The collection / 111 fragments

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Passages, proverbs, and questions carried across the ages.

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111 results · Page 4 of 5Play this collection ▷

01c. 1956 AD

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.

David Sedaris / quote

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02c. 1956 AD

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.

David Sedaris / quote

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03c. 1956 AD

The way I saw it, if my students were willing to pretend I was a teacher, the least I could do was return the favor and pretend that they were writers.

David Sedaris / quote

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04c. 1956 AD

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.

David Sedaris / quote

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05c. 1956 AD

Being locked up is one thing, but to have no concept of confinement, to be ignorant of its terms and never understand that struggle is useless - that's what hell must be like.

David Sedaris / quote

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06c. 1956 AD

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

David Sedaris / quote

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07c. 1956 AD

The walking tour guides one through the city's various landmarks, reciting bits of information the listener might find enlightening. I learned, for example, that in the late 1500s my little neighborhood square was a popular spot for burning people alive. Now lined with a row of small shops, the tradition continues, though in a figurative rather than literal sense.

David Sedaris / quote

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08c. 1956 AD

I love things made out of animals. It's just so funny to think of someone saying, "I need a letter opener. I guess I'll have to kill a deer.

David Sedaris / quote

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09c. 1956 AD

My mother was, for the most part, delighted with my brother and regarded him with the bemused curiosity of a brood hen discovering she has hatched a completely different species. 'I think it was very nice of Paul to give me this vase,' she once said, arranging a bouquet of wildflowers into the skull-shaped bong my brother had left on the kitchen table. 'It's nontraditional, but that's the Rooster's way. He's a free spirit, and we're lucky to have him.

David Sedaris / quote

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10c. 1956 AD

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?

David Sedaris / quote

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11c. 1956 AD

Nobody likes having a problem, but having a convoluted, bureaucratic one is even more galling.

David Sedaris / quote

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12c. 1956 AD

On a busy day twenty-two thousand people come to visit Santa, and I was told that it is an elf's lot to remain merry in the face of torment and adversity. I promised to keep that in mind.

David Sedaris / quote

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13c. 1956 AD

Randall, the gay alcoholic in the house next door, boldly peeps through my windows. 'Boy, you sure rock in that chair a lot,' he said last week, his face pressed against my screen. This time I was lying on my bed with Katherine's cats. I'm watching them while she's out of town. I can be very mushy, and he watched me kissing them and saying that all the other cats in the neighborhood were jealous of their beauty.

David Sedaris / quote

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14c. 1956 AD

I was just struggling with my inner vachette and pondering the depths of my own inhumanity.

David Sedaris / quote

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15c. 1956 AD

My conscience is crosswired with my sweat glands, but there's a short in the system and I break out over things I didn't do, which only makes me look more suspect.

David Sedaris / quote

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16c. 1956 AD

I would later discover it was a bad idea to gather more than two of these people in an enclosed area for any length of time. The stage was not only a physical place but also a state of mind, and the word audience was defined as anyone forced to suffer your company. We young actors were a string of lightbulbs left burning 24 hours a day, exhausting ourselves and others with our self-proclaimed brilliance.

David Sedaris / quote

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17c. 1956 AD

Each one of us is left to choose our own quality of life and take pleasure where we find it with the understanding that, like Mom used to say, sooner or later something's gonna get you.

David Sedaris / quote

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18c. 1956 AD

Scream at the mangled leather carcass lying at the foot of the stairs, and my parents would roar with laughter. "That's what you get for leaving your wallet on the kitchen table.

David Sedaris / quote

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19c. 1956 AD

If some people are “outed,” are other people “inned”? Can we say that someone has been “besided” or “overed”?

David Sedaris / quote

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20c. 1956 AD

The guilt applies only to those things that are being given away for free.

David Sedaris / quote

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21c. 1956 AD

It was my friend Frank, a writer in San Francisco, who finally set me straight. When asked about my new look he put down his fork and stared at me for a few moments. "A bow tie announces to the world you can no longer get an erection.

David Sedaris / quote

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22c. 1956 AD

He's as nutty as a vegan T-bone.

David Sedaris / quote

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23c. 1956 AD

It’s not lost on me that I’m so busy recording life, I don’t have time to really live it.

David Sedaris / quote

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24c. 1956 AD

It's astonishing the amount of time that certain straight people devote to gay sex - trying to determine what goes where and how often. They can't imagine any system outside their own, and seem obsessed with the idea of roles, both in bed and out of it. Who calls whom a bitch? Who cries harder when the cat dies? Which one spends the most time in the bathroom? I guess they think that it's that cut-and-dried, though of course it's not. Hugh might do the cooking, and actually wear an apron while he's at it, but he also chops the firewood, repairs the hot-water heater, and could tear off my arm with no more effort than it takes to uproot a dandelion.

David Sedaris / quote

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