694 Quotes by David Sedaris

He secretly thinks he looks like Marlon Brando, but take a good look a young Marlin Perkins is more like it! Maybe that’s what he sees in Annette Kelper – he’s an animal lover.

I don’t really do very well when I’m sent somewhere. A lot of magazines want to send you somewhere to do something. They want you to stow away on a ship, or something like that.

When asked “What do we need to learn this for?” any high-school teacher can confidently answer that, regardless of the subject, the knowledge will come in handy once the student hits middle age and starts working crossword puzzles in order to stave off the terrible loneliness.

My understanding was that it completed a person, sanding down the rough provincial edges and transforming you into a citizen of the world.

While I know I can’t control it, what I ultimately hope to recall about my late-in-life father is not his nagging or his toes but, rather, his fingers, and the way he snaps them when listening to jazz. He’s done it forever, signifying, much as a cat does by purring, that you may approach. That all is right with the world. “Man, oh man,” he’ll say in my memory, lifting his glass and taking us all in, “isn’t this just fantastic.

It means ‘female dog,’” I’d explained to my sisters, “but it also means ’a woman who’s crabby and won’t let you be yourself.

The younger an ingredient, the more highly it was valued, thus the baby chicken, the baby spinach, the newborn asparagus, each pale stalk as slender as a fang.

Every gathering has its moment. As an adult, I distract myself by trying to identify it, dreading the inevitable downswing that is sure to follow. The guests will repeat themselves one too many times, or you’ll run out of dope or liquor and realize that it was all you ever had in common.

I didn’t need a fifteen-minute conversation, just some human interaction. It can be had, and easily: a gesture, a joke, something that says, “I live in this world too.” I think of it as a switch that turns someone from a profession to a person, and it works both ways. “I’m not just a vehicle for my wallet!” I sometimes want to scream.