because, if I don't say it, he or she might think that I'm anxious. Which, of course, I must be, otherwise I'd walk by in silence, just as I do with my fellow Caucasians. Does this make me racist, or simply race conscious? Either way, I'm more afraid of conservatives than I am of black people.

the lower bunks, both of us longing to be pinned. "You kids think you invented sex," my mother was fond of saying. But hadn't we? With no instruction manual or federally enforced training period, didn't we all come away feeling we'd discovered something unspeakably modern?

At what point had I realized that class couldn't save you, that addiction or mental illness didn't care whether you'd taken piano lessons or spent a summer in Europe? Which drunk or junkie or unmedicated schizophrenic was I crossing the street to avoid when I put it all together?

Like everything else, holiday gifts escalate. The presents get better and better until one year you decide you don't need anything else and start making donations to animal shelters. Even if you hate dogs and cats, they're somehow always the ones who benefit.

I'd Begin to imagine my life in a foreign country, some faraway land where, if things went wrong, i could always blame somebody else, saying I'd never wanted to live there in the first place.

Back off, world. It's time for me to be good to me.

The reverend insists we occupy the first pew. He rang us up not long ago, tipsy-- he's a tippler-- saying that our faces brought him closer to God. And it's true, we're terribly good-looking people.

To spend your days in the company of naked men - that was the life for me.

Often I'd take out my magnifying glass and stare into the chaos that was her face. Most people would have found it grotesque, but when you're in love nothing is so abstract or horrible that it can't be thought of as cute.

Adrienne started teaching a few months ago in Denver and wrote that it leaves you with a constant feeling of deceiving people. That you know nothing they don't, or couldn't learn on their own if they cared to.

Finally he was hit by a train while walking, which is strange because trains don't generally sneak up on people. For the most part, barring a derailment, you know exactly where to find them.

I realized I was a teacher when I felt warm during class and got up to open the door. Later on there was noise in the hallway, so I got up and shut it. Students can't open and close the door whenever they feel like it.

The woman spoke with a heavy western North Carolina accent, which I used to discredit her authority. Here was a person for whom the word 'pen' had two syllables. He people undoubtedly drank from clay jugs and hollered for Paw when the vittles were ready-- so who was she to advise me on anything?

It was like seeing someone who wore a striped tie or parted his hair on the left — a detail, but not a telling one.

When I got back to the apartment, the phone rang. It was Dad, who told me I should try to get work as a model. I told him he was being ridiculous and he said no, he'd just been at the barbershop and saw a GQ magazine with a guy on the cover who looked just like me. So I went to the newsstand and found a copy and the person on the cover was not a model but Gary Oldman.

He loved flowers, I loved flowers, and wasn't it beautiful that our mutual appreciation could transcend our various differences and somehow bring us together?

Today the teacher called me a sadist. I tried to say that was like the pot calling the kettle black but came out with something closer to "That is like a pan saying to a dark pan, 'You are a pan.

Sometimes, when I find it hard to sleep, I'll think of when we first met, of the newness of each other's body, and my impatience to know everything about this person. Looking back, I should have taken it more slowly, measured him out over the course of fifty years rather than cramming him in so quickly.

Something has changed, and now, when I look at my students, I see only people who are going to eat up my time.

She paused, and I took the opportunity to practice the only promotional skill at my disposal: fluttering my fingers over the telephone's mouthpiece, I attempted to cast a spell, silently chanting, It's me who you want. Me, me, me.