694 Quotes by David Sedaris

Everyone in America is extremely concerned with hydration. Go more than five minutes without drinking, and you’ll surely be discovered behind a potted plant, dried out like some escaped hermit crab.

Happiness is harder to put into words. It’s also harder to source, much more mysterious than anger or sorrow, which come to me promptly, whenever I summon them, and remain long after I’ve begged them to leave.

Because I’ve always been a fairly nervous person.

When I was seven years old, my family moved to North Carolina. When he was seven years old, Hugh’s family moved to the Congo. We had a collie and a house cat. They had a monkey and two horses named Charlie Brown and Satan. I threw stones at stop signs. Hugh threw stones at crocodiles. The verbs are the same, but he definitely wins the prize when it comes to nouns and objects.

The third guest, a poet, had recently published a memoir about her cancer and the many operations performed in an effort to reconstruct her jaw.

Our mother became the living ghost that haunted it, gaunt now and rattling ice cubes instead of chains.

Most of my ribbons were for good sportsmanship, a backhanded compliment if ever there was one.

Making it worse, I had to sit through another endless preview for Titanic. Who do they think is going to see that movie?

I can manage in a restaurant, take a cab, and even make small talk with the driver. “Do you have children?” I ask. “Will you take a vacation this year?” “Where to?” When he turns it around, as Japanese cabdrivers are inclined to do, I tell him that I have three children, a big boy and two little girls. If Pimsleur included “I am a middle-aged homosexual and thus make do with a niece I never see and a very small godson,” I’d say that. In the meantime, I work with what I have.