Quotes from David Sedaris

he's braw and pulchritudinous

IT IS HIS BIRTHDAY, and Hugh and I are seated in a New York restaurant, awaiting the arrival of our fifteen-word entrées. He looks very nice, dressed in the suit and sweater that have always belonged to him. As for me, I own only my shoes, pants, shirt, and tie. My jacket belongs to the restaurant and was offered as a loan by the maître d', who apparently thought I would feel more comfortable dressed to lead a high-school marching band.

Doesn't the blood of every suicide splash back on our faces?

The one titled "Romance" included the following: "Would you like a drink?" "You're a fantastic dancer." "You look like some cousin of mine." The latter would work only if you were Asian, but even then it's a little creepy, the implication being "the cousin I have always wanted to undress and ejaculate on.

Given all the time I've spent in the country, you'd think I might have seen a calf being born, but this was a first for me. The biggest surprise was how nonplussed the expectant mother was. For a while she lay flat on the grass, panting. Then she got up and began grazing, still with those feet sticking out. "Really?" I said to her. "You can't go five minutes without eating?

I'd wish then that I could afford to go to the ticket counter and buy a seat on the next plane back to where I'd come from.

They think rabbits lay eggs and a monkey jumped over the got-damn moon. Stupid bitches don't know shit. Rabbits don't lay no eggs. Go-rilla can't shoot no dice.

One day she'd throw a dish at you, and the next she'd create a mosaic made of the shards.

Doing something nice for him was easy and immediate and didn't lead to the mountain of junk mail you're punished with whenever you give to an established charity.

Anyone who does anything even remotely irritating is, from this point on, a Republican.

On Maui, one November, Hugh and I went swimming, and turned to find a gigantic sea turtle coming up between us. As gentle as a cow she was, and with a cow's dopey, almost lovesick expression on her face. That, to me, was worth the entire trip, worth my entire life, practically. For to witness majesty, to find yourself literally touched by it—isn't that what we've all been waiting for?

But it's a house, not a tombstone

Slip too far beneath the surface, and wouldn't your family resuscitate you with a loan or rehab or whatever it was you needed to get back on your feet?

There was a sink for washing glasses and an assortment of cartoon napkins illustrating the lighter side of alcoholism.

And there's no point in me doing anything if I can't write about it," I continued. "It would be like . . . walking ten miles without my Fitbit on—a complete waste. I mean, I do do things I don't write about: I use the bathroom, I have sex, but I try to be quick about it.

February 13, 1989 Chicago Tonight at Barbara's Bookstore, Tobias Wolff read from his new memoir, This Boy's Life.

Happiness is harder to put into words. It's also harder to source...

I reached Odell convinced that if I never spoke to another human being for the rest of my life, it would be too soon.

Pointing to the oversized crate that served as a manger, one particularly insufficient wise man proclaimed, "A child is bored." Yes, well, so was this adult.

Hey," he said, "that's where we used to go when we were a family.

he couldn't have been more than a few hours old when he died. Even in a jar, that kid has outearned me.

if you're not cute, you might as well be clever.

his voice was high and strange, as if it had been recorded and was now being played back at a faster speed.

I read yesterday that when starved for food, the humpback cricket will chew off its own legs. If they regenerated this might be a half-decent idea, but they don't. So it eats its legs, and, unable to escape danger, it promptly gets eaten itself. That so seems like something I would do.