Quotes from Sarah Vowell

The irony of informing nearly naked people in a wilderness setting about the story of naked Adam and Eve eating the fruit of knowledge and inventing the fashion industry due to a sudden need for clothing to hide their shame is not lost on Williams.

There is something aesthetically pleasing about trading one engraving - and old map - for another - American money.

Then Cotton quotes Luke 12:48. "To whom much is given, of him God will require the more." Of course there's a catch, Spider-Man. When God is the landlord, Cotton says, "defraud him not of his rent." The price? Obedience.

That story is proof of the theorem that then as today in Chicago, the mysterious equation of whiskey plus music equals what can only be called happiness.

i love reading and am always stuck in one labrinth of letters or other

I]deas, when implemented, turn into precedents with unpredictable and potentially disturbing consequences.

So, the moral of that story, other than never underestimate an independent bookseller, was that the Continental Army and its commander in chief had a soft spot for Chief Artillery Officer Henry Knox.

Wainwright prayed to the graven image of Lafayette, since neither the president nor Congress seemed to be listening. "We, the women of the United States," she told the bronze Lafayette, "denied the liberty which you helped to gain, and for which we have asked in vain for sixty years, turn to you to plead for us. Speak, Lafayette, dead these hundred years but still living in the hearts of the American people.

Take for example the commencement address he [James Garfield] delivered at his alma mater Hiram College in the summer of 1880. ... The only thing stopping this address from turning into a slacker parable is the absence of the word 'dude'.

I am pro-plaque.

As the starstruck Lafayette later described his first glimpse of Washington, It was impossible to mistake for a moment his majestic figure and deportment; nor was he less distinguished by the noble affability of his manner. What a sweet memory. Still, it does get on my nerves how easy it is for tall people to make a good first impression.

Lafayette, on the other hand, was more of a make-your-own-destiny type of fellow, disobeying orders from the king and abandoning a pregnant girl for an entirely optional adventure.

No one recorded what those marches were, though decades later there was an apocryphal and later-debunked story the one of the songs the British played was the on-the-nose The World Turned Upside Down.

In other words, after Winthrop has acquired all his butter firkins, food stirrers, and beer along with six dozen candles, twenty thousand biscuits, and twenty-nine sides of beef, he goes through the Bible and writes down a bunch of verses commanding him to be willing to cheerfully give all that stuff away. My firkin is your firkin being one of Christianity's primary creeds.

In the United States, there was no simpler, more agreeable time.

Like a lot of once devout people who have lost their faith, I had holes the size of heaven and hell in my head and in my heart.

The internet is the nerd Israel, a place to speak and listen to spectacularly specific concerns.

I've always had these fantasies about being in a normal family in which the parents come to town and their adult daughter spends their entire visit daydreaming of suicide. I'm here to tell you that dreams really do come true.

it may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces.

After he finishes his song, I ask him, "Sir, were you just playing 'Lean on Me'?" "That's right!" he answers, thrilled. Now, whenever I think of Mudd and his house I hear that song, hear Mudd serenading the limping Booth, taking his arm and helping him up the stairs, singing, "Lean on me, when you're not strong, and I'll be your friend.

Of course Americans celebrate Independence Day as opposed to Yorktown Day. Who wants to barbecue a hot dog and ponder how we owe our independence to the French navy? Who wants to twirl sparklers and dwell on how the French government's expenditures in America contributed to the bankruptcy that sparked the French Revolution that would send Rochambeau to prison, Lafayette into exile (then prison), and our benefactor His Most Christian Majesty Louis XVI to the guillotine.

Lafayette lifted his glass at one reception to toast 'the perpetual union of the United States,' adding, 'it has always saved us in time of storm; one day it will save the world.'" Whether

I have intimate knowledge of what it was like to be young and uneasy and outraged under Reagan. My high school was 1980s America in miniature--you either belonged or you didn't, you learned to seek relief where you could find it.

Mutual Criticism required a member of the group to stand up in front of everybody and listen to the enumeration of his or her faults. The bright side of being that night's subject for criticism was the rare treat at Oneida of being the center of attention. The downside was that everyone you knew and loved was allowed, even encouraged, to look into your eyes and ask, "You know what your problem is?