Quotes from David Sedaris

What's the worst thing you can hear while you're blowing Willie Nelson? "I'm not really Willie Nelson.

It's beautiful, the Atlantic, but at the same time so insistent, always advancing, always taking what it wants.

I have $211 and it doesn't make any sense.

Watch this. 'Buenos Dios, Miguel.' A small, dark-eyed man looked up from his wood splitting, alarmed. They spook easy, Hobbs said. Yes, well, people tend to do that when you come up behind them shouting, Good God. It's just a habit, I guess.

I'd been to only one Walmart in my life before this and I was shocked at how ugly it was, even by American standards. It was a mammoth jumble of absolute shit made more chaotic by brightly colored signs and promotional displays.

She looked to me like a librarian is supposed to, slightly stern, with a longer-than-average neck.

If you think I'm putting my bra back on for this bullshit, you

I learned that people below the age of sixteen cannot deliver milk in the U.K., but I don't think I learned why. It was just one of those weird English injustices, like summer.

Your trash. You're trash. Your family's trash.

When asked what we wanted to be when we grew up, we hid the truth and listed who we wanted to sleep with when we grew up. "A policeman or a fireman or one of those guys who works with high-tension wires.

Before leaving Austin I heard a radio report on an Englishman who's giving out awards for stupid security measures. First prize goes to an airport scanner who forced a female passenger to drink from three bottles of her own breast milk. She'd pumped it before boarding, and they wanted to make sure it wasn't poison. This explains why sperm donors are traveling Greyhound.

This was for me one of those adult moments involving a choice. Do you shrug your shoulders and say, "I couldn't get it to work either," or do you tell the woman she spent the weekend trying to open a wine bottle with the broken knob to the dishwasher?

Something in the early summer of 2019 had us all thinking about enormous gaping assholes.

You tell yourself that if you traveled alone to Europe this summer, you could surely do the same thing next year, and the year after that. Of course you don't, though, and the next thing you know you're an aging, unemployed elf so desperate for love you spend your evening mooning over a straight alcoholic.

Were they to charge you ten cents per napkin, they would undoubtedly make them much thinner so you'd need to waste even more in order to fight back the piping hot geyser forever spouting from the little hole conveniently located in the lid of your cup.

Dad doesn't pay attention when you talk to him, so Paul's taken to throwing the term IRS into his sentences. Then it's suddenly: "Hold on a second, what did you say?

As kids, we spent our beach time swimming. Then we became teenagers and devoted ourselves to tanning.

As we walk into the store, he confides that his biggest regret is that Melina never got to have sex, that he ruined all that by getting her spayed.

Late in her life, my mother embraced the word "fuck" but could never quite figure out its place in a sentence.

That's the thing with a diary, though. In order to record your life, you sort of need to live it. Not at your desk, but beyond it. Out in the world where it's so beautiful and complex and painful that sometimes you just need to sit down and write about it.

Why aren't you stronger? I wanted to ask. I mean, really. Can't you just try harder? Of course, I was drunk too, so what could I say?

At around five, I took the L home. A woman near me had a three-year-old child on her lap, a girl, who looked at me and said, "Mommy, I hate that man.

A guy needs a place where he can gaze into the ocean and sort things out." It

Maybe ours wasn't the house I'd have chosen had I been in charge of things. It wasn't as clean as I'd have liked. From the outside, it wasn't remarkable. We had no view, but still it was the place I held in mind, and proudly, when I thought, Home.